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 Politics Down UnderPosted on Aug 21, 2007By E.J. Dionne MELBOURNE, Australia—In describing the average voter’s view of the economy, which opposition party politician said: “If things are going so well, why am I finding it so tough?” Guessing Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama or John Edwards would be reasonable, but wrong. The words are those of Kevin Rudd, the leader of the Australian Labor Party who, if current polling numbers hold, will be elected this fall as Australia’s next prime minister. The if is important—the 11-year incumbent, John Howard, is one of the toughest politicians in the democratic world and will not go down without a fierce fight. The election campaign here is an important test of whether good economic numbers are enough to re-elect an incumbent party when voters, even in the midst of affluence, feel stressed, overly in debt and time-poor in their personal lives. Julia Gillard, the Labor Party’s deputy leader, cites all these factors in casting the campaign as a choice between the Howard government’s economic record and “fresh ideas, a government in touch with people’s needs, and fairness at work.” She and just about everyone else expect the government to run “a fear campaign based on the economy,” as she puts it, rooted in the claim that Rudd’s Labor Party would wreck what Howard has achieved. Although Howard is running behind Rudd in the polls, his approval ratings hover around 50 percent. This leads one of the prime minister’s campaign advisers to argue that by the time voters go the polls—the betting is that Howard will set the election for late October—they will default to re-electing him, as they have three times since he first came to office in 1996. Howard has been the master of a classic form of conservative politics. As Wayne Errington and Peter van Onselen argue in a new biography, he has “managed to balance the interests of those welcoming of globalization with those hostile to it” by “fusing his long-held social conservatism with his embrace of globalization and free markets.” The rush of economic change is tempered by a defense of old Australian values—and some well-timed symbolic gestures on immigration that appeal to Australia’s equivalent of the Lou Dobbs-Pat Buchanan electorate. The key to Howard’s politics are the “aspirational” voters, the middle class in the nation’s outer suburbs who long for material improvement in their lives. This election is about aspiration and its discontents. Some of the restiveness arises from discontent with the conservative government’s new law on workplace rules, which in Labor’s view has sharply shifted the balance of power in favor of employers. Labor gives a traditional values twist to its argument against the new rules. Kristina Keneally, a minister in the state Labor government in New South Wales, says they “put in jeopardy people’s ability to make commitments to their communities and families,” such as “whether you can coach your child’s soccer team if they can change your shift.” Rudd, in the meantime, has narrowed his party’s differences with the government on economic management and cultural issues and focuses relentlessly on the future. His promises to act on global warming and expand broadband Internet access work on a symbolic as well as a substantive level. Rudd has also done something unusual for an Australian center-left politician: He has spoken openly about his Christian faith and declared his admiration for Dietrich Bonhoeffer, the German theologian and pastor executed by the Nazis for his role in the plot to kill Hitler. “What he worked out in his theological career,” Rudd said in an interview, “was the principle that if you forget about the life, the well-being and the interests of those below, you have lost your Christianity.” Rudd’s image as “St. Kevin” took a dent over the weekend when it was reported that while on an official trip to New York four years ago, he visited a strip club with the editor of the New York Post. But it was not clear how much the story would hurt Rudd as other politicians started confessing their own visits to such establishments and Labor charged Howard’s side with dirty tricks in pushing the story (which Howard’s side denied). The visit seemed out of character for the strait-laced Rudd, who said he stayed only 40 minutes at the club and acknowledged he was drunk—indeed, as one Australian paper put it, he “flagellated himself for the umpteenth time” on Monday. The surfacing of the story, however, showed how high the stakes are in Australia this year. There is a restlessness that has echoes in the United States. Is aspiration enough? Australians will tell us soon. E.J. Dionne’s e-mail address is postchat(at)aol.com. © 2007, Washington Post Writers Group Previous item: Ingredients for Murder Next item: Arming the Enemy Elsewhere: . CommentsAre you a Truthdig member yet? Login now, or register with Truthdig. Add Your Comment |
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AIDS and the Myth of the Oversexed Negro
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By Douglas Chalmers, August 23, 2007 at 12:48 am #
#96343 by ~B~ on 8/22 at 7:28 am: ‘...How did the U.S. end up leading the old British Empire in the new imperial wars...”
