World War I began early, accidentally, when a small German force invaded the north tip of Luxembourg on 1 August, 1914, three days before the Western war began in earnest. Having destroyed a railway station telegraph office and ripped up rail track — both of which would have to be rebuilt when Germany re-invaded — they sheepishly withdrew across the border.
Is that where we are now? With the publication of the latest Newspoll giving Labor the magical 56-44 2PP, The Australian came out all guns blazing, the anti-Labor stories tumbling over themselves hourly. By mid-afternoon, Albo was “defending” Labor’s position on China (which appeared to be identical to the Coalition’s position on China).
By late afternoon, when one glanced back to check a fact or two, it was gone and Albo was now doing a backflip on the Kurri Kurri hybrid gas plant. Both stories were tendentious in the extreme. Labor’s “defence” of its China policy was simply restating it. Labor’s plan for the Kurri Kurri plant had always been that it should be hybrid, converting to full hydrogen use in a decade.
Business as usual. Whether right-wing ideologues or mortgage-paying desperados, News Corp’s staff have been reformed into ideological flying columns, ready for the long slog on behalf of a blemished and discredited government.
But have they gone a little early? Reporting on the Newspoll included a series of dodgy pie charts, which visually skewed the results of the “Better PM” poll — ScoMo leading by a slender 43% to 41% — to give the impression that the Coalition had a de facto near-majority.
Those pie charts appear to have disappeared on the News website, after a storm of ridicule, and that sally might mark the right’s “Luxembourg telegraph station explosion” moment. With the right readying an onslaught behind their frontiers — a mixture of their powerful myths, appeals to self-interest, and big fear — but faced with an electorate whose trust they have lost, they wouldn’t want to go too early.
Is there four weeks’ traction in the mix of sawdust and bulldust they will try to sell us? Barely. There is certainly not six weeks. For the Coalition, assailed both by Labor and by independents of all stripes, the race will be against themselves — to get over the line with the whole campaign still patched together, without the sprockets flying off.
But if they can do that, of course, then a reversal occurs. It is the Coalition, I presume, who for months now have had their wonks coming up with something like “the promise of Australia”, Scott Morrison’s 2019 quasi-religious appeal to a national spirit, which all could partake of, from their atomised lives, and which would allow the Coalition to acknowledge its own sins while owning a higher conception of life and possibility.
“We all fall short of our ideals” I can imagine Morrison saying. “I personally have done that many times. So has Jenny. But all Australians are great and together we make up ‘the Australian greatness’ of a nation at peace, where you can work your way up … nothing but three bucks and an icy-pole stick…” etc, etc, and preacher boy that he is, he will sell the life out of that. Or something like it. And it may just work.
The problem for Labor is that ScoMo can make something like that sing, out of sheer desperation, and Labor is then once again left defenceless. It have advanced no general conceptions of how life should be, of what we should dream of, of making a society which honours and encourages our best selves. It is running on “kick this mob out”, and offering a few practical, region-focused solutions at the same time.
So they will either have to ignore that sort of big pitch or puncture it altogether. The latter strategy works if enough people are wholly convinced the Morrison government is full of it, but if that’s not the case, Labor — for some of them at least — takes on the role of the destructive cynic. (“What, you don’t want us to be great?” “Greatness? How about a fast train to Newcastle!”)
The truth is that conservative parties have always been better positioned to play this sort of game, for the simple reason that, since the advent of high capitalism and a full franchise, their success has depended on persuading a section of the working class to vote against their own specific interests. The convoking of imperial pride, of national loyalty, of abstract notions of duty was always campaigning with an offer of the imaginary — it’s just the imaginary was real. In the 1920s, the UK Tories slogan was simply “For King and Country”, and not much else was required.
Labor parties learnt how to do this for a while, and then they lost it. As their ranks were taken over by university graduates (often of working-class origin), the very fact that they did want to do better for the less well-off — and had the figures to show what needed and had to be done — has diminished their capacity to talk in any language but that of technocratic command and remedy. We’ll see this time out if they managed to remedy that after the 2019 loss, but one doesn’t hear any great indication of such.
The concern with that asymmetry is also about from whence the passion will come to fuel progressives for the fight. Because without a political-economic narrative to attach to, progressives return to their comfort zone — culture wars that leave much of the nation cold or are flatly counterproductive.
The Grace Tame event of last week was a sign of that. Someone refusing a smile at an official event counts as a political act of sorts, but the outpouring of political passion attached to it by progressives, the tide of rah-rah op-eds, shows how utterly self-absorbed many progressives have become, and how their personal hatred of Scott Morrison and what he represents may well distort their political vision.
That is what the right is hoping for, of course, and will be the traps that some will lay from now until May – or ha-ha, the House of Reps only election in September, after a half-Senate in May. As every progressive knows, the hacienda will not be rebuilt (Guy DeBord), but the Luxembourg telegraph office has been destroyed. The railway station the Germans took over was named Troisvierges. There’ll be none of those when this is all over.
