Treasurer Wayne Swan says Opposition Leader Tony Abbott will be left in a ‘‘policy cul-de-sac’’ when the carbon tax is introduced. Photo: Andrew Meares
Treasurer Wayne Swan has told his Labor colleagues that July 1 will be a ''game changer'' for the carbon tax.
Today Mr Swan - who is also acting Prime Minister while Julia Gillard is at the G20 meeting in Mexico - said that Opposition Leader Tony Abbott would be left in a ''policy cul-de-sac'' when the carbon tax is introduced and his argument that the sky will ''fall in'' is exposed.
Mr Abbott has argued that the carbon tax will ''hurt'' Australians from day one, even though the economic damage may take some time.
Mr Abbott told his Coalition colleagues today that the government was "worried and confused", and repeated his comment that the carbon tax was a "bad tax based on a lie". He said he would travel around Australia in the first fortnight of July to campaign against the carbon tax.
Nationals leader Warren Truss said every Australian industry would be less competitive from July 1 and predicted it would be a "turning point" in the Labor Party's decline.
Today, Mr Swan pointed to the compensation that had already been rolled out to millions of Australian pensioners and families, and advised caucus not to fall for simplistic arguments when explaining electricity price rises to their constituents.
Mr Swan said it wasn't just a result of the carbon tax, telling Labor MPs to look at the recent profits of electricity generators.
This comes as Families Minister Jenny Macklin called on state governments to protect carbon tax compensation to pensioners.
Earlier this month, the NSW government announced that public housing rents would increase.
Today, Ms Macklin said she was extremely concerned about the O'Farrell government's decision, arguing it was taking money from pensioners who live in public housing.
''We want this money to go to pensioners, we don't want it gobbled up by state governments,'' she told reporters in Canberra.
Compensation worth more than $700 million will be paid to pensioners before the carbon price starts on July 1.
During Labor's caucus meeting this morning, Ms Macklin put her Victorian and NSW colleagues on notice to watch out for public housing rent increases. The Schoolkids Bonus - announced in the May budget - will also be rolled out to 1.3 million families from tomorrow.
By chief parliamentary correspondent Simon Cullen, ABC Updated June 27, 2012, 3:08 am
The Coalition s campaign is launched just days before the tax comes into effect.
Labor is warning small businesses against displaying the Coalition's anti-carbon tax posters, saying they risk million-dollar fines if the information is found to be misleading.
The Coalition has sent the fliers to bakeries, butchers, dry cleaners and fruit shops just days before the carbon tax is due to take effect.
Labor is warning businesses to be "very, very careful" about being part of Opposition Leader Tony Abbott's campaign by displaying the posters in their shop fronts.
"Don't allow him to drag you into his cynical scare campaign because the consequences of that are very serious," Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury told Parliament.
"If you do mislead your customers, then you could face fines of up to $1.1 million."
[hmm .. David .. careful not to go to extremes, i don't expect any small business who displays the sign to be hit with that.]
But the Coalition has rejected suggestions their small business posters are misleading.
"The fliers do nothing more than explain the Government own modelling and policy," Opposition small business spokesman Bruce Billson said.
"This is just another example of the Gillard Government trying to intimidate small business to not pass on or talk about the impact of the carbon tax."
The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has set up a hotline for members of the public to make complaints about misleading carbon tax claims.
The tactic is a further sign that both sides of politics are preparing to ramp up their campaigning efforts surrounding the tax.
On Tuesday Mr Abbott told a meeting of Coalition MPs that he and other senior party figures would be campaigning "across the country", warning people the tax would push up the cost of living and threaten jobs.
Labor is also preparing a coordinated campaign this weekend to reassure the community about the effects of the tax.
Special Minister of State Gary Gray plans to visit the South Australian city of Whyalla on Sunday - a community Mr Abbott said would be "wiped off the map" because of the carbon pricing scheme.
Mr Abbott visited an RSPCA compound in Canberra on Tuesday to point out that "thousands" of charities would be worse off under the tax despite Government reassurances.
The head of the RSPCA in the ACT, Michael Linke, estimates the cost of the carbon tax will be somewhere between $5,000 and $10,000 per year for the local organisation.
"At this stage we're not expecting job losses here in Canberra," Mr Linke told reporters at Mr Abbott's media conference.
"There is absolutely no way that I'm going to compromise animal welfare, so we are going to have to shave costs in other areas."
The Government says more than $300 million is available to councils, community groups and charities to help offset the costs of the carbon tax.
Prime Minister Julia Gillard used Question Time to ridicule Mr Abbott's visit to the animal welfare charity.
"I can assure the Leader of the Opposition (that) on July 1, cats will still purr, dogs will still bark and the Australian economy will continue to get stronger," Ms Gillard told Parliament.
"Presumably tomorrow he will be out trying to scare Skippy the bush kangaroo, and the day after he'll be out trying to scare Puff the Magic Dragon, and so it will go on."
.. must try to remember to check on Whyalla in six months .. Oh! .. it appears a major union initially made that comment ..
========
Carbon tax 'will destroy' major centres such as Port Pirie and Whyalla
Mark Kenny and Catherine Hockley, Canberra April 19, 2011 12:00AM 121 comments
The OneSteel plant in Whyalla and the city itself would be at risk by the carbon tax, a union says. Picture: Sam Wundke
THE state's two key industrial cities will be "wiped off the map" by a carbon tax, a major union warns.
The tax would strip thousands of jobs from Whyalla and Port Pirie, the Australian Workers Union state secretary Wayne Hanson said.
The internal revolt from Labor's industrial heartland threatens not just the reform but the Government's survival.
Mr Hanson yesterday stepped up his union's opposition to the tax, claiming the future of both cities would be in serious doubt because both had economies based on the high-emission production of steel, iron ore and zinc.
"Goodbye. They will be off the map," he said.
His opposition to the tax appears to be a calculated manoeuvre by the AWU and follows last week's surprise about-face by the union's national secretary, Paul Howes, who declared the AWU's support would be conditional on absolutely no jobs being put at risk in the steel sector.
The Gillard Government's support base now appears to be fracturing, threatening the future of the Prime Minister's signature reform for this term.
With Whyalla's main employer, OneSteel, and fellow steelmaker BlueScope in Canberra today for talks with the Federal Government over the proposed tax, the fact that such an important union has broken ranks and is openly campaigning against the Government is highly significant.
