This morning’s ABC radio news had two stories that caught my attention. The first was the entirely predictable news that the Mathias Cormann “Helloworld” tickets scandal had already expanded. US ambassador Joe Hockey apparently instructed embassy staff to meet with the Helloworld CEO, who’s a personal friend, when Helloworld was seeking a government tender. The second is that Melbourne has been judged the “heroin capital of Australia“, after an analysis of sewer outflows.
Smack running out of a sewer. What better picture could one summon up of Australian governance and political culture than that? As the $400 million dollar Paladin contract sloshes around, with its beach shack registered office, and its shonky personnel, as two thousand deaths of benefits claimants after receiving barrages of Centrelink debt robocalls wait to be investigated, as it turns out that Freedom Boy Tim Wilson plugged a relative’s financial business into a parliamentary consultancy process, as the memory of another $400 million going to the industry-dominated Great Barrier Reef foundation resurfaces, the $30 million handed over to FOX for women’s sports, with no documentation, no reporting and no outcomes, the six hundred thousand given to Bjorn Lomborg’s organisation to produce a single book … after all that, Mathias Cormann must be hoping that $2700 in free air tickets that he “didn’t notice” would barely get noticed by the public.
In fact, that may well be the final straw for many. Four hundred million dollars is such a gobsmackingly large amount to be given around, that it can barely be comprehended. But many thousands of Australians, looking at the cost of a family holiday, and deciding “not this year”, and wondering how many more holidays they’ll get, may well identify that as the real deal-breaker: they save, while Mathias Cormann rings up the CEO to book, who amazingly forgets to take his credit card details at the time.
There is now something more than anger attached to this government. There’s a sort of disgust around. Disgust with them, at the sheer volume of waste, shonk and grift, disgust with ourselves for having let it go for so long, for being the mugs who let it happen. It is once again of the paradox of Australian self-conception. We’ve imagined ourselves to be relatively uncorrupt and competently governed for so long, that a keener sense that government had entirely collapsed into cronyism, clientelism and dirty tricks was lacking. The capacity for trust in Australia is being rotted from the top down. It’s rational to think of a Coalition government the way Italians tend to think of their government, something that has absolutely nothing to do with representation at all: simply a self-contained predatory element, feeding off the body social.
This is part of the intent of right-wing parties of course, to increase cynicism and distrust of government altogether, and enrich themselves at the same time. All the same, they may well have overshot the mark in the last year or so. Am I alone in feeling sick to my stomach, literally nauseous, at reading the national news these days, wondering what the next story of corrupt, corrosive, destructive rorts is going to be? Is disgust now a live political factor? I think it might be. We now have a fundamental asymmetry in Australian politics. One major political party, Labor, capable of government; one minor, the Greens, with some internal strife, but no accusations of rorting. And on the other side something that is neither a Coalition, nor parties at all. It’s simply a random, rhizomatic piss cloud of sleaze, grift, incompetence, reactionary obsessiveness, glued together by nothing other than hatred not merely of the left, but of good government itself, and an eye for the skim off the top.
The disgust is something more than political contestation or the belief that the political right, in our era, is a sham. It’s a real pain that this has happened to our country. There was, as I’ve noted before, until about a decade ago, some sort of implicit agreement about limits, some sense of being pointed forward, whatever political differences there might have been about what form progress would take. The effect of living in such a continental Rortopolis is to make you feel like a mug for doing anything other than making millions from transfers of state money for no product. Why bother? While you’re putting your energy into art, science, honest commerce, the very fact that you thereby entrust other people with governance is taken by them as a chance to shonk it.
Does Labor have the energy, wit or will to make this an issue, and to genuinely reform Australian governance? I hope so, but I don’t get the vibe. Some of the people Shorten has been close to behind the scenes do not inspire confidence that Labor will avoid the worst. And Chris Bowen is an academic manqué. Plibersek is nothing much at all. Only Penny Wong seems to actually take the fight to the government, seems to actually want it, want power. I don’t doubt they’ll govern better, if they can actually find the energy to win. But for the moment, let us rejoice, it’s all just smack floating down the sewer.
Two events stick out for me as the watershed. The first is Tampa, the second the invasion of Iraq. The first for its absolute cynicism: exploitation of human tragedy superimposed with a lie, and also, I think, because of its willingness to exploit our worst failings as a community and as human beings. The second, again because it was based on the lie of WMDs, but also because of its utter contempt for democracy and ordinary Australians, and also for the hundreds of thousands of innocents who have lost their lives in the conflict. All from a group of people that seeks to make political capital from their claim to be pious followers of a man who preached non-violence.
And the awful, sickening feeling that there is absolutely no depth beyond which this government would not sink. No limit to their malevolence and lust for wealth and power.
