Truly pathetic

The Rudd government has just announced it’s carbon reduction targets at a measly 5 per cent. Why did they bother with all the palaver of the Garnaut report? And why did we bother electing them? 5 per cent is hardly worth doing. 15 per cent, which is the maximum they’ll go to by 2020 but only if there’s a worldwide agreement, is less than half what most scientific opinion says is necessary to avoid the worst effects of warming. Meanwhile, Big Coal gets 4 billion dollars in compensation. Clearly it’s not for reducing emissions. Can someone please explain?

Paint it black

It’s been a big week or so for race in Australian politics. Last week Immigration minister Kevin Andrews announced cutbacks in African immigration claiming that ’some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life’, and yesterday John Howard announced his historic turnaround to embrace Aboriginal reconciliation. In between there was the funeral of Liep Gony, a young Sudanese-born man murdered by two whites shortly before Andrews made his announcement. This amidst the trial of two young men charged with the killing earlier this year of Morgan Harris Morgan, a young Sudanese refugee.

All the way through the media have fanned the flames. Misleadingly presented footage and hysterical reports of ‘Sudanese gangs’ brought the race issue to the fore and almost certainly prompted Andrews’ announcement, not so much playing pre-orchestrated wedge politics as playing to the media gallery in the present lead-up to the election campaign. But missing from almost all the media coverage of attacks on young Sudanese-born men is that the attackers were all white. Nor was there mention of the ethnicity of the four whites who bashed Ajang Gor, a young Sudanese-born man, in Melton, then sent his friends and relatives racist taunts using a phone stolen in the attack. Whiteness, still, is ethnically invisible in Australian race politics.

Yet race was highlighted in reports of an attack on a policeman after Liep Gony’s wake.

Andrews, for his part, pointedly refused to apologise to the Sudanese community for his ill-timed remarks after calls to do so from Liep Gony’s family at his funeral. It was a despicable act. All week he had painted the African community as criminal, and subsequently used his refusal to apologise to underline his rhetoric, by darkly mentioning secret reports he couldn’t talk about that proved his case. Smear by innuendo.

No-one doubts the difficulties faced by some in the Sudanese community, given the situation they’ve come from. But cutting back a humanitarian program won’t solve that problem. Nor will playing race politics.

But what to make of Howard’s announcement? Its proper context isn’t the background of ministrations to Aboriginal Affairs Minster Mal Brough from Marcia Langton, Galarrwuy Yunupingu and Noel Pearson that Misha Schubert and Annabel Stafford spoke of in today’s Age, which then found the prime minister’s ear. The proper context is the decision by the government a month ago to vote against a UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

And if there might seem to be little wider electoral advantage in Howard’s late embrace of reconciliation then, as my partner pointed out, that’s to miss its potential political impact in the seat where it counts: Bennelong, increasingly dominated by a new, younger educated professional constituency. Langton was no doubt right to say that too many are ’stuck in their anger’ at the legacy of Howard’s treatment of Aborigines, and that ‘clear thinking and foresight’ will deliver results. But it’s hard to believe that this is the moment.

Someone in the Liberal party must have realised that people are sick of non-stop attack politics. That crunching sound you hear is Howard desperately trying to change gear.

A ‘rethink’ too far?

Interesting article by Paul Kelly in the latest ALR, most surprisingly for what it gets wrong, not least its rather narrow interpretation of Donald Horne’s The Lucky Country. In an opening riff that fits up Horne as a prototypical member of today’s ‘elites’, Kelly caricatures Horne as an ‘intellectual alienated by the long success of Menzies’ and therefore a despiser of an opposing ‘political class’ who have been Australia’s true and great leaders.

Horne was anti-protectionism and anti-white Australia policy, not anti-political class as such. The book is a coded jeremiad against both.

Horne’s argument was that Australia was ‘living on its luck’ because, thanks to its second-rate leaders, it had remained insular on both fronts and got away with it, but wouldn’t be able to for much longer.