The AWU, the oldest and most influential union in the ALP, is demanding either an outright exemption for the steel industry or a 100 per cent compensation package.
An estimated 3000 to 4000 jobs are dependent on OneSteel's Whyalla operations alone. The company produces some 1.3 million tonnes of steel per year from its operation there, accounting for around 20 per cent of the national industry.
Adding to Ms Gillard's woes, food manufacturers are now also seeking special treatment.
"We don't oppose a price on carbon, but industry is opposed to a tax that will increase the cost of food and grocery manufacturing in Australia, which is already under intense pressure," the Australian Food and Grocery Council's Kate Carnell said in a statement yesterday.
"Whatever decision is made, the Government must ensure that Australian-manufactured food and groceries will not be made less competitive."
The Government now faces a wall of opponents as groups across the political spectrum from employers and industry bodies, to unions and the welfare sector, seek exemptions or more compensation.
The unpopular tax, which the Government is struggling to sell - not least because it has not designed it yet - is also a factor driving Labor's support into the basement.
The latest Neilsen poll showed Labor at its lowest level in 15 years.
Mr Hanson said union members at Whyalla's OneSteel plant, and at Nyrstar's lead and zinc smelter at Port Pirie were rightly worried.
"It's ridiculous to consider (a carbon tax) when you don't have other countries that are prepared to adopt a common approach," he said.
"To allow your steel industry to disintegrate is just reckless. Should we be the trail-blazer?"
That argument appears to be straight out of Tony Abbott's anti-carbon tax playbook after he called for a people's revolt on the tax on the grounds it would destroy jobs and send investment off-shore.
However, the state Labor MP for Giles, Lyn Breuer, said the Federal Government understood what was at stake.
"Why would the Federal Government send an industry broke, put in jeopardy the jobs of thousands of workers, particularly in my area in Whyalla? ... I'm confident that we'll be able to make some sort of arrangement that will satisfy everyone," she said before acknowledging: "without the steel making operations at OneSteel, the town (Whyalla) would not have a future."
Carbon tax won't hurt much but we don't want to know
June 27, 2012 .. Gittins: Why is our carbon tax so high?
At $23 per tonne of carbon dioxide, Australia's carbon tax is the highest in the world. But what is the reason for this? Ross Gittins explains. .. VIDEO INSIDE ..
When psychologists study those sects that predict the end of the world on a certain day, they find the leaders rarely willing to admit they were wrong and their true believers rarely willing to admit they were duped.
Rather, the sect members find some dubious rationalisation. It was our prayers, brothers and sisters, that interceded for this wicked world and persuaded the Good Lord to stay his hand.
Since the day he won the leadership of the opposition on the strength of his willingness to switch from supporting to opposing putting a price on carbon, Tony Abbott has been predicting the carbon tax would wreak devastation on the economy, wrecking industries and destroying jobs.
Illustration: Kerrie Leishman
To be fair, running scare campaigns against new taxes has always been accepted as a legitimate tactic by our ethically challenged political class.
Labor was happy to exploit the fears of the ill-informed in its opportunist opposition to John Howard's ''great big new tax on everything'', the goods and services tax.
The biggest difference is that Abbott's misrepresentations have been so much more successful.
But with the carbon tax taking effect from Sunday, the moment of truth approaches. Soon enough it will become clear that, for consumers and the vast bulk of businesses, the dreaded carbon tax will have an effect much smaller than the GST.
The retail prices of electricity and gas will rise about 9 per cent, but the increases in other prices will be very small.
Whereas the GST increased the consumer price index 2.5 per cent, the carbon tax is expected to raise it just 0.7 per cent.
Whereas the GST is expected to raise revenue of $48 billion in the new financial year, the carbon tax is expected to raise about $4 billion in its first year and about $7 billion in subsequent years.
Julia Gillard and her supporters have been hoping against hope that, as soon as this reality dawns on a fearful public, as soon as the magnitude of the Liberals' hoax is revealed, voters will switch back to Labor in droves.
I don't see it happening. It rests on an unrealistic view of the lack of self-delusion in human nature.
Political parties and their cheerleaders don't like admitting they've been dishonest - even to themselves. And you and I don't like admitting we've allowed ourselves to be conned by unscrupulous politicians and shock jocks.
So we look for rationalisations, no matter how tenuous. And in these the carbon tax abounds. With the GST, the object of the exercise was clear and simple: to raise more revenue. With the carbon tax the object is far from clear to anyone who hasn't done their homework.
For a start, it's clear the object is not to raise revenue, because much of the revenue raised is being returned to households as ''compensation'' in the form of a small cut in income tax for most people and small increases in pensions, allowances and family benefits.
But if the object is simply to discourage people from using emissions-intensive goods and services - which it is - why give back to most people the extra tax they'll be paying?
Because economists believe that to change people's behaviour it's necessary only to change the relative prices they face: to raise the prices of fossil fuels (particularly electricity and gas) relative to all other prices. It's not necessary to leave people out of pocket by keeping the proceeds from the tax you used to bring about the change in relative prices.
You may say you can't see how such a relatively modest rise in the price of electricity could make much difference to households' use of power. That's probably true, though it may encourage people to buy a more energy-efficient model next time they're replacing an appliance.
Actually, the price increase is aimed mainly at big industrial users of energy and, more particularly, the generators of electricity.
If the industrial users can be induced to eliminate wasteful use of power, this will make a difference. And if power companies can be induced to replace their present generators with less emissions-intensive models when the time comes, this will make a big difference. Raising the price of electricity produced by burning fossil fuels helps make the price of power produced from renewable sources more competitive.
But if those objections to the tax don't wash, there are plenty more. One is that the tax of $23 per tonne of carbon dioxide is way too high. I discuss this one in my little video on the website.
Yet another objection is that, since there's nothing an individual country can do to have a significant effect on global emissions of greenhouse gases, in the absence of a binding agreement to act by all the major countries there's no point in us doing anything.
Trouble with that argument is it increases the likelihood of failure. Only if enough countries demonstrate their good faith by getting on with it is effective global action likely to eventuate. We should line up with the good guys, not the bad guys - and we're far from the only good guy.
