I confess I’ve left this newsletter till the day after the election as I didn’t want to miss the moment when Scummo was turfed out of the Lodge. To complicate matters still further, I’ve finally managed to contract COVID-19 and am holed up in a hotel room in Cairns for a week. I was on my way to Arnhem Land but bailed out when I got a positive reading. This has necessitated a lot of rearranging of schedules, which were already pretty messy, but Cairns is as good a place as any to spend a week in a room.
My symptoms are mild, with only a couple of days when my head felt too fuzzy to write anything. I’m on track to be a free man again by 26 May, and am looking forward to taking all those antibodies with me to Europe.
To the main event: the end of three years of duplicity and corruption disguised as government. If I tried to list all the things Scummo has mismanaged and lied about I’d need another three newsletters. It would be much simpler to list things that he got right. If readers can think of any such instances, I’d be happy to hear about them. Even John Howard – a grey mediocrity now magically transmuted into an éminence grise – did one heroic thing with his gun buyback. Morrison would never have had the courage or conviction to do anything like it.
Our late leader was a man singularly devoid of convictions. He told Deborah Snow he wasn’t concerned with leaving a legacy. He pissed off the left and right wings of his own party with his opportunistic shifts and stunts. He went into this election with the same set of policies he had last time, ie. no policies, only a raft of hastily concocted short-term promises; a full program of photo ops and ludicrous gimmicks; a blokey attitude that he felt sure Australians would appreciate; and a readiness to denounce anything Labor suggested.
Well it worked last time, didn’t it? This time, Labor played it safe by being parsimonious with their own policies and proposals. More disturbingly for Scummo, he didn’t realise that his macho posturing was alienating female voters across the spectrum. Add this to his failures on climate policy, and his refusal to consider a federal integrity commission that could be anything but a smokescreen for political corruption, and he laid the foundations for the Teal wave that has swept the Liberals out of their heartland seats. Yes, people in these seats may be more wealthy and conservative than most others, but they are also well-educated and able to see where unchecked climate denial and corruption will lead any nation.
Scummo’s two big platforms were a strong economy and national security. Both claims were farcical. His idiotical antagonism of the Chinese has cost us billions of dollars in trade. His Jobkeeper program – which he had to be pushed into – was geared to deliver millions of dollars into the hands of businessmen like Gerry Harvey, who increased his profits during the pandemic; and private schools, that also did well. His government has quadrupled the national deficit, partly by relentless pork-barrelling. By refusing to see low wages, inequality and childcare as core issues in relation to productivity and consumer confidence they have enshrined these problems as a permanent drag on the economy. The corrupt and narrow-minded insistence on coal-fired power, when even the energy companies are wanting to move on, has set us up to be the pariahs of the world when we should be leaders in renewables.
Scummo’s big economic idea was tax cuts for the wealthy. To pay for these gifts to the rich, money was to be found by such expedients as cracking down on receipients of the National Disability Insurance Scheme, many of whom had to sue to have unfair decisions reversed. Meanwhile, aged care has continued to slide into a state of despair, while promised recycling schemes exist only as glossy advertisements.
The modest Uluru statement calling for “a voice” to parliament was resolutely ignored, and let’s not forget the poor, bloody Sri Lankan refugee family on whom Scummo spent millions of taxpayer dollars inflicting maximum pain and cruelty, reiterating his readiness to continue this treatment in the last days before the election.
As for national security, when you gut foreign aid because you can’t see any point in handing money over to a bunch of islanders, you shouldn’t be surprised when those islanders find a new friend in Xi Jinping. Great strategic thinking, guys.
When the results were in on Saturday night, the valedictory speeches began. First we had Josh in Kooyong, after having been dumped from a blue ribbon Liberal seat by a well-organised challenge from Monique Ryan. What a lot of ludicrous, sentimental gush we heard about “family”, along with a boastful recital of the government’s “achievements” – a list that could be debunked at every turn.
Next up was The Boiled Egg, who somehow managed to keep hs seat. Once again it was a lot of rubbish about “family” and the government’s great achievements. The Egg’s great achievement in the next year of parliament, where he is expected to become Liberal leader, will be to avoid being investigated by the new anti-corruption body.
At last, the grand finale! Scummo, Jenny and the girls appear on stage. As might be predicted, although he’d just been thrashed, he acted as if he had won. His two buzz words were the inevitable “family” and “strong”. Everything was “strong, strong, strong”. Does he really think this kind of rhetoric cuts through to middle Australia? To the women voters who dropped him like a hot coal? To people on welfare or in aged care?