Nowhere in The Lucky Country is Menzies ‘squarely blamed’ for ‘our mediocre artistic life, Anglophobia, white Australia policy, racism, cultural cringe, provincialism and ineptitude in Asia’. While he rightly criticises the inertia of the Menzies era in its final decline, Horne would have been aware of Menzies’ speechifying against racism, directly praises the easing of fears about Asian immigration that took place ‘over the period of the Menzies administration’, and champions his immigration program and his appointment of an Australian as governor-general. The book’s arguments rest on a much broader cultural critique than Kelly admits.

History proved Horne’s central arguments right. But these are ideas, too, I would have imagined, that Kelly might normally have sympathy with. Not to mention politicians since. Far from despising the political classes, as Kelly imagines, Horne embraced leaders like Whitlam (who did the last rites on White Australia), and Hawke and Keating (who did the last rites on protectionism and engaged with Asia). Nor was Horne so anti-ordinary-people as Kelly claims. On the contrary, at the time of writing The Lucky Country he was a conservative populist (who once aspired to become a Tory MP), who embraced suburbia at a time when the prevailing intellectual current was to despise it.

But Kelly’s opening riff is a false set up, in any case, to add gravitas to what amounts to not much more than a fairly standard newslimited attack on elites, personified by David Marr, Raimond Gaita and Julian Burnside. There’s some good points along the way. I can only agree, for example, that some of our prominent leftish public intellectuals are long on moral outrage but short on analysis, and that they tend not to understand the difference between high principle and governance. And most can’t countenance the possibility that economic reform has had its successes. But none of these points justifies the piece’s descent into little more than a Howard apologia. You don’t have to be a ‘Howard-hater’ (not a term Kelly uses, I should add) to believe that Howard hasn’t been a good PM on any measure. Nor has he led a good government.

Perhaps Kelly’s greatest mistake is that he uses the elites versus politicians riff not as a metaphor, but as a premise for argument, as if either group is singularly responsible for change-making. Howard, after all, has had his own court of conservative intellectuals and their antecedents.

Kevin Rudd, apparently, will be the ‘new man’ who brings these warring tendencies together. I’ve often admired Kelly’s work, including, despite its faults, End of Certainty. But there’s a hint of messiah following in his finale. Stand by for the book.

It’s on

It’s on. Not three months ago I sat down for dinner with two of Australia’s leading political commentators, vain and proud men not easily trifled with, and announced my belief that Kevin Rudd would win the election at a trot. They hedged. ‘Too many seats needed.’ ‘Howard is too strong on the economy.’ In short, a ridiculous idea. That things have changed in the world of the punditocracy was made official last week when press gallery bellwether Paul Kelly spoke of electoral annihilation for the Howard government. Two of the Murdoch press ‘dancing bears’ have since observed the dance card, with Janet Albrechtsen and Andrew Bolt both suggesting Howard step down. DB no. 3, Piers Akerman, gave them a drubbing for their trouble, but also concedes that all ahead looks bleak.

Just how bad things are for the government was made clear at Possum Pollytics with a frankly devastating analysis of some leaked Crosby-Textor polling. So bad are things that the government is trying to firewall seats with a ten percent margin.

So why are the wheels coming off? Lots of reasons but at base, it’s the economy, stupid. Too many people haven’t seen the wealth so much as debt. Real unemployment is around double the official stats, and most of those new jobs are in the low-paid service sector. And the more the government talks about it, the worse things will get. People are doing it hard, especially in the key marginals, and they’ve had a gutful of the ‘p’-word (prosperity) being pushed in their faces. Chastened by the polling, Howard is desperately trying to reinvent himself as a politician with vision, who looks forwards, not backwards. But he’s never had it. Not as treasurer during the Fraser years, and not now, has he ever stood for more than John Howard himself.

And now the party itself is starting to fall apart. There are many here among us who are glad to see him to stay on as leader through the campaign, if only to see the look on his face on that final night when all the spite, hubris and political failures of the past decade finally make their way home.