But if all else fails - if you can't find any other argument to confirm the wisdom of your original conclusion the carbon tax is a terrible thing - just tell yourself that, when the vast majority of scientists specialising in the area warn us continued emissions of greenhouse gases will lead to devastating climate change, they've got it all wrong.
Economists are regularly criticised for worrying about gross domestic product (GDP) and similar measures. The classic statement of the case was by Robert F Kennedy: “Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things…
“Too much and too long, we seem to have surrendered community excellence and community values in the mere accumulation of material things. Our gross national product … if we should judge America by that – counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. It counts special locks for our doors and the jails for those who break them. It counts the destruction of our redwoods and the loss of our natural wonder in chaotic sprawl. It counts napalm and the cost of a nuclear warhead, and armoured cars for police who fight riots in our streets. It counts Whitman’s rifle and Speck’s knife, and the television programs which glorify violence in order to sell toys to our children.
“Yet the gross national product does not allow for the health of our children, the quality of their education, or the joy of their play. It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages; the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials. It measures neither our wit nor our courage; neither our wisdom nor our learning; neither our compassion nor our devotion to our country; it measures everything, in short, except that which makes life worthwhile. And it tells us everything about America except why we are proud that we are Americans.”
Much of the time this criticism is misplaced. For the purposes of medium-term macroeconomic management – that is, trying to maintain full employment and low inflation – it is important to measure how much economic activity is going in aggregate. If aggregate demand is weak, for example, it is sensible to stimulate the economy by cutting interest rates or increasing public spending. GDP is the best single measure of economic activity, precisely because it captures all output, taking existing market prices as the measure of value.
But in the longer term, the problems with GDP start to matter, even in relatively narrow issues of economic policy. In measuring economic performance (as opposed to activity), GDP suffers from three major drawbacks in this respect
* It’s gross – that is, depreciation of physical and natural capital is not deducted.
* It’s domestic – that is, it measures output produced in Australia, even though the resulting income may flow overseas[1].
* It’s a product – the ultimate aim of economic activity is not production in itself but the income it generates, which should be taken to include the economic value of leisure, household work and so on.
If we want to look at policies that promote our economic welfare in the long term, we need to start with another measure, produced by the same national accounts that give us GDP, but with the errors above fixed. That measure is net national income (NNI): the amount of income accruing to Australians, after replacing depreciated capital.
Ideally, depreciation should be extended to take account of depreciation of, or improvements to, natural capital such as Kennedy’s redwood forests. This is done to some extent in “satellite accounts” prepared by the Australian Bureau of Statistics.
More importantly, in considering economic welfare, we need to take account of the value of leisure and non-market work. This can be done crudely, by looking at net national income per hour worked as a measure of welfare. More sophisticated approaches, involving concepts of full income, have been developed, but not implemented in the national accounts.
Net national income per hour worked doesn’t measure the beauty of poetry or the strength of marriages, but it is a pretty good guide to the success or failure of economic policy in the long run. It’s this variable that we should be looking at when considering what kinds of economic reform policies need to be pursued.
There’s a lot to like about this report. The discussion is generally sensible, and there’s a good survey of economic policy options.
Unfortunately, the central recommendations are policies that may well raise GDP, while reducing economic welfare for Australians. The report states:
“But for now, only three reforms — tax mix reform, female and older people’s workforce participation — can change the game. They should be the core economic reform priorities for Australian governments.”
The report estimates that each of the reforms it considers could raise GDP by about $20-25 billion a year, or around 1.5 per cent.[2] The problem is that GDP is the wrong measure. This is most obvious in relation to female labour force participation, where the issues are briefly discussed. Increased female participation in the labour market is likely to arise primarily as a result of reductions in unpaid domestic work, most importantly childcare. The report argues that market work will be of greater economic value than the unpaid work it displaces. This is dubious, but even if it is correct, the gain will be a small fraction of the measured increase in GDP.
At least the report mentions the costs of increased female participation. By contrast, the extra output that might be obtained encouraging or forcing Australians to work longer is treated as a pure gain. The idea that, after 40 or more years of paid employment, workers might benefit more from retirement than from the extra earnings they could generate by staying on the job, is not even considered. Again, a correct evaluation would show a much smaller increase in GDP.
The final policy option is tax reform, with a primary focus on reducing corporate taxes. The argument here is similar to that of the Henry Review, which found that cutting corporate taxes would increase investment and therefore GDP.
But let’s take a stylised (though not totally unrealistic) example and see how it works out. Suppose a foreign company sets up a plant in Australia, bringing in $1 billion of its own capital equipment. Suppose further that the business is sufficiently capital-intensive that the impact on employment can be disregarded, and that any input materials used would otherwise have been exported unprocessed.
Suppose that the business yields the standard return on capital obtained in the international market, say 8 per cent. Then it’s easy to see that annual gross domestic product has increased by 8 per cent of $1 billion, or $80 million. How about net national income? The $80 million in capital income all flows overseas, so the impact on NNI is a big round zero.
Which measure should matter to Australian policymakers? The answer – pretty clearly – is that the presence or absence of the plant makes no difference to the economic welfare of anyone in Australia, so NNI gives the right answer and GDP the wrong one.
Of course, the stylised example isn’t perfectly accurate. Increased capital investment may lead to higher demand for labour and therefore to higher wages for Australians. But these indirect effects will be an order of magnitude smaller than the effects on GDP, and may be offset partially or completely (for example, if the increased demand is met by increasing immigration).
More subtly, the same kind of argument applies to the case for preferring taxes on consumption to taxes on investment. If we tax consumption, we are likely to increase savings and therefore have higher income in the future. But that isn’t necessarily a good thing. To assess the impact on economic welfare we need to take into account both the present costs (less consumption now) and the future benefits (more consumption later). Under standard assumptions, these two will approximately cancel out for low and moderate rates of income
There is plenty of room for debate about the best direction for Australian economic policy in the medium term. But as long as this question is framed in terms of maximising the growth rate of GDP, we are going to get the wrong answers.
John Quiggin is a Federation Fellow in Economics and Political Science, and author of Zombie Economics: How Dead Ideas still Walk among Us.
Footnotes
1. As the Kennedy quote indicates, discussion used to focus on measures of gross national product. The switch to GDP reflects the fact that, in macroeconomic terms, it doesn’t matter much whether economic activity produces income for Australians or for foreigners. This switch further illustrates the point that GDP is not designed as, and should not be used as a measure of economic welfare.
