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Raising Hell: Issue 40: Rogues And Scoundrels, All

"Education is a weapon whose effects depend on who holds it in his hands and at whom it is aimed," - Joseph Stalin, Soviet Dictator, Revolutionary, Bank Robber and Poet.

Raising Hell: Issue 40: Rogues And Scoundrels, All

Some time ago, back in the heady days of Trump’s rise, I published a little book called Rogue Nation where I attempted to document the earliest breath of political disaffection spreading across the land.

The idea was to use the return of Paulin Hanson’s One Nation as a hook to examine the work of those colourful independents in Parliament. Half the project was written out in the field, the other half from inside parliament after I spent a few months working as a staffer for Nick Xenophon. The entire project was completed in a breathless, three-month sprint and looking back, I think it shows. Were I to do it again today, there would be a few things I’d like to have discussed in more detail.

One of those things is the actual history of populism, which has always been a democratic movement to make politics actually work for the people — and in many ways the modern Labor party was born out of this impulse. As a general rule, it is always good to remember that when a commentator somewhere dismisses another as a populist, they actually mean to say that person is a demagogue.

Regardless, the two big insights from Rogue Nation was that the “colourful” independents who once stalked the halls of power actually did good work stalling the worst excesses of the Abbott era of Coalition government and that people had long since decided both major parties were leaving them in the lurch.

Even at the time it was possible to see Australia slowly beginning to slide into the same trajectory as the rest of the world. As centre-right parties are increasingly dragged to the right by a clutch of flag-sucking white nationalists, centre-left parties have been left hollow after the after the coalitions that arose in the post-war period was obliterated by the neoliberal reforms of the 1980s — reforms they often participated in (looking at you, Hawke and Keating). Throw in a heavy dose of austerity politics and what you have is swathes of people embracing the schadenfreude vote.

With Trump out of the White House, and that first crop of independents I wrote about largely gone, little attention is being paid to this process, even if the same trend I identified hasn’t gone away. That much has been clear of late as the movement to get climate-conscious, centre-right figures a run in seats held by climate denying Coalition members has been running fundraisers, while in recent days the socialist political economist John Quiggn has been aiming his pen squarely at Labor, whose smallest-target policy has made the party practically non-existent at the federal level.

Quiggin’s question is essentially this: what’s the difference?

Having been spent some time documenting this disaffection among the rest of the population, it is curious to watch this feeling now trickle up to those segments of society who had largely kept the faith.

Set against the backdrop of the Coalition’s broader political project — a clumsy recycling of the US Republican party’s “states rights” agenda in the absence of any real ideas or policy — and what you’re looking at is another stage in the fragmentation of the Australian political system. Add it all up, and what you’re left with is a ruling Coalition that has lost the Mandate of Heaven as it unable to act in the face of disaster (remember the bushfires?) and unwilling to even hide its corruption, and an opposition entirely unable to mount an effective challenge to unseat them, leaving absolutely no one happy.

As someone who has written about this, it will be interesting events play out from here until the next election (likely to be called in May next year) as the country approaches the most significance election it has faced in a long time. For millions of Australians, there is much riding on the outcome. Unless something changes in the next few months the public is being presented with a dispiriting choice between returning an incompetent conservative government that has been captured by the oil and gas sector, and an opposition that has all-but guaranteed it will nothing to help anyone.

And if this is how I’m reading the situation, I hate to think how everyone else out there is feeling.

For the Fortnight: October 26 to November 9

Reporting In

Where I recap what I’ve been doing this last fortnight so you know I’m not just using your money to stimulate the local economy …

  • ‘Exmouth Gulf: development plans stir up fears about future of Ningaloo’s neighbour’ (The Guardian, 26 September 2021).
  • Future Of Local Journalism, Long Table Discussion, Context Festival (10 October 2021).

Projects

You Hate To See It

A dyspeptic, snark-ridden and highly ironic round-up of the news from our shared hellscape…

  • Bought And Paid For

    World leaders have once more gathered in Glasgow for the COP26 summit to assure the rest of the world that even if the world is running out of time to ward of a collapsing biosphere, broiling oceans and potential extinction, they totally do get the need for immediate action on climate change. In fact, the need for action is so pressing, those like Joe Biden fell asleep while Australia, has been busy shilling for the oil and gas sector. Ever keen to export is domestic trolling onto the international stage, oil and gas company Santos took centre stage. The installation may have been removed three days later, but the CEO of Santos Kevin Gallagher — who also serves as the chair of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association — had already head down the road to Edinburgh to watch the Wallabies in the rugby, a team his compony sponsors.

