Instead I bring you some thoughts on recent weeks in Australian politics. As regular readers will know, I was less than happy with the result of the last election (I expressed my expected deep disappointment before we even had a result, mainly using West Wing gifs in the post you can find by clicking here). The last few months I have had near daily reminders of my sadness at this result as the Abbott government developed exactly the kind of policy decisions that I had anticipated. The Abbott governments has done many things I disagree with profoundly but today I'm focusing on one negative and one (two sided) positive (yes I found one).
When I say that I focus on one negative, many of you will ask only one? As is abundantly clear from my blog, I live squarely on the left side of politics so you can take it as read at this point that I despise the government's policies on asylum seekers, the environment, education, media funding, health funding, etc etc...right down to and including the joke and mass waste of money that is reintroduction of knighthoods (I've spent a lot of the last week hoping the government was kidding on that). I could write blogs on all of these matters at LENGTH but I'm leaving that for now. My negative for the today focuses on something else...the big question of why did the centre go?
Now part of me would love it if everyone agreed with me politically but that would be boring and also I feel that sometimes we might need the right to pay the bills and make the trains run on time (theoretically at least, years of a Liberal government in NSW and we got a rebrand and are getting Opal cards but the trains and buses still often aren't on time). In the end the important thing is that political views are a continuum, otherwise it is just the middle to far left screaming at the middle to far right and vice versa. We need a political centre, those people who are slightly left or right who are usually left on social issues and conservative on financial matters. They are the buffer for the screams...they keep us balanced, no puns intended they get us centred. The problem is that the policies of the Abbott government have created a void. The left have got mad and often moved further left by the minute. Many of those in the centre have feel so disenfranchised that they have not so much shuffled but more sprinted to the left to join in on the anger. The right have got defensive and have moved further right. There is no centre... there is only the void, the darkness and the anger. Thanks to the T.E.A. party in particular, this has been an issue in the States for a few years now and so I bring you a clip from Aaron Sorkin's The Newsroom- the most famous clip from the first season possibly- to show someone who is centre right struggling to be just that...
The thing is there is not one thing in this speech I, as a leftie, disagree with on a basic level and it is fascinating to watch as the show attempts to create a centre right figure in a world where they increasingly don't exist. We even had them in the parliament too...back before the election...
Bring back the centre, please Tony! To quote Newsroom again, "Facts are the centre"!
So that is the negative....you may continue to be perplexed by my finding a positive but it is this. As was noted in V for Vendetta, "People shouldn't be afraid of their governments. Governments should be afraid of their people". Finally it seems the populace of Australia is waking up to this fact and is calling the government to account on their myriad irksome policies. This means that we are seeing a new form of activism and the rebirth of an old form of activism. Most people I know have political views and they hold them strongly but they are suddenly feeling that this prime ministerial term, or at the very least this year, is the time to take that politics to the streets and to actively engage in social justice. I have gone to more protests/events and signed more petitions and written more letters since this government came to power than I have in all of my previous years combo-ed, and I lived through and occasionally protested, signed petitions and wrote letters about the Howard government for 12 years (especially the last 7 of those years when I was at university). The breadth of the dissatisfaction with this government created a new form of activism, for Australia at least. People who disagree with the government would be unable to work if they were actively engaging in protesting all the policies they are dissatisfied with. The way to respond to this is the March in March protests. Now these protests were flawed and seemed to work on the base line that we could overthrow the government just by protesting (if only), but there is brilliance in the idea too. The March in March protest allowed people to voice their anger on many issues instead of just one (effective!) and it also allowed the protest to be large enough to get decent news cover global so it showed foreign governments that as the government tried to sell their policies overseas Australians weren't happy and it showed ex-pats that the people back home were angry. The second form of activism that I'm happy to see making a reappearance is the religious communities of the country getting vocal on social justice. The leaders of multiple faiths came (or sent people to speak for them) to a vigil I attended in Sydney and there was more solidarity across the common humanity represented there than I have ever seen. Multiple Christian social justice organisations have been started over the last few months to seek to help with the plight of refugees. It is both amazing to see the solidarity and AWESOME to see Christians living out the welcome that they are call to give outsiders.
There is my negative and my positive for this week. If people want the names of the Christian social justice groups that I've mentioned, comment and I'll give you them. Just to finish so you don't think I've forgotten another Newsroom clip that sums up some (those not all) of the anger I continue to have regarding the government's policies on refugees (wait for it as I'm pretty sure it is towards the end of the clip).
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