2. Note that even on the overstated estimates here, these “game-changers” taken together would only raise GDP by 4-5%, over a period of at least a decade. That’s only equivalent to a year or two of economic growth, and much less than the average year-to-year variation in household incomes. While it would certainly be good to raise incomes by 5%, relative to trend, over the next decade, it would scarcely represent a game-changing transformation of the Australian economy.
Dodgy Australian opposition anti-carbon tax campaign designed to blame ALL future electricity cost increase on the carbon tax.
Day one of the carbon tax [July 1, TODAY IS DAY 1 (auctd1)]
Greg Hunt ABC Environment 29 Jun 2012
Before you even make it to the shower, you'll be paying the carbon tax. Credit: Sam Davis (ABC)
ON SUNDAY 1 JULY, the carbon tax starts. In case you are wondering, it is an electricity tax, a gas tax and a food tax. It isn't however an environmental tax because our emissions go up, not down.
So, instead of waking up in a utopian green world where all that has been wrong with the world has been corrected, you'll simply wake up in a world where your power bill goes up. The Prime Minister may pretend that your power bill won't go up and your job remains secure. Or that her broken promise from the last election will have been forgotten. It's a world viewed through rose coloured glasses and not connected to the reality that families and businesses will be facing as they start paying for the world's biggest carbon tax.
You may sleep through the midnight change over to a carbon tax world, but that won't stop the new costs starting to gradually mount up and by the time you've had breakfast, you will have been slugged by the carbon tax a dozen times.
This is how it will work.
From midnight when you're in bed, your heating system is slugging you with a carbon tax.
When you get out of bed and turn on the light, you will be slugged the carbon tax.
When you shuffle into the shower, your gas hot water will be slugged by the carbon tax.
When you get out of the shower and dry your hair with the hair dryer, you will be slugged with the carbon tax.
When you turn on the kettle for a cup of coffee, you will be hit by the carbon tax.
If you like a sugar with your coffee, that's bad luck, Mackay Sugar is a big polluter.
If you have milk with your coffee, bad luck again, dairy companies are listed as big polluters.
And when you take the milk out of the refrigerator - you pay twice, for the electricity and the refrigerant.
If you enjoy a bit of Vegemite on your toast, that's bad luck again, Kraft is a big polluter.
When you cook the toast in the toaster, you pay the carbon tax on the electricity.
If you decide instead to have cereal, remember you are paying carbon tax on the milk and the electricity to heat up the milk in the microwave.
So when you've finished breakfast what's next? If you are planning to spend Sunday cleaning up the backyard and taking a load of rubbish to the tip, then once more you will be digging into your pocket to pay increased dump fees due to the carbon tax.
A trip to a shopping centre will also cost you. The major retailers have included a carbon tax clause into their leasing contracts so the cost is passed through. The shoe store, the hairdresser or the cafe will be paying more and so will you. The alternative is that they will have to cut costs elsewhere and that will mean staff.
Fed up by all of this and want to escape on a holiday? Well you will also pay on your airline ticket with Qantas estimating the cost of the carbon tax will be over $100 million. And forget taking to the water rather than the sky, the Spirit of Tasmania has also added a carbon tax levy to its tickets.
In the same way the Prime Minister said "there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead", she has also claimed it is just the big polluters who will pay. The first statement we now know was dishonest, and the second has repeated that behaviour. Every Australian will pay the carbon tax every day. And that is why the bill adds up to $36 billion over four years.
Note, nothing in Greg Hunt's dealt with other contributors to the future rise of the cost of electricity .. this one does .. and suggests the Gillard carbon tax will contribute 5%,
Australia needs the carbon tax
June 30, 2012
Opinion
'AFTER all,'' Scarlett O'Hara assures herself in the concluding scene of Gone with the Wind, ''tomorrow is another day''. It is advice Australians should take to heart, having been long assailed with dire forecasts that tomorrow, July 1, will not in fact be just another day. Instead, some would have us believe that it will be the beginning of our impoverishment and the end of civilisation as we know it, all because of the arrival of a Great Big New Tax. These claims are nonsense, uttered by people who think that if they repeat them often enough and without evidence, their fellow citizens will believe them to be true.
For the record, here are the relevant facts about the carbon tax, which begins tomorrow. Yes, it is a pricing scheme aimed at reducing emissions of greenhouse gases by shifting from coal-fired to cleaner forms of power generation. And yes, that will involve an increase in electricity prices. But the rise due to the tax will be only a small part of the total rise in household power prices, which is chiefly due to the cost of upgrading an ageing network - i.e. replacing poles and wires. In Victoria, for example, the average electricity bill has increased by 28 per cent over the past three years, and the Australian Energy Market Commission expects it to rise by another third over the next three. But the carbon price will be only a tiny portion of this: in two years prices will only be 5 per cent higher under the carbon tax than they would be without it.
That is the big picture. There are local variations, but they still don't make a blame-it-all-on-the-tax stance credible. Network upgrades are the main reason for power costs increasing across Australia, but the market commission says that in Victoria an even bigger cause is the charges imposed by electricity retailers, which have risen by 68 per cent since 2008. And, as The Age reported yesterday, a further complication is that energy consumption is now expected to fall in Australia even without the introduction of the carbon tax. The decline of manufacturing, consumer responses to rising power prices, including the take-up of rooftop solar panels, and a decrease in use of airconditioning systems because of recent mild summers have all changed energy use, and the Australian Energy Market Operator expects consumption to fall this year. That may make it easier for Australia to reach its greenhouse-gas emission target, but it could also slow necessary investment in new transmission networks and gas powerplants.
Does this mean the carbon tax isn't needed after all? That isn't true, either. The introduction of this tax resumes Australia's public policy response to what former prime minister Kevin Rudd referred to as the greatest moral challenge of our time. When Mr Rudd uttered that judgment, the Labor government was able to rely on broad popular support for an emissions trading system, something that the Howard government, too, had intended to introduce if it retained office in the 2007 election. That support has now dissipated, in large part because of the timid handling of the issue by Mr Rudd and his successor, Julia Gillard. Mr Rudd shelved the emissions-trading legislation, and Ms Gillard notoriously promised during the 2010 election campaign that there would be no carbon tax, only to abandon this promise in negotiating Greens support for her minority government. That has returned action to reduce carbon emissions to the centre of public policy, as it should be; the government's credibility, however, has taken a battering in the process.