  • Now That’s Innovation

    We begin this fortnight in sunny California where Long Beach City College is running a “Safe Parking Program” for homeless students. Under the program these students — who are trying to improve their lot by plunging themselves into debt — will be permitted to sleep in their cars, in a secure parking facility — on campus! Only 70 students are currently participating in the program, but it is almost inevitable the idea will be taken up by other universities cross the US before it eventually filters its way into Australia.

  • Not Just Hot Air

    Enjoy this heatmap published by US investigative journalism outfit ProPublic that allows anyone, anywhere in that country to check if they have spent their lives near high levels of cancer-causing air pollution. God help us if a similar project is ever completed looking at Australia.

  • Spin Me Right Round, Like A Record Baby

    Meanwhile in Australia, US management consultancies continue to burrow their way into the public finances like a tick. At senate estimates this fortnight it was revealed the government handed a $6m contract to US-based multinational consulting firm McKinsey, over and above the CSIRO which had applied for the contract but had proven unsuccessful. Of course, this is all just the marketplace of ideas: if the CSIRO will help you find the answer, McKinsey will give you the thin-veneer of righteousness without the uncomfortable possibility of being shown to be wrong.

  • With Friends Like These

    But hey, it’s not like US or British involvement in Australian has ever been malevolent? Right? …Right?

  • “Fuck This”

    But then, perhaps we can take heart from the embittered goths of US clothing chain Hot Topic who have, like many other thousands of people across the US, quit on the basis they are tired of being immiserated in their jobs.

Failing Upward

Where we recognise and celebrate the true stupidity of the rich, powerful and influential…

  • In a year that somedays feels like we have lived through a blizzard of dumb, this last fortnight has bee relatively difficult for a proper Failing Upward nomination. For a time it looked like Victorian opposition leader Tim Smith might get the nod as he insisted he would continue to remain in office despite… everything. But then he resigned, which really left us here in the Raising Hell office in the lurch.Certain that if we reached far enough back in the collective memory we would land something, we were ultimately proven right yet again by the Deputy Prime Minister who in the opening moments of the last fortnight claimed the only way to deal with climate change was to “start shooting cattle” — and so we may as well let it rip.Boy, howdy. What a time to be alive.

Good Reads, Good Times

To share the love, here are some of the best or more interesting reads from the last fortnight…

  • Noam Cohen, writing in Wired has this great story about one woman’s crusade to remove Nazi fan-fiction from Wikipedia using basic academic rigour. I, for one, salute her.
  • Katharine Murphy has this in The Guardian on the significance of Morrison lying to the French about the submarine contract. As much as the instinct among some might be to roll their eyes, from the start the implication has always been clear: if Australia will lie about this, what else will our leaders lie about on the international stage?
  • Carl Rhodes, writing in The Guardian, offers a good reminder of why progressive gestures from business are downright dangerous.
  • Lee Harris writing in Prospect offers a window into how the Scottish city of Aberdeen is attempting to ween itself off oil and gas. Lee glosses over the detail on “blue hydrogen” and CCS, but otherwise it’s a pretty good write up of the tensions — and makes it abundantly clear where Australia is looking for guidance.

Before You Go (Go)…

  • Are you a public sector bureaucrat whose tyrannical boss is behaving badly? Have you recently come into possession of documents showing some rich guy is trying to move their ill-gotten-gains to Curacao? Did you take a low-paying job with an evil corporation registered in Delaware that is burying toxic waste under playgrounds? If your conscience is keeping you up at night, or you’d just plain like to see some wrong-doers cast into the sea, we here at Raising Hell can suggest a course of action: leak! You can securely make contact through Signal or through encrypted message Wickr Me on my account: rorok1990. Alternatively you can send us your hard copies to: PO Box 134, Welland SA 5007
  • And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, leaving a review or by just telling a friend about Raising Hell!
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Jamie Larson
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