Modern Australian political parties are more likely to be corrupted by ideological or religious fanatics and power seekers than by disputes about policy and how to get into government.
One of the ongoing problems with talking about what political parties do or don’t do is that it is easy to overlook problems seated deep in parties’ DNA and the contemporary political culture.
In the film Vice, a biopic about Dick Cheney, there is a scene in which a Republican researcher is addressing a group of political operatives about inheritance taxes and how they need to be framed as ‘death taxes’ – a framing which ensures any negative campaign appeals to a much wider audience than the wealthy who would be most affected.
Recently the New Daily ran two Michael Pascoe pieces exposing a $2.5 billion regional grants program rort 25 times bigger than the sports rorts. Forwarding it on to someone elicited the surprising response: “Who cares?”
The person wasn’t being dismissive but rather making a comment on how the succession of scandals, incompetence and corruption in seven years of Liberal National Party Governments had caused only limited outrage and didn’t impact on their re-elections beyond narrowing their winning margin.
The Morrison Government is adopting the newest form of doubting climate change by arguing that yes it does exist but that it can all be fixed by some unproven technological developments such as carbon capture or hydrogen both of which may end up looking a bit like nuclear fusion – just around the corner for decades.
In 2008 David Michaels’ published a book – Doubt is their Product How Industry’s Assault on Science Threatens your Health – which was instrumental in the subsequent exposure of the systematic efforts of various industries to raise doubt about the science relating to areas from tobacco to today’s climate change.
Reflecting on when the Prime Minister rang to ask him head the Government’s COVID-19 Task Force Nev Power said he couldn’t refuse the PM – reacting as any responsible citizen would.
He would also have been comfortable knowing he would be surrounded by colleagues from the fossil fuel industries. Although he apparently didn’t feel the need to ask why the majority were representatives of industries –resources and manufacturing – which even combined are not as significant a part of the Australian economy as construction.
It is often easy to imagine that all Americans are unhinged, gun-toting, Bible bashing, conspiracy believers, LBQT+ haters and Trump supporters.
Yet the evidence of some recent polling suggests this is not the case just as various investigative journalists have demonstrated that the ‘popular’ uprisings against lockdowns have been prompted by far-Right wealthy activists, such as the De Vos family, motivating an unrepresentative minority.
While the number of inequality indices and ratios is proliferating there has been less sustained attention to the social costs associated with it.
Perhaps the best response to this absence is the latest book by Princeton Professors Anne Case and Angus Deaton – Deaths of Despair – which analyses the interactions between inequality and the dysfunctional US health system; the decline of unions and the disappearance of manufacturing jobs; predatory behaviour by drug companies; corporate capture of legislative and administrative structures; and, the collapse of traditional community institutions in communities across the US.
Denmark and France are blocking pandemic financial assistance to any firms registered in tax havens.
Meanwhile, in Australia the CEO of EnergyAustralia – a company with a parent company based in the Caribbean – has been appointed to the Reserve Bank of Australia Board of Directors; and, a third of large Australian companies are paying no tax at all with no suggestion by the Morrison Government that any of them will be excluded from pandemic stimulus funds in the way casual and part time workers have been.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s Anzac Day was in decline – a malaise exemplified by Alan Seymour’s play The One Day of the Year.
But in January 1964 a 34 year old ANU historian, Ken Inglis, gave a paper – The Anzac Tradition – at the biennial Australian and New Zealand Association for the Advancement of Science (ANZAAS) which probably launched a new vision of what Anzac Day was and what it represented.