Because of that battering, the government has become ever more defensive, and resisting the campaign of disinformation about the tax has become all the harder. But that is hardly reason to abandon the fight. On the contrary, the government must reinvigorate its defence of the tax, tomorrow and every other day.
AFL's [ link added for 'unusual?' sports fans .. http://www.afl.com.au/ .. lol ] larrikins live on
IT'S an image long cherished in the stories we tell about ourselves - the typical Aussie as a bit of a larrikin, rebellious but having a sense of fun, outspoken and direct, yet rarely mean or nasty. C.J. Dennis and Banjo Paterson celebrated his (and yes, it is a male image) laconic humour and took pleasure in the shock that accompanied his embrace of the limelight. Just when we thought our globalised culture had consigned larrikins to history along came David Danger, a passionate member of the Melbourne Football Club who, in the best tradition of larrikinism, made public his views on Tom Scully's defection to Greater Western Sydney.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ .. my insert .. Scully money protest just fun
CAROLINE WILSON June 27, 2012
WHEN David Danger went to the MCG on Sunday he was armed with his usual passion for the Melbourne Football Club and a stash of fake cash aimed at lampooning Tom Scully, the young player who had deserted his Demons.
He could not have predicted that waving a paper bag full of home-made notes - that he also had pinned to his jacket - almost had him evicted from the stadium and at the centre of a security and civil liberties storm.
The MCC and AFL yesterday claimed that MCG officials had tried to remove the Victoria Police employee from the ground after he had used obscene language, but yesterday Danger - seeing himself on television and being widely accused of having a foul mouth - moved to set the record straight.
''At no point did I use an obscenity,'' said the 16-year Melbourne member, who works in the Victoria Police infrastructure and IT department. ''I am not happy with the way I have been portrayed by the AFL spokesman Patrick Keane as well as the MCG spokesman Shane Brown.
''The whole idea that I was swearing seems to be a ruse or cover-up for the fact that I was waving Scully money and wearing a jacket covered in notes, and they actually wanted to quash that.
chuckle, first i've heard of it, too. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
It was all a bit of fun - a chance to express disgust at the role money plays in the game, making loyalty increasingly a concept of relevance only to supporters. The appropriately named Mr Danger took on the establishment and broke the stuffiness associated with the members enclosure by wearing a jacket adorned with home-made notes sporting images of Greater Western Sydney coach Kevin Sheedy, AFL chief Andrew Demetriou and Tom Scully himself, and waving a bag of the ''money''. In a staggering development - some might even call it ''un-Australian'' - this almost had him evicted from the stadium.
The overreaction by security officers and some football officials was astounding. C.J. Dennis [see reply] would have had great fun with this comment from a players' agent: ''To some this was comical, witty at best, but for the future of our game it was alarming. These actions highlight the detachment the average fan has with the direction our game is headed.'' The language is 21st century business-speak but the sentiment echoed the reaction to C.J. Dennis's Larrikin Luke, who knew all about ''winning from all respectable folk a very respectable frown''
..and other tidbits of 'now' Australian politics .. note: at this time i don't know if the video will change ..
For those interested it is my hope to kinda keep in touch with some of the political, economic and social repercussions in Australia of the Julia Gillard carbon tax introduced i Australia July 1 2012 .
Oh .. it just occurred to me that it's fair to say the carbon tax legislation is a result of compromise, with unhappy people and fierce critics on both sides. Kinda like President Obama's Affordable Care Act he, with some immediate effect, signed into being, March 23, 2010.
Time is right for Australian carbon tax, says Gillard
Updated June 30, 2012 19:31:26
A carbon tax seeks to limit the burning of polluting fossil fuels by putting a higher price on their use. (JodieV, file photo: User submitted via ABC Contribute)
On the eve of Australia's introduction of a carbon tax to control greenhouse emissions, Prime Minister Julia Gillard says the impost is an important reform at the right time.
Australia will join a number of other countries with taxes aimed at putting a price on the carbon contained in hydrocarbon fuels such as coal, petroleum and natural gas.
The tax will be charged at $A23 a tonne of emissions on 294 organisations that emit 25,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide or the equivalent in greenhouse gases.
More than seven million Australians will receive a tax cut as compensation for any cost of living increases.
Ms Gillard said she is confident many households will be better off after the July 1 introduction of the carbon tax.
Meeting voters in Melbourne at the weekend, she said: "They will be in a position from tomorrow to judge for themselves the claims that have been made to see what carbon pricing really does mean."
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [insert .. it's a good video which raises many ???? .. about voting systems, parliamentary vs presidential vs other systems .. could the Greens ever come to have as great an influence under the system in the USA? .. ? .. there is much chat of damn no 3rd party influence in the USA .. oops, there has been, the TeaParty.
one other ? from in there .. is it fair to class the 'there will be no carbon tax...' a lie? .. if changed circumstances render the original 'lie' a virtual impossibility .. perhaps, courageous and astute politicians instead of saying .. "i will"', or, "there will be no" .. during almost interminablein election campaigns in some countries, could consider 'i will do my very best to...' .. or .. 'the position today is that 'there will be no'... .. would that harm their electoral chances? .. they would be open to the charge of not taking a position .. to which the reply would be, circumstances change .. lol .. anyway, i reckon there would be less talk of lies, which would be a plus ..] ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Australians will "see the change it means for a clean energy future, and also to see for their household budgets, what tax cuts mean, what increased family payments mean, and what pension increases mean."
Opposition leader Tony Abbott pledged to dismantle the carbon tax if he wins government.
[THINK ROMNEY]
He was addressing the Liberal Party federal council meeting, also in the southern city.
He said the next election will be a referendum on the tax.
Countries with a carbon or energy tax or similar at present include India, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Ireland, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovenia, Sweden, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. Some American states also have a carbon tax.
'Biggest emitter'
The author of the Australian Government's climate change review, Professor Ross Garnaut, says from Sunday Australia will be doing its fair share to cut global emissions.
Professor Garnaut says the tax is Australia's first step towards an emissions trading scheme.
"With the package . . . Australia starts to catch up with the average of developed countries," he said.
"Lots of countries have gone a lot further than us.