Lets forget about the so-called British roots of both America and Australia and look at what the people already living there back then still suffer today. Racism!
The current Australian federal government policy is to usurp the remaining rights of native Australians and to deprive them of any control over their tribal lands. This is a land-grab now in progress!!! The reason is covertly to ensure the unfettered and uninhibited mining of uranium and especially in the Northern Territory where their attention is presently focussed. Uranium as a fissile material will become obsolete in the next 40 years and, with climate-change as a plausible excuse, they are desperate to dig it all up before then and build new nuclear reactors around Australia as well as in the USA and elsewhere for a market.
Despite the recent victories of the Mirrar people in the Kakadu region of the Northern Territory Top End, tribal native Australians don’t stand a chance. The same appplies to the people at the Wad-e-ye community which is in the way of the construction of a land facility and pipeline to service the offshore gas and oil wells in the Bonaparte Gulf in Northern Australia. Already, the regional Aboriginal Affairs portfolio has been wrested from native Australian members of the Northern Territory government and is now directly under the control of the white chief minister and a white assistant minister.
Once, in 1990, a native Australian Torres Strait islander, Eddie Mabo, achieved a court victory as regards native title and land rights. Since then, white Australian state government officials have worked for the “extinguishment of native title” with mining investment interests as their contrived justification for their obsessively racist-imperialistic attitudes and to cover over their families’ sins of the past. Ironically, many smaller mining companies have gone on to negotiate successfully with native Australians as regards mining ventures on their traditional lands. Everything is now sadly about to change to an apartheid-era South African model in some form. That is what the Howard Neocons in Canberra want. http://www.iht.com/articles/2007/08/22/news/outback.php
Report thisBy ~B~, August 22, 2007 at 7:28 am #
How did the U.S. end up leading the old British Empire in the new imperial wars?
B
http://b-political.blogspot.com/
Report thisBy Douglas Chalmers, August 22, 2007 at 2:43 am #
The reality is that the generation of right-wing pro-Neocon retirees who voted Howard into office have passed on and there is no-one left to vote for the Howard Liberal-National troglodytes clinging to power in their own last days. The resultant dumbing-down of society there has left a real mess and a million young professional Australians are living and working overseas just to have a life.
Australia is running a housing/real estate bubble every bit as bad as the USA. The collapsing “yen carry trade” in global financial markets won’t help as Australia loses its fantasy currency status in the “free money from Japan” splurge which is now ending as a result of the growing US sub-prime mortgage investment disaster. There are tougher times ahead.
The election-year “fear campaign” approach the Howard government is well-known for is even more defunct this time than the Karl Rove attack-dog scenario in the USA. They tried to engineer yet another immigration scandal by exploiting Pakistani and Indian doctors working in Australia and, in particular, Dr. Haneef, who had some remote links with the Glasgow Airport bomber fiasco but it backfired badly. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/6920344.stm and see Wikipedia for background.
Prior to that, the federal government had also stumbled on its workplace legislation which was seen as taking all rights from workers and destroying unions. Hundreds of thousands of workers staged marches and rallies in all major cities. The economy is running well solely as a result of the China boom but any deterioration will again go badly for Howard as his government has claimed responsibility for that success. Interest rates are already rising and he and his treasurer, Peter Costello, are even now looking dubious.
In short, the game the Howard regime has played is falling to pieces as change happens around them and in spite of them. Conversely, the new opposing candidate, Kevin Rudd, has a much more open approach and is initiating new policy ideas in the parliament without waiting for an election and thus pressuring the Howard regime. He is seen as the “sunshine boy” from the Queensland Sunshine Coast and his ideas as new and meaningful “sunshine policies”.
As a former Australian diplomat to China, and political advisor to an earlier Queensland state Labor party government, Kevin Rudd does have some qualification and experience which is already evidently suiting him well for the job of prime minister. His wife is also a successful businesswoman in her own right. That, along with his positive attitudes to climate-change imperatives, makes him all of the things that an Australian electorate could wish for.
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