If we have a corruption problem, then why doesn’t Albo bring it to the front and centre attention of the voters with proposals to de-link Grants of every variety from the grubby hands of the pork barrel distributors…..once and for all.
It’s not an expensive policy to implement and murky Murdoch misinformation media would rather ignore the subject entirely rather than attacking it.
A Federal ICAC will umcover all kinds of dirt frim both sides!
Albo should make it happen and take the high ground……..rather than feeding the cynicism.
However, given the ALP have been out of office for all but six of the last twenty-six years, their scope for corruption (at the Federal level) has necessarily been restricted. Hence, I would be reasonably confident that most of the dirt will be found in one stinking pile.
If they delve into it, no matter whether Labor or L/NP any amount of corruption whether above or below will be uncovered.
Any form of shoddy dealings should be questioned and scrutinised.
yah, libs ‘and’ nats
You are forgetting the gross incompetence of everyone of the Morrison mob. Would any realistic business operator employ any of them?
Well if you had a dud product you would definitely employ Scottie to sell it. Albo would be totally useless.
I’m not sure that Albo could sell ‘good news’.
He would not have to sell it, he could just be it.
That credits the average voter in the internet/Murdoch era with more understanding than is reasonable , I fear.
So true 🙂 Have oft wondering if this was why Scotty from marketing went into politics.
Cannot agree more with you, show that you are willing to be accountable.
If you got nothing to hide, you got nothing to fear!
The Prime Minimal is on his hind legs at the NPC as I write – beginning with an apparent mea culpa which was immediately revolting & suspect.
After listing all the disasters over which he has presided and made worse and seemed about to break out sobbing “why did nobody tell me!” that he is crap, at governing like everything else he’s ever touched.
Nothing of course was his fault.
The bush fires, the floods, the pandemic and the abject failure to deal with it were all once-in-a-century events, unforeseeable and totally unique in all human experience but, striding through the smoke & dust came Scummo, our saviour and a veritable colussus amongst lesser beings.
It’s not his fault. He’s a human sieve, he doesn’t hold responsibility along with a great deal many other things.
And don’t forget the elderly in aged care who died because they refused to take their booster or their family refused to let them. Antivaxxers, the lot of ‘em, apparently. Nothing to do with the fact that the Morrison Government still hasn’t gotten around to providing aged care facilities with booster shots. Nothing at all.
That’s always been the conservatives’ advantage. Their vision is more of the the same, which requires no imagination to comprehend. The vision they hold out to everyone is simply, “You can go on having all that you now have, only we’ll make sure that you get more of it.” (Note: this is their VISION. It’s not reality, but it doesn’t have to be. It just has to fool enough people.)
By contrast, what is it, exactly, that ‘progressives’ are trying to progress to these days?
Simply put Guy, watch the dirt from Muckracker ( worked well for Trump) watch the supporters of this sad indictment of L/NP ..watch the cockroaches come out from the dark now.
Already seeing on the sad lot of sad NEWS on SKY ..sad reporters dealing misinformation and slight infractions on Labor wherea..People are seeing thru that though, I read comments on the disinformation thst SKY is trying to sell on nine msn .The AUSTRALIAN, FINANCIAL REVIEW, Muckrackers rags trying to sell a lie will be the bartow they push.
Yepp! Cock roaches will be skittering around in the gutters now.
barrow not bartrow*
Twas ever thus. People believe that which gives them comfort, which validates their sense of themself, which excuses them from self-reflection. The mass media provide that comfort, validation, and excuse. I also find myself enraged by the hypocrisy, dishonesty, and outright stupidity of most of the talking heads, but I also find some cause for hope in the way that they’re constantly trashing their own brand. People, and most of all our young people, KNOW they are being lied to. They know viscerally they are being gaslighted by the monopoly media. You only need observe the hysterically defensive and self-justifying responses of the talking heads to criticism to realise that they know it too. Howard sold our shared narrative for a mess of pottage and today we are beginning to reap the consequences. The old institutions are collapsing under the weight of their own inherent contradictions. When paradigms decay, we live in fearful times.
Blaming “progressives” for the culture wars, and especially for the Grace Tame side-eye brouhaha, seems backwards to me. The latter was definitely outrage started in the conservative papers. Culture wars, as such, are exclusively a conservative pecadillo: centers of western culture and religious freedom laws, for example.
It’s a lazy tag imported from the US and used by Howard to describe Victoria aka ‘Massachusetts’ of Oz, along with all the other imported socioeconomic or cultural baggage, that goes unnoticed by media, also lazy?
Yes culture wars and identity politics are a danger ground. Let’s not forget who starts it and feeds it- progressives must not buy into it. Have to find ways to not feed the frenzy which distracts from core values and the real world.
Complex Gender debate does not resonate as a vital issue in towns where jobs and drought are front of mind. Not saying this is not
important but a broader vision of justice and fairness for all has more chance to engage hearts and minds.
This weeks nonsense was not about religious freedom- rather all about turning the knife on a small vulnerable group and stirring division. We need to name it out loud into the broader narrative.
Worried what a feral Morrison will do!