"We are by far the biggest emitter of carbon dioxide by head of population among the developed countries."
I truly hope that those about the world in opposition to climate change legislation are able to find some small solace in an understanding the result will be that millions of humans, including many great- and great-grand-children of theirs, will live in cleaner environments.
.. and that less are addicted to nicotine .. drag ..
"The growing population of immigrants in Greece — about 800,000 are registered, and an estimated 350,000 or more are in the country illegally — adds to the anxieties of many Greeks, who are seeing the government’s once-generous social spending evaporate. They complain that the foreign residents are depriving them of jobs and threatening the national identity."
Thomas Keneally considers the capaciousness of the garden of our national identity
It is a truism that the people most certain about national identity are often the ones who draw its boundaries most narrowly, and who are moved to deplore whatever they see as lying outside those boundaries. But we must talk primarily about what we believe as a community, and not what we think we should believe. To try seriously to define identity is not primarily an exercise in morality or social improvement.
Former immigration minister Kevin Andrews
~~~~~~~~~~ Insert: Haneef to Stay in Custody in Australia Mon.July 16, 2007 2:39:17 AM, BRISBANE, Australia(AP)
[...]
"I reasonably suspect that he has, or has had, an association with persons engaged in criminal activity, namely terrorism, in the U.K.," Andrews told reporters in Canberra, the national capital. "That's the basis on which I have made this decision." http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=21257174 .. and reply .. Haneef case descends into farce .. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/replies.aspx?msg=21257174 .. Andrews, a conservative troglodyte had nothing against Dr. Haneef, except his own prejudices and his perceived political needs. ~~~~~~~~~~
was certain about national identity in 2007, when he criticised the Sudanese community. I am attracted to the Andrews statement because I have travelled in the Sudan during the years of oppression and chaotic civil war, which have not ended despite the Peace Agreement of 2005.
Speaking of Sudanese immigrants, Andrews said, ‘Some groups don’t seem to be settling and adjusting into the Australian way of life as quickly as we would hope.’ It is a cry that has been heard throughout Australian history, and no more so than in the past two decades. He accused the refugees of refusing to embrace the Australian way because of their ‘race-based gangs, altercations between various groups from Africa … Tension within families.’ It is true, however, that he was unable to back his claims with any figures. Nor did he mention any important aspects of advances in adaptation to Australia that Sudanese immigrants might have made that lay outside his certainties of identity.
And in part, too, he was hiding his department’s light under a bushel to the extent that Australia had shown compassion in taking its share of Sudanese refugees and thus rescuing them from camps like Kakuma in Kenya,
of which his own department’s Sudanese Community Profile of 2007 reported, ‘There is frequent violence in the camp. Regular clashes occur among residents, many of them armed … Sexual assault is common. Children may have been born in the camps and are unfamiliar with any other lifestyle.’ Nor did he mention that given this unspeakable background, the Sudanese Association of Australia and similar bodies do what they can to bridge the gulf of experience between, on one hand, civil war and what can rightly be called ethnic cleansing by the Sudanese government and, on the other, a settled Australian life. The association’s aims include ‘to do all lawful things, in the best interests of the community’. In 2007 it signed a memorandum of agreement with Victoria Police, with the obvious aim of guiding Sudanese youth through the criminal justice system, but also of helping with law and order issues. It is not as if, as a community, they aren’t trying.
There has been no lack of commentators who have in the past two decades uttered very nearly the same sentences as Kevin Andrews about other Australian immigrant groups, particularly groups from countries such as Vietnam and Lebanon. These are nations where law and order has, as in the Sudan, broken down for long and savage periods.
It is true that the phases of adjustment of new arrivals to Australia have never been without some bemusement from established Australians and the arrivals both. These adjustments often take place far from the fashionable suburbs and undeniably put as much pressure on the long-settled locals as on the newcomers. They impose a temporary cultural bewilderment on those who consider themselves the true Australians, and call forth from them what has been till now a blessedly temporary hostility. But the locals also frequently offer, individually and through organisations, fraternal support as well. And the people who draw identity narrowly often depict the immigrant group as making no attempt to find their place in society. All is decency and Australianness on this side of the narrowly drawn fence, and ill-will on the other. I argue though that this mutual coming-to-terms is not a departure from the Australian way of life. It is and has been the Australian way of life for most of my existence. If one lives long enough, one sees that what at first we deplore, we end by celebrating, and what we don’t want a bar of becomes that of which we boast.
I clearly remember immigrants I encountered as a child, an era in which Greeks and Italians were often referred to charmingly as ‘the Abos of southern Europe’. A family from the particular region of southern Europe, a region hard-soiled and harrowed with poverty, moved in next door to us in Homebush, New South Wales. We were somewhat astonished to discover that, as they reasonably enough had done on the hard earth they came from, they used their night soil as fertiliser for their garden. Being generous, they offered my mother some of the crop of their tomatoes, which were rich and plump. How’s that for cultural bewilderment? My mother was a progressive woman and accepted the gift with thanks. I cannot remember if we ate them or not. I know as well that both the daughters of that family went to university. Indeed, cultural accommodation on both sides has been vastly helped in my lifetime by equality of opportunity, another plank of Australian identity. We still believe that that equality exists. Many assert it does, and one hopes it does, though the figures themselves are not necessarily hopeful. And as we all know, equality of opportunity has been a hard struggle for the Aboriginal community and, is still being painfully worked out, with the balance of pain very unequal indeed.
