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Thoughts on the 2019 Australian Election

There's a fine line between analysing something and simply complaining about it. I hope that the following, which was penned in a rush the day after the election, doesn't veer too much into the latter.

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With the re-election of the Liberal government now sinking in, we are hearing the oft-repeated but perhaps not entirely comprehended observation that Australia is in fact a deeply conservative country. This fact has never been intuitively obvious for me, because I’m from and live in the most progressive part of the country. My family, education, workplace and the bulk of my acquaintances reflect a tacit left-wing consensus on social and political issues. Australia being conservative is something I understand only in an abstract, intellectual sense. The reaction a lot of people in my area are having to the 2019 election is reminiscent of the wealthy socialite’s reaction to George W. Bush’s 2004 re-election: how could he have been elected, I don’t know anyone who voted for him! It's a hard thing to recognise the larger political world that exists beyond your own. (I actually don't know if this joke was specifically about Bush's 2004 re-election, but let's say it is).

Already I’ve come across suppositions regarding the “silent majority” of Australians turning out to reject the Labor platform. The “silent” part is I think meant to be a rebuff to the loud, negative broadsides from Labor regarding issues such as economic inequality and climate change. It sounds dignified and proper, and casts Labor as indignant and immature. It also suggests something of an anodyne quality to the conservatism on offer. When we talk about Australia being conservative, I myself don’t take this to mean that Australia is reactionary. The conservatism on offer in Australia is of a petty nature. Its the conservatism of small business owners and shopkeepers, of hedge fund managers and financial advisers, rather than the conservatism of the petulant, anti-immigrant, ill-educated outer-suburb brat who has been sucked down the rabbit hole of Reddit (even if they do exist in large numbers in this country).

If there’s something that we shouldn’t do here is see Morrison’s victory as an extension of the Trump phenomenon. Morrison may adhere to a very weird strain of Christianity and his party may be too comfortable with elements in Australian politics that are genuinely reactionary, but the Liberal party is at the end of the day a centre-right party. Life under a centre-right party is not a death sentence. Elections in Australia have consequences for the emotional states of its citizens probably more so than they do for their material welfare. Many Australians who share my politics will be unhappy, but they’re not necessarily worse off. This is because there are certain tacit agreements in Australian life to do with certain modified welfare state packages – agreements that are the result of prior victories - that conservative governments can’t undo.

We can’t escape the issue of climate change, and what the Liberal victory means in this respect. Andrew Bolt is correct in proclaiming that Morrison’s victory is a pretty stark rejection of the contention that climate change is an issue that needs addressing. I think this has something to do with the small-minded nature of Australian conservatism. Again, it's the conservatism of the businessman rather than the conservatism of the ideologue that is the generative force here. Encoded within the message that the Liberal party is the organ that protects the hard-won income of the average citizen against the encroachments of a party that would take that income away in the name of equality, is the message that acting on climate change means you won’t even have the capacity to earn an income at all. This is something the Coalition have been expert at with the whole issue of the world’s climate, and was pioneered by Tony Abbott: addressing our impact on the environment will mean you, the hard-working Aussie who pays taxes and raises children, will be worse off as a result. Acting on climate change will cost you your job, and allow other people from other countries to act on the opportunities that were rightfully yours.

The fact that this message has worked so well reflects very poorly not only on the Labor party, but also on the policy-oriented intelligentsia and its attempts to present the case for a workable carbon tax or emissions trading scheme. They know, but have failed to adequately convey, that the costs of enacting carbon tax legislation will actually have pretty minimal impact on employment opportunities, let alone degrading economic growth. In the spirit of tolerance and conciliation, the emphasis, when it comes to climate change action, should be on the fact it won’t disrupt people’s lives, or at least won’t do so any more dramatically than shifts in geopolitics or technological change already have and will. I’m not entirely confident that this wasn’t the strategy of Labor, but something tells me that the emphasis was rather on the environment itself, and not on the people who live in it.

The other thing about climate change action is that opinions on it do vary very much depending on socio-economic status. As an electoral force the Greens have on their side much of the educated middle-class who live in the inner-suburbs. The following may be a cheap shot but I think it's fundamentally true: people who worry about climate change are people who have the time and detachment, and dare I say it the leisure, to worry about it. Despite the obvious urgency felt in many places around the world on the issue, here in Australia it still seems too abstract for working people. It sounds like the height of silliness that people’s position on the climate of our planet is dependent on our class interests, and yet it is. Appealing to the capacity of most Australians to think in the long term, and to think outside the context of their own financial situation, is doom-laden. The Coalition’s messaging here about keeping the ship tight on course for growth and stability and maintaining the wealthy status of families and businesses is alas not some conspiracy from an oligarchic elite pulling the wool over the eyes of the Australian people. Unfortunately, it resonates with us. It reflects very well the short-range and unimaginative thinking of a lot of Australians. It's an area in which the Labor party’s messaging – about climate change, about economic and social equality and about extending a sense of fairness and sympathy to others – simply doesn’t carry the same intuitive appeal as the Coalition party’s message about protecting you as an individual.

And this brings me to my main point. Hopefully this election will force us to stop talking about how the Australian people have been let down by our politicians. What we should start asking ourselves is whether the Australian people are in fact deserving of a mature political class. At the end of his book The Politics of Petulance (2018), which I reviewed in my previous post, Alan Wolfe pretty much asks as much about his fellow Americans. The election of Trump reflected fundamentally not on the institutions or external pressures of Americans, but on the people themselves. He quoted Brecht’s line about dissolving the people and electing a new one. He used the quotation not to literally endorse it, but like most people to put across, in its most extreme form, a frustrated, elongated sigh about his fellow citizens. I feel that same exasperation with my own fellow citizens. The Coalition has told us to think of ourselves and our money, and to conceive of the future of the country as being simply the future of our children in forty or so years. It may be unrealistic to ask us to conceive of the future in a different, deeper light. But by re-electing the Scott Morrison, we’ve irrevocably shown our hand.

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