Share your sentiments exactly, and wish to add a third event: the MH17 cover-up. Another political football spearheaded locally by self-righteous, indignant and self-interested abbotts and bishops. Replete with the same obvious distortions and outright lies, complete with Powerpoint presentations. And as with the lies about WMD’s in Iraq, in the service of the same imperial master.
I think the waterfront dispute and the conspiracy between the government and Patrick Stevedores to phoenix the company and screw over employees was the moment I became disgusted with the Coalition and not just in disagreement with their views, and children overboard took that from disgust to “can never, ever be voted for and should be in prison”.
By contrast, I disagreed with what Howard did with the Tampa but don’t see it as anything more than sharp politics that followed the will of the electorate better than many (certainly me) realised at the time, and while I disagreed with the Iraq war utterly and demonstrated against it, the crimes there were American and I think it would be an unusual Australian PM who refused to stand with both the US and the UK, our biggest defence allies and insisted he knew better than the intelligence they claimed to have on WMDs. I don’t treat either decision with the same level of disgust as the waterfront, children overboard, Abbott’s incredibly dishonest and destructive campaign against carbon pricing, Abbott using and exploting misogyny against Gillard, etc
For once I disagree with you. The WMD lies were perhaps the most egregious ever told in the parliament or to the Australian people, shockingly compounded by the massive Wheat Board cover-up later on, and the role of nation-builder Downer in it. That most of the world knew the US and UK were lying hugely (I certainly did, and there could be no doubt after Gen Powell displayed his dismal, embarrassed face to spell it out in the UN) enders the excuse you make for Howard null and void.
And then of course, up pops Mr Downer in the Timor bugging affair.
I remember speaking with a person who had been part of the team looking for WMD in 1997 in Iraq who said even back then that they couldn’t find anything. The LNP manipulated information for their own political purposes. Disgusting!
Couldn’t agree more with Graeski’s brilliant letter, but not with the waterfront dispute. It’s not all paradise in some work places, where work practices appeared to be appalling and where self interest prevailed. Howard should have been tried for war crimes in Iraq. Over 500,000 people died in a phony war we supported.
“And on the other side something that is neither a Coalition, nor parties at all. It’s simply a random, rhizomatic piss cloud of sleaze, grift, incompetence, reactionary obsessiveness, glued together by nothing other than hatred not merely of the left, but of good government itself, and an eye for the skim off the top.”
Huzzah!
I don’t know if this link will work, but I’m reminded of ‘Blazing Saddles.’ Guy Rundle has a very nice turn of phrase (I hope his coming book will include a lot of his wit).
But he uses his tongue prettier than a $20 …
His columns alone are worth the full price of my subscription.
https://youtu.be/XrpwBgh7gGc
“Five million readers? Quick, take a picture. I’ll be famous.”
Can’t see how that would bear any resemblance to our government ministers. (TIC)
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-27/liberal-frontbencher-bungles-budget-figures-live-on-television/10312642
Wayne, that would be “perdier than a $20…..”
And it’s Hedley!
Ahhhhhhh, a good Guy Rundle diatribe, you don’t so much read it as roll in it.
And it gives your conversation a piquancy that will get you noticed at parties.
“Am I alone in feeling sick to my stomach, literally nauseous, at reading the national news these days”
Obviously not a reader of the Australian ‘newspaper’ where none of this scandalous behaviour has occured 🙂
Self enrichment for themselves and their greedy mates/benefactors is in the DNA of conservatives world wide, and especially in the ranks of this government, its disgusting for sure, but the main disgust should be directed at the ordinary Australian voters that support and encourage this behaviour by voting them into the positions of power that allow it to happen time and time again, while they are lining their own pockets they pay for this privilege by taking from those least able to afford it and strangely some of these poorer victims actually help them by voting for the conservative clones like Hanson and Palmer who pretend to be somehow different types of conservatives but underneath it all, a conservative will always be just that, mean , greedy, self indulgent and usually corrupt in some way or other, without this supporter base, they would simply not exist.
It’s quite ironic how so many of these boosters of free enterprise, with their contempt of public ownership, themselves are firmly stuck to to the public teat. It’s quite likely Helloworld wouldn’t exist without Government largesse.
Good piece Guy.
Or possibly that Helloworld DIDN’T exist without government largesse…
Then there was Hymie’s (Get Smart) commandeering a government jet to “drop in to Adelaide to lobby a couple of cross-benchers” on the way home to Perth :- because there were no “suitable commercial flights” available?
And to think “The Age of Entitlement” is over – for some?
When he had the makings of such “good Fine-ants Minister”?
In a wayJoe Hockey was right that his Age Of Entitlement Is Over speech was the most influential of the decade – it’s just he and the Libs didn’t realise it was aimed at them.