But I argue that it is part of Australian identity to adjust to and come to treasure the stranger, ~~~~~~~~~~ Insert: White supremacists can't handle the changing demographics in the U.S. - much like teabaggers. http://investorshub.advfn.com/boards/read_msg.aspx?message_id=78281504 ~~~~~~~~~~ whereas many commentators consider distrust a valid statement of the same identity. While politicians and civic leaders, after all, often congratulate us on tolerance, at the same time there is that in us that likes to see Australia as a hermetically sealed entity, which even a few hundred hapless creatures on a leaky boat can puncture and violate. Another childhood story arises, as it always does when you’re my age. From the unforgettable first six months of 1942, I have never forgotten two particular Norman Lindsay covers for the Bulletin. One was of a rock- jawed digger with rifle ready to parry the advance of Japanese militarism down the archipelagos of South-East Asia, and quite up to the job. The other was of Australia as a threatened maiden (very well endowed, according to the Lindsay tradition) facing a leering Japanese soldier. I believe that it is contradictorily part of Australian identity to show a robust face to the world when it accords with our perception of events and to be the threatened maiden when it does not. I believe we became very much the threatened maiden during the Tampa incident on 2001,
~~~~~~~~~~ Insert: In August 2001, the Howard Government of Australia refused permission for the Norwegian freighter MV Tampa, carrying 438 rescued Afghans from a distressed fishing vessel in international waters, to enter Australian waters. This triggered an Australian political controversy in the lead up to a federal election, and a diplomatic dispute between Australia and Norway. .. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tampa_affair ~~~~~~~~~~
when our imaginations were routed by the idea that we might be invaded by 438 powerless and disoriented Afghans whose un-Australian behaviour was emphasised for our benefit by the then prime minister, John Howard, and whose invasion might therefore be followed by hordes more.
So we are viscerally attracted to what we see as our stable identity, our enclosed garden of values. Indeed, we were promised an Australian garden at the time of Federation. It was to be a Caucasian garden, partially based on misreadings of Darwinism, on the science of phrenology, on the superiority of the Bible-based Christianity to other creeds, and a conscientiously held belief that intermarriage between Europeans and Asians was miscegenation, and so destructive of culture. It was also based on the shared value of keeping ‘coolie labour’ out of Australia. ‘The unity of Australia is nothing,’ said the remarkable Alfred Deakin, ‘if that does not imply a united race. A united race means not only that its members can intermix, intermarry and associate without degradation on either side, but implies one inspired by the same ideas, and an aspiration towards the same ideals … a people qualified to live under the constitution.’ Deakin, first federal attorney-general, the first speaker in the Immigration Restriction Bill debate in 1901, declared that the Commonwealth did not want to offend foreigners, and did not himself argue racial superiority. It was purely a matter of protecting the equity of white Australians in their country. He confessed an intellectual interest in Buddhism and Hinduism, but he wanted to avoid for Australians the poverty he had seen in India.
Whiteness was an essential part of the Australian utopia, and in its name, Philippinos, Chinese and Japanese and the Pacific Islanders generally called Kanakas were about to be expelled from Australia by the proposed Act, or else their lives made so restrictive as to drive them out.
Deakin’s ideal Australia was Protectionist too, not globalised. His Australia would be one in which Protection created adequate wealth to justify fair wages. The harbingers of the utopia were tariffs, the ‘frugal comfort’ of the basic wage arising from the Harvester case of 1907, the pension, the franchise for women and other progressive reforms.
In our federal garden, the flora and fauna are familiar, the pathways are orderly, we have certainty as to where they will lead. People queue, according to enlightened traditions inherited from northern Europe, for water and for food, and they vacate seats on the benches in an orderly manner when their turn is up. But clamorous at the gate are people who, we believe, understand none of that, who not know the rules of the park and, we fear, harbour an active contempt for them. The fact that in the past many of those admitted from the great mass outside have not shown this contempt does not count in our fear of the people outside the gate at this very moment.
In my lifetime I have seen identity, the value of the enclosed garden, called up to resist the entry of Italians and Greeks because of their un-Australian manners; eastern Europeans because of their inscrutable languages and their hunger for success; Chinese because they broke the ethnic tapestry of Australia; Serbs and Croats because they hated each other; Vietnamese because they made gangs; Muslims because they are not only members of gangs but jihadists and, besides, wear the hijab. And so on. At every turn the garden has proven to be more capacious and adaptable than we thought it could be. The walls that seemed so solid and immutable actually shift. It is as if they were built of paper, not of stone. But, also at every turn, from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first, the rhetoric of exclusion has been persistent. It has always been interchangeable in the sense that if a particular statement of concern about perceived ethnic threat were deprived of its dateline, we would have a hard time saying in what era it was uttered.
We are familiar with Pauline Hanson’s condemnation of Asians: ‘they have their own culture and religion, form ghettos and do not assimilate’.
But in her maiden speech she also quoted a famous Australian as saying, ‘Do we want or need any of these people here? I am one red-blooded Australian who says no and who speaks for 90 per cent of Australians.’ That was Arthur Calwell, [ see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Calwell ] Labor Party leader, some forty-five to fifty years before Hanson. And who is being talked about in the following case? ‘The —— settlers of North Queensland are generally of an undesirable type and do not make good settlers … consideration should be given immediately to the racial stock of the immigrant.’ The missing word is ‘Greek’, and the statement is that of Thomas Ferry, commissioner of the 1925 Queensland Royal Commission on Numbers of Aliens in North Queensland. Endless instances of such repetitive rhetoric could be given.
There is no doubt that even now, in this century, in our struggles with the rawness and newness of events, we often cling to the Federation garden as if it did contain all our identity, hermetically sealed. But if one looks at the general results of immigration, and the sometimes total, the sometimes only partial triumph of necessity and goodwill over fear, an aphorism of art critic Robert Hughes comes to mind. Hughes wrote, ‘A culture raised on immigration cannot escape feelings of alien-ness and must transcend them in two possible ways: by concentration on “identity”, origins and the past, or by faith in newness as a value in itself.’ In the latter spirit, such programs as the Good Neighbour schemes of the 1940s and the contemporary Rural Australians for Refugees show a faith in newness as a value. And to underscore the point, they show that faith in the new is part of Australian identity too.
No-one is saying that Australian acceptance is a perfect virtue, but as a social force it has had notable successes. Contrary to the idea of total triumph, of course, one has to mention the Cronulla riots, the recorded cries of ‘Go home, Lebs!’, the replies of ‘These skippy Aussies want war’, and the associated violence. The tabloids seemed to salivate at the possibility of days of mayhem, anticipating perhaps the months that the very differently based French race riots had run in 2005–06. After Cronulla, there were days of unrest and mutual insults and even a display of firearms, fortunately not fired, outside the Lakemba Mosque where the Imam called for peace. The odious thunderbolts of shock jocks lit the sky. Apart from the police lockdown of the beach community, leaders from both sides, including such core Australian bodies as Lifesaving Australia, worked to settle the matter peaceably.
