Raising Hell: Issue 8: Austerity Blues

At this time when Australia seems to be wiping the sweat from its brow and thanking the gods it is not somewhere else like the Americas, my read of the incoming headlines from the past fortnight paints a curious picture of the nation. If the conservatives have thrown themselves into the work of remaking the country in their image and enriching their allies, progressives — who once cheered the tacit acceptance of “socialism” in the first weeks of the pandemic — seem to be growing more depressed by the day as the core social institutions of Australian life are mothballed, savaged by funding cuts and neglected.

Probably the most surprising thing I have found in this moment is the commentary from sections of the media lamenting the death of a noble bipartisanship that, allegedly, took hold during the crisis. In this instance, the best example from recent days was an analysis by Laura Tingle — a journalist whose work I have great respect — writing for The ABC:

But if the news was depressing on both the jobs and health front, the confirmation that we have also not dodged a class of politics that thinks it's OK to tell voters that black is white is equally depressing.

That brief, glimmering moment when our leaders seemed to make decisions in the broad public interest, rather than their own political ones, and drew us into their frank confidence, is over.

Reading this, I couldn’t help but wonder: Who were these people that were drawn into the frank confidence of our political leadership? I know it sure wasn’t me. And did any of us really think this about our political leadership? Most people I know were just happy they had a little bit of cash coming in to pay the mortgage even as their opinions of politicians remained unchanged.

At its core, this brand of political writing suffers from a sparkling naivete or willful blindness from people who should and do know better. When cynical, it becomes a tired rhetorical trope. If sincere, the issue is a blindness to certain realities. At heart, is a fundamental longing for some “lost era” of politics where statesmen (emphasis on “men”) were noble, parties cooperated and the ship of state was guided by the sober hand of an apolitical technocracy as it sailed a rising tide that lifts all boats. If this ever existed, it was probably for ten whole minutes during the nineties when Third Way politics was a thing people took seriously. Since then, times have changed and recent events have proven the very notion was more a curve on the road than some truckstop at the end of history.

While I understand the basic instinct to wish we were living in The West Wing where crisis were handled in an hour with an idealistic speech about values, politics in the real world has never been about that. Even at a base level, politics — that is the process of deciding who gets what and in what amount — is fundamentally about conflict and the catharsis of overcoming the other. As far as ideas go, this is maybe one of two things which the right side of politics actually do understand. It is also why every media op, every speech, every made-for-TV moment from someone within the Coalition is all about projecting strength. These people may have no clue about much of anything, but since they decided the only thing worse than looking dumb in the public eye is to look weak, that is all they have had to offer. This is why all you get from the Coalition since about 2008 is guff about a strong™ plans for jobs and dull speeches about how we have to be “tough on borders”.

None of this really changed during the pandemic. Yes, the leaders of the major parties may have talked more. Yes, the government engaged with the ACTU and Judith Sloan agreed to sit tight for five minutes while the medical health professionals did their thing. Those are all nice moments that will no doubt appear in a show-reel of this time period, but then to focus on these is to engage in an act of selective recall.

Remember, for instance, the confusion in the opening weeks of the pandemic as Morrison insisted on television he would still go to the rugby and then how he updated the rules for handling the pandemic by the day in angry, confused riddles on press conferences held at 10pm each evening? Then there was that time his government dawdled on introducing JobKeeper because they literally could not imagine re-purposing the wages system to prop up the economy? And then let’s not forget how the Coalition — as the pressure eased and they had finally caught their balance — deliberately excluded 2.5 million casual workers from Jobkeeper while telling migrant workers who were struggling just to “go home”? Or how when the worst was over, it was announced they had only spent half as much stimulus money as promised and then bragged that was a good thing?

Image: For anyone who thinks the outrage and “confusion” in the first week of the pandemic was limited to Twitter, here is the sign on the door of Davo’s Deli in Parndana, Kangaroo Island which still hangs in late June 2020. (Source: Royce Kurmelovs).

I could go on, but you get the gist.

And, look, I get it. We’ve got crisis fatigue and mostly we’re all just thankful Australia has come out of this better than the US or Brazil. That said, let’s not delude ourselves. Now that the heat is off, the reality is the Coalition never changed and never abandoned is commitment to austerity — though the fiscal conservatives would prefer not to call a spade a spade. To rattle off a few headlines, there was the $280 million arts funding announcement that came all too late, mostly targets the top-end of the industry, and consists mostly of loans. The ABC, meanwhile, has suffered an $84 million cut — to which the Coalition have countered by innocently asking: “what cut?” Universities, meanwhile, have been given nothing while the price of arts degrees has been hiked because they’re not going to vote for the Coalition anyway. The CSIRO was revealed by the CPSU to be cutting 40 staff due to cuts while the public sector has taken another wage freeze. And at the same time Qantas has been laying off 6000 of its staff, it should be remembered the rules at Centrelink were not changed to allow those flight attendants who worked international routes to apply for support, meaning they missed out on Jobseeker.

