October, 2004

Just finished reading Cory Doctorow’s Eastern Standard Tribe, again. It’s a ripping good yarn, and only takes a few hours to get through.

If you haven’t done so already, I suggest downloading it from Cory’s site immediately.

It would seem that a lot of people are using iModium, but keeping very quiet about it. Check out their website, iModium.com, including the obligatory cheesy flash game. (via Prof Quiggin)

On a completely unrelated topic, it’s so very Friday.

I almost fell off my chair. I agree with something John Howard said:

… There was divided opinion in Australia on whether or not we should have gone into Iraq.

Wow. John Howard admits that the decision to go to Iraq wasn’t unanimous amongst the voters. That’s almost showing humility. It’s almost an apology for dismissing the quarter million anti-war protesters out of hand. Not that it matters; nobody will be judging Howard over his decision to send the troops to Iraq until decade 200x is part of a modern history curriculum.

I digress. Our PM continued the interview:

But the overwhelming majority of Australians believe very strongly that having gone there, we should stay and finish the job. They rejected the notion of the premature withdrawal of our forces until their job has been completed.

And again I agree.

On second thoughts, perhaps “help fix the mess we made” would be more accurate than “finish the job,” because the job was to take away Iraq’s WMDs. However, I’m glad to see our troops in there doing good, whatever the rationalisation.

Australian left wing bloggers are putting together the story of how John Howard managed to win a fourth term, an increased margin and a senate majority. It will take months to complete, but the general shape is “John Howard is still in power because the left are not addressing the issues that the majority of Australians care about. This must change. Here is how.”

According to the new narrative, the issues that the majority of Australians care about are:

• How can I get the big house and all the stuff that I aspire to?

• Will I still be able to afford the mortgage repayments if interest rates go up 2%?

• How do I get more money?

• What’s better – Backyard Blitz or Ground Force?

No doubt the list will grow broader, deeper and more accurate over the coming months. I expect Hugh McKay’s books to be selling particularly well in the lead-up to Christmas. All this will take place to the sound of a thousand right wing bloggers saying, “Duh!”

The issues that have been pre-occupying the left are all intellectual, wet and community-minded:

• How low will the standards of our democracy sink before somebody restores them?

• How much of our natural environment can we preserve?

• How can we get the working poor into more stable employment?

• Can we restore Australia’s reputation as a good world citizen?

These are good things to be concerned about. It’s good to educate oneself about them and to discuss them with your peers. However, when we try to talk to the “typical Australian” in these terms, all we provoke are blank stares and the suspicion of being lectured. So we had better try something else.

I think the Left will catch up – we’re motivated and we’re good at introspection, so it’s just a matter of time. We won’t be playing on the right’s home ground either. There are plenty of voters’ problems that the Liberal party doesn’t have answers for, like the affordability of housing, who is going to care for their grandmother, and whether their children will have a decent country to live in.

Some links I’ve found useful:

• Hugh McKay called the election correctly in September, and consequently his opinion deserves a listening.

• Clive Hamilton captures the precarious financial position many voters are in.

• Harry Heidelberg has a cathartic rant, upset, but accepting that voters aren’t interested in lefty issues like truth and justice. He makes the point that we need to speak to each person in their own terms.

• Alan Ramsey, chattering away and crying into his chardonnay. We must stop doing this in public; it might pick up the odd convert, but overall does more harm than good. (On the other hand, maintaining the rage is useful. Perhaps we should retain Alan Ramsey for this purpose, so long as the rest of us learn how to communicate.)

• Chris Sheil’s Back Pages weblog is one place where the new narrative is being forged. This new narrative is only a few days old, but it’s already starting to change people’s language and their viewpoints.

I find the left wing bloggers’ narrative fascinating, but it’s nowhere near as important or as detailed as the narrative the Labor party needs to build for itself in the coming months. Interesting times ahead.

Update: Two Labor party members have written pieces for Crikey, showing the beginnings of new Labor party story. The authors weave together memes from newspaper columnists, a dose insider knowledge and a strong conviction that it is possible for Labor to win an election.

• Latham’s big missed opportunity

• Reflecting on Labor’s loss – “After going backwards in Labor’s strongest booths, the only conclusion is that the party has lost touch with working people.”

There’s a bit of a meme going around with Howard supporters at the moment, which this quote – attributed Peter Ruehl of the Fin Review – sums up nicely,

“Whenever you [hear] somebody saying the other side won because of scare tactics, what they are saying is the voters are stupid” (quoted by “harry clarke” on John Quiggin’s weblog).

Let me spell this out: both sides ran advertisements designed to elicit strong concerns about the other’s leader and their possible behaviour in office. Like almost all modern advertising, they were designed to elicit an emotional as well as intellectual response.

These ads were, in the venacular, scary.

To follow Peter Ruehl’s logic through, when a party runs one of these scary advertisements, it’s because they think the voters are stupid. The Liberal party ran the largest number of scary advertisements so obviously, the Liberal party thinks the voters are stupidest. That’s what Peter Ruehl is saying.

For the record, I think the Liberal party’s scare campaign may not have been responsible for their win, but it was responsible for the size of their win. Their ads were well targeted, well timed and played on the fears of the large number of Australian voters that don’t care about federal politics. These voters are not stupid – they are ill informed on the runnings of our country, scared of interest rate rises and more ready to believe bad things about politicans than good things, but not stupid. In their position would be strange if they weren’t scared by the Liberal party’s ads. Congratulations to John Howard and his team for understanding the voters better.

So to Peter Ruehl and friends, no, I don’t think the voters are stupid, any more than the Liberal party does.

Starting from July 1, 2005, the Liberals will have control of the senate, and it’s likely that cross media ownership laws will be relaxed, if not completely repealed. Currently, those laws are the only thing stopping Kerry Packer buying the old Fairfax empire.

I am expecting most of Australian television and print media to be owned by Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch by the end of 2007. Both Packer and Murdoch have a conflict of interest when it comes to reporting the news, in that with such large businesses, the news often reflects poorly on them, and so it gets censored.

Check out the Limited News site for a glimpse of how the Murdoch empire controls its newspapers for it’s own benefit. Don’t expect any better from Packer.

I also expect to see the government reign in the ABC‘s news departments, shrinking them agin and also demanding more favourable coverage under threat of disbandment.

So today I subscribed to Crikey, not because their news is brilliant, but because they are independent. I hope Crikey will be the first of a number of independent news bureaux running with low overheads and quality reporters.

Here is how I will be voting tomorrow:

• 1. Greens

• 2. Labor

• 3 – 85. All the rest, even the crackpots.

• 86. Liberal

I firmly believe that the Libs have trashed our democratic processes and traditions for long enough. Australia has committed an unjustifiable violence against Iraq, and John Howard is the man who put Australia there. That he did it without without any real public discussion, and that he didn’t seek the authorisation of parliament was the second-to-last straw for me. The last straw was lying about the strength of the case for war. The way I figure it, if we vote lying politicians out for long enough, we’ll eventually end up with representatives that are more anxious to tell the truth than to get a good sound bite.

Labor’s policies seem to be rooted in reality, and if they get in, Australia will be more relaxed and comfortable. The last Labor PM we had was responsible for floating the dollar and deregulating all kinds of markets, and Latham doesn’t talk like a commuist. The economy will do fine.

Some have made a lot of Latham’s inexperience, but I don’t think it’s a big deal. He’s capable and has as much experience at being PM as John Howard had in 1996.

I agree with some Greens policies, and I disagree violently with others – being fairly socially conservative – but the Greens get my first preference for giving a voice to a segment of the population that has been ignored for quite some time, and Australia could use a third voice.

I’ll also be numbering every box on the Senate tablecloth, so I can make sure who will be last.

Yesterday was somewhat unusual. Here’s some things I did:

• Got up at 4:15am. Not happy, Jan.

• Almost had a nose-to-tail accident in the airport tunnel. My taxi driver left big black marks on the road, but the car right in front of us pulled off to the side of the road, and we missed the car in front of that by a good metre and a half. Early morning heart starter.

• Flew to Melbourne and back on Virgin Blue. Uneventful.

• Spent $340.00 on taxis. Unbelieveable.

• Delivered the next iteration of our system to our client. Big smiles all ‘round. A relief.

• Had lunch in the park: 24 degrees, no clouds, no wind. Lovely.

• Went to half a Catholic mass – the cathedral being right next to the park. It provided some time for quiet prayer, and the service was sort-of familiar, but I felt the outsider I was. Interesting.

• Had my own personal sunset at Melbourne airport. When I plopped down in the comfy chair next to gate 10, the sun had just kissed the horizon, big and orange. It slid gracefully downwards as 737s leapt off the tarmac, and dimmed enough that I could watch the final sliver of light disappear behind the mountains. Spectacular.

Counterspin posts about an A4 political leaflet that Australia Post refused to deliver:

The leaflet shows a 12 year-old Iraqi child in hospital. His arms have been blown off; he has suffered terrible burns to his torso. The photo has been printed in the newspapers.

Next to this image is a family photo of Mr Howard. The text comments on the different protection Mr Howard offers his family, as compared with the devastation inflicted on countless Iraqi families because of our invasion of that country alongside the Americans.

See the whole leaflet here.

Chris Sheil at Back Pages is doing some quality blogging on the Aussie election. His latest post on the polls generated a good deal of discussion (53 comments and counting.) Buried in the middle of it was this little nugget from Chris himself:

I don’t think I necessarily disagree with anyone, but the Lodge/Kirribili thing really gets on my wick. I thought it wrong that the pm didn’t live in Canberra at the outset. I let it slide. But then, when I heard Jack back from his early US trip talking about ‘job snobs’ – unemployed folk who wouldn’t go to where the jobs were – and I remembered the size of his own public Kiribili subsidy, I went spare, and have never recovered. Get the goddamned hypocritical lying bum outta there.

Come to think of it, I haven’t heard much talk of “mutual responsibility” lately.