Australian tolerance on the Snowy River Scheme in the 1950s was described in the following terms by the journalist and novelist-to-be George Johnson: ‘The average man … is willing to accept the migrant if he brings with him no threat to the standard of living and a readiness to become a “fair dinkum Aussie”.’ Admittedly, the term ‘fair dinkum Aussie’ begs the question. As one commentator said, the demand that newcomers become fair dinkum tout de suite ‘dehumanised migrants … Its fundamental implication was that migrants were at best inferior and undesirable, and at worst, positively dangerous and threatening.’ Well, there is some truth to that, but Johnson does seem to have summed up a proposition that has operated in the relationships between established Australians and newcomers throughout the major shocks of immigration to Australia since the Second World War.
Many migrants claim that under that kind of rough contract, and under broader gestures of welcome as well, they soon enough felt acceptance more than condescension. I would say that a ‘functional tolerance’, a pragmatic, sometimes rough-handed, sometimes grudging tolerance, has produced in Australia—and in world terms—fairly speedy acceptance of new groups. To deny that is to deny the assertion of many a happily settled immigrant. It is to deny the goodwill, for example, of Dr Stepan Kerkyasharian, speaking in Yass last Australia Day: ‘As a migrant of Armenian heritage, I feel great pride to have been accepted into this nation. And I am not alone.’ Functional tolerance means that though there may be for a generation a notable concentration of an immigrant group in certain suburbs, classic ghettos of the kind found in France or Germany do not exist. And there exists in Australia a remarkably easy progress to citizenship once residence is achieved— always admitting that achieving residence is the hard task.
This kind of acceptance of the recently arrived—pragmatic, sometimes patronising—is often less hypocritical than the oratorical but underachieving tolerance of other societies. The late Edek Korn of Sydney, a Schindler survivor, is simply one of the immigrants I have known to whom tolerance was one of the most important aspects of Australian identity. But it was sometimes of a backhanded nature. Something of a sage, Korn told me, ‘Australians are funny people. When they don’t know you and don’t like you, they call you a wog bastard. But when they get to know and like you they call you a wog bastard.’ He told me too that his wife came home in a state of amazement from her first Australian job in a factory. ‘They hate the Polish Catholics as much as they hate Polish Jews.’ To Leosia Korn it was equality at last.
Again, this is not to deny that many, and perhaps most, newcomers have had wounding and savage words flung at them on their way into the Australian garden, within which the level of urbanity fluctuates somewhat. An Australian-born woman of Malaysian Chinese background once told me that while shopping in the Hanson days of the later 1990s, she was shouted at and advised to go home. It is a safe bet that a woman in the hijab has been abused somewhere today while taking her children to or from school.
Not unrelated to our other beliefs in identity, it was always assumed by Australians that anti-authoritarianism was a potent part of our character, an index of our egalitarian tradition. But that has now been de-emphasised in historiography. Russel Ward, the author of The Australian Legend, has been attacked almost as much as, for varying reasons, Geoffrey Blainey and Manning Clark, for such arguments as that the Australian ‘believes that Jack is not only as good as his master, but is probably a good deal better, and so he is a knocker of eminent people … He is fiercely an independent person who hates officiousness and authority.’ Despite all, there is some truth there, for other visitors from Anthony Trollope to James Michener mentioned Australian manners of egalitarianism and mockery of authority.
Mockery of the pompous is often seen as an inheritance of bushrangers and the world wars. An Australian stretcher bearer whose journal I was reading recently wrote, ‘Sensation in Cairo yesterday. An Australian saluted an officer.’ The historian C.E.W. Bean said that officers quickly discovered that to set certain places out of bounds for the recruits of 1914–15 simply provoked the recruits to enter those areas. I was raised on my father’s Second World War stories of how he and his friends would borrow officers’ uniforms so that they could go to the officers-only bar of Shepheard’s Hotel. If there happened to be officers from the best British regiments drinking there, then the chance to outrage them was considered a bargain. We’d like to think that in this century we retain some of that larrikinism and capacity for mockery in our identity portfolio. Reasonably we are not so keen on anti-authoritarianism when it involves the invasion of suburban parties and attacks on police vehicles sent to impose authority. We ought to remember that when the word ‘larrikin’ was first applied to the Australian urban working-class, it was meant to be an unflattering word.
We are in fact more susceptible to authority than the stories I just told would indicate. Even a child must be detained in an immigration centre if his parents or he seek asylum. It is true that Prime Minister Gillard’s policy is not to put children behind heavy-security razor-wire for years, as happened in previous regimes. But even in February 2010 there were more than a thousand children under eighteen years detained in various immigration detention centres, of whom nearly 400 were unaccompanied children. And the Prime Minister had not, at the time of writing this, ruled out the possibility that children and pregnant women will be sent to Malaysia under her new scheme. This should be authoritarian enough for everyone. Jump the queue at the ice-cream stand and you’ll get what’s coming to you, even if you’re a kid. The instances of authoritarianism towards Aboriginals, from sequestering of wages and child kidnapping, are numberless.
And now authoritarianism is set to have a good century. Already, with opposition stated only by a few brave commentators, substantial intrusions into our rights of free expression, habeas corpus and legal representation have been passed by the federal houses in the name of anti-terror. This was accomplished with barely a bleat from the federal opposition of the day. Those who did try to say something were attacked as abettors of Osama bin Laden. The auguries for more authoritarian legislation in this century are splendid, and our gestures of anti-authoritarianism may be ignored and may prove to have dimmed.
The aspect of identity that fascinates, teases and comforts me above all is the enduring utopian view of Australia that rose in the late nineteenth century. There are a number of Utopian writers of the period who still resonate and whose vision of Australia is not unlike ours. ‘Australia’, Bernard O’Dowd’s famous poem first published in the Bulletin and beloved by progressive politicians, famously raised the issue of whether Australia would be ‘a drift Sargasso, where the West / In halcyon calm rebuilds her fatal nest?’ (that is, a repeat of all the Old World injustices). Or would it be the ‘Delos of a coming Sun-God’s race?’ The culture of the surf, which took over Australia almost immediately after Federation, reinforced O’Dowd’s sentiments about the Sun-God’s race. John Farrell, another Bulletin poet, wrote of Australia:
*He [God] wrought her perfect, in a happy clime And held her worthiest, and bade her wait Serene on her lone couch inviolate The heightened manhood of a later time. *
That ‘heightened manhood’ was to be the Australian, unique among humankind, the Sun-God’