I suspect all the “family” stuff was a way of poking Albo, who is a divorcee with a girlfriend, and a son from his first marriage. When Scummo announced with apparent glee that he would step down from the leadership at the next party meeting, I can see only one plan in his mind: Let the Boiled Egg be leader for a while and make a hash of it. As the next election looms it’ll be time to reassert his credentials and engineer a comeback.
This is exactly the sort of cynical idea one would associate with Scummo, but surely his impregnable self-confidence is not taking into account the fact that Australians have decisively rejected his leadership style. He may believe the average Aussie is so dumb he (usually ‘he’) will vote for someone who is actively undermining all his best interests just because they act and sound like a good bloke. His definition of a “good bloke” is apparently someone without an idea in his head, who seems to have never read a book, has no interest in the arts, and wants nothing more than to hang out at Bunnings on the weekend and watch the footy in the evening.
Surely even good blokes would prefer to elect politicians who showed some mastery of their portfolios. Tradies are good at what they do, politicians need to show the same competence. To that end, I can’t improve on the words of the French Foreign Minister, Jean-Yves Le Drian, who recalled fondly Scummo’s good work with the French submarine contract. “The actions taken at the moment they were taken were of such brutality and cynicism and I would even be tempted to say of unequivocal incompetence,” he said, most probably in French – long known as the international language of diplomacy.
Goodbye to the patronising, smug, provincial, proudly ignorant, anti-intellectual, Boofhead style of politics we have endured for the past three years. I’m still reeling from one of the defining images of the campaign, when, in a stunt-gone-wrong, Scummo crash-tackled a small boy in a soccer game and crawled all over him in a scene that looked – to the naked eye – like a middle-aged man violently assaulting a child. Although some may argue it was vaguely reminiscent of the beach scene in From Here to Eternity.
Can Prime Minister Albo turn the Titanic around?
We have to be hopeful. After an election campaign in which he often looked and sounded like Mr. Magoo; being relentlessly pummelled by the Murdoch media, and an appallingly stupid pack of reporters; Albo finally had his moment of glory on the podium. Today everyone seems to be praising his passionate speech, which was delivered in a more forthright and confident manner than anything he managed during the campaign. It was, however, a tissue of old chestnuts about being a working class boy from an immigrant background, brought up by a single mum on welfare support in council housing. By now we all had our hankies ready.
Nevertheless, Albo tried to make substantial commitments on a range of issues, from indigenous affairs to climate policy, that have never featured in Scummo’s cosmology. Trying to give his partner, Jodie, a kiss, and then embrace his son, Nathan, who towered over him, Albo was incredibly awkward. He is graceless, but is he loveable? The way he kept saying “My fellow Australians” was eerily reminiscent of John Howard. Perhaps Albo intends to follow the same path of defiant ordinariness. It seemed to work for Howard.
In a world in which appearances count for so much, Albo has to rely on sincerity and integrity to compensate for the deficiencies in his image. He gained a lot in comparison with Scummo’s blustering, over-confident sleazebag persona, but when this nasty sight is out of the way will we still look fondly on daggy Albo? It depends on his performance, and that of his party. If Labor can break free of the policy silence maintained during the campaign and come up with more positive action on climate change, an integrity commission, and so on, that will make an instant difference. The presence of so many cross-bench candidates may act as an added incentive to action in these areas, or at least a good excuse. The ball’s at your feet, Albo, don’t crash tackle a small child by mistake!
This week’s art column is devoted to the Snowy Valleys Sculpture Trail, which offers a neat respite from politics. There’s nothing much to criticise in a project that is fully supported by the local communities and so well executed. It’s a reminder of the power of art to create a new focus of attention on a particuar place, and hopefully a new range of economic benefits.
The movie being reviewed is – as prefigured – Top Gun: Maverick. Even though the very thought of Tom Cruise makes me want to go “Yeeeeeccchhhh!”, it’s impossible to hate this piece of shameless bubblegum in which the poster boy of Scientology features in virtually every scene. Everything about the film is right up front, with a premium on thrill-a-minute action scenes and patriotic bumpf. As you’re watching this flick, one Saturday night, spare a thought for Captain Albo, our own Top Gun Maverick, now sitting in the cockpit. Has he got what it takes? Will he hold his nerve? Perhaps we’ve found an unlikely action hero.