I hate to say I saw it coming, but here’s me writing in the second issue of Raising Hell:

In fact, I have been mildly surprised at the commentary running in Australia right now about how the world has changed. What happens next will depend (as it always has) on who is in charge at the critical moment and that man right now is Scott Morrison. The Prime Minister has been clear that his federal Coalition government has no intention of sticking with their newfound embrace of socialism — even if these socialist policies are proving hugely popular. The safe bet is that when this is all over, the federal Coalition will go right back to running brutal austerity measures in an effort to drag us “back into the black”.

As we go forward, this is important to understand. The basic problem for Australia right now is that we, as a people are some of the most indebted on the planet (for anyone interested, I have just written a whole book about this subject) and many, according to one Commonwealth Bank study, couldn’t spare $500 in case of an emergency — like, say, a global pandemic. Cutting back to repay the national debt is the fastest way to engineer a recession — and at that point we’ll see what we really stand for. I have long argued Scott Morrison is the compromise candidate who everyone forgets they hate until the money stops flowing. Perhaps that moment is here.

Or perhaps not. The truth is I’m not there in the halls of parliament and I have a very different outlook. In the neighbourhood where I grew up, unemployment sat at 16 percent in the good times, 17 percent in the bad and the whole region has been in a localised recession for the last four decades. It’s probably fair to say I’ve been conditioned to look at things in a very different way than most, so it’s probably best I stick to the facts…

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 …

• ‘'Shell shock': Kangaroo Island struggles to recover amid bushfire grief and Covid-19’ (2020, The Guardian, 28 June).Most of my last fortnight has been spent working on this longread for The Guardian on how Kangaroo Island is doing six months after the bushfires. If the story I filed was 2500 words long, it still wasn’t enough to properly capture the intricate layers of hurt and the unique character of that community. The Guardian, kindly, allow me to go on a three-day research trip to KI which left me with, maybe, another 1000-to-2000 words of material including stories of people who lost everything. When it came time to actually sit down and put together that piece, I decided to leave the politicians out. I wanted to paint a respectful and intimate portrait of people on the ground who were living out the aftermath of a crisis. I had found a people who were proud, strong and still grieving after a disaster that was bigger than any which had come before and I wanted to do their story justice. Though it went unsaid, I wrote the story with the implicit understanding that these people are living on the frontiers of climate change and have largely been abandoned by a political leadership that sees advantage in insisting nothing is happening at all.

Image: Yacca plants sending up flowers after the bushfires on Kangaroo Island (Source: Royce Kurmelovs)

• ‘Coronial inquest into the death in custody of Aboriginal man to resume after a legal fight resolved’ (2020, NITV, 17 June).Here is a quick report I did on the latest developments involving the death in custody of Aboriginal man, Wayne Fella Morrison. Short version: proceedings will pick up again in August.

You Hate To See It

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

• Organised Money Hates The Reds More Than Trump

  If the US oligarchy is shameless, the richest Americans on the left-side of the spectrum have spent the last fortnight desperately trying to do in socialist Alexandria Oscar-Cortez by funneling donations to her challenger, Michelle Caruso-Cabrera. In a story first reported by The Financial Times, figures across Wall Street were handing Caruso-Cabrera $2800 checks each in an effort to be rid of Cortez and her troubling talk about a wealth tax. The donors included extremely-super-rich-guys like Stephen Schwarzman of Blackstone’s, a multinational private equity group, and David Solomon of Goldman Sachs — that’s right, The Vampire Squid which ripped off its own clients and helped plunge the world into the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. In the end, it was worth a damn. Oscar-Cortez won pre-selection with a 50 point lead and (USD) $10.5 million in donations. The average donation was $10.

• Troubled Times

  In South Australia, Sanjeev Gupta, the British billionaire industrialist who saved the Whyalla Steelworks as a white knight investor is going through a spot of financial trouble. Hit by a troubled global economy, the billionaire’s businesses have promised lay-offs across every operation to make savings. At the same time, his companies have gone quiet about plans he had been talking up in April last year to manufacture electric vehicles in Australia. His company won’t say when that’ll be happening, or even where but it is worth pointing out vacant industrial sites now dot the nation.

• Another One Bites The Dust.

  The usually media-shy legal profession was front-of-centre last week as allegations hit the papers that Dyson Heydon — a conservative apparatchik once described by Tony Abbott as the most “distinguished” man in the legal profession — was a serial sex-pest and predator who indecently-assaulted several associates and one current judge. The aristocratic Heydon now curiously finds himself joined by other less noble figures like US porn star Ron Jeremy who is also up on charges for sexual assault and rape. In the eyes of the law, at least both men are equal as their lawyers insist their clients are innocent and will be vindicated in court.

• It’s Nice To See How The Other Half Live

  If you were ever wondering what the world’s richest look for in a home, wonder no longer! In the relentless quest to drive retail sales up, up, up, the fine fellas at Enness Global have scoured Google Search Trends to find out what the world’s super-rich (or apparently those who aren’t rich enough to stop using Google) actually want in a luxury home, list them in a spread sheet and group them by the world’s six largest financial hubs. Curiously “security” was a concern everywhere except Monaco and Hong Kong…

  

• Need a Break?

  World weary? Sick of your dick bosses? Run-a-way SARS virus got you bummed because you’re aged 16-through-40 and at this rate may not live beyond sixty? Broiling oceans and burning forests mean you simply can’t forget the existential dread promised by climate change? Take a holiday! For a mere £3 million a week, you can relax like the bosses of those aforementioned dick bosses by taking the world’s most expensive superyacht (named: The Flying Fox) out for a spin. The boat — which looks like retail outlet for ex-soviet weaponry — comes complete with its own helipad, hospital, cinema, luxury spa complex and submarine. It sleeps 25 guests on top of the 54-person crew — including waiters and gym instructors — who will presumably curtsy meekly whenever you catch their gaze while lounging totally care-free totally unperturbed by the petty struggles of the masses.

  

  Image: And of course, The Flying Fox is German-made (Source: Boats International)

Failing Upward

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

• First, let’s give credit where credit is due. The chattering classes who make up the world of politics may not be good for much but they can, on occasion, muster a sophisticated media operation. And these dirt units can, every so often, be so well timed as to change the course of an election. But let us be clear here: Queensland LNP Senator Amanda Stoker getting busted for running a sock puppet account named “Mandy Jane” is not sophisticated. In fact, it is the exact opposite sophisticated — and that is the exact detail that landed her a mention in Failing Upward.
  
  For background, Stoker is a social and fiscal conservative who was elected in 2018 when she took the spot of George Brandis in the federal senate. You may remember her from more recent scandals such as that time she went on Skye News at the height of the pandemic and used the dying words of George Floyd, the black man murdered by police in the US, to rail against restrictions on movement.

  New lows for LNP - Senator Amanda Stoker accuses Qld Premier of being “the knee on the throat of the businesses of Qld, stopping them from breathing.” Who uses the words of a dying man to score a political point?

  — Senator Murray Watt (@MurrayWatt) 4:39 AM ∙ Jun 15, 2020

  Later, when called out for the obvious dog whistle, Stoker said she "“meant no offence”.

  This time around, she was caught out in a far more meaningless scandal by no less than the Courier Mail who noticed the ever-present figure of “Mandy” in the comments threads of the senator’s official Facebook page. Mandy —Amanda… whoever, routinely used the second account to act as her own hype man, “liking” her own posts, referring to herself in third person, shouting down her critics and suggesting more support for her ideas than there might otherwise be.

  When challenged by her constituents, the Senator (on her official account) referred to the story as a '“baseless attempt to make me seem less credible”.

  

  We leave you, the readers of Raising Hell, to decide on issues of credibility.

Good Reads, Good Times

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

• With news that the episodes of Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown is coming to Netflix, I’m re-upping this obituary which neatly captured his flaws and his humanism.

• I’ve also been keeping an eye on the conversation happening in the US around mask wearing, where the approach on the liberal-progressive side of politics was recently skewered by Amber A’Lee Frost writing in Damage for having its priorities all screwed up. Taking aim at the weird demands on the left side of politics that people should like wearing masks, Frost responding by pointing out mandatory-mask wearing has been a feature of every respectable dystopia from the trenches of WWI to The Last Of Us and so no, people don’t have to like them — even if they should wear them as a civic duty:

  Another said a friend called him “irresponsible” for complaining, and another said her boyfriend got angry with her for saying how much she hated them. Strangely, all the admonitions came from progressives and lefties, the sort of generally supportive therapy-culture inflected types who are always giving others (and to no less extent themselves) “permission to feel your feelings.” Now these same people think your feelings are self-indulgent—apparently abandoning their defense of narcissism and irrational contempt for stoicism. Before the crisis, their “tolerance” was always on display because “it’s ok to not be ok”; now they are severely intolerant of any emotional expression or sentiment that suggests that their idea of a utopia is actually a dystopia for the vast majority of well-adjusted people who are not pathologically anti-social.

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 turns out to be burying toxic waste beneath children’s 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! Download the encrypted message app Wickr Me onto your phone or laptop and contact us securely at my handle: rorok1990.

• If you’re lurking and like what you see, throw me a subscription to get my screeds straight to your inbox every second Tuesday — it’s free. If you like what I do and want to see me do more of it, throw me a paid subscription — it’s $5 a month or $50 a year. Are you skint? Or flush? Well, you can also pay what you feel I’m worth by setting your own yearly rate.

• And if you’ve come this far, consider supporting me further by picking up one of my books, or leaving a review or just tell a friend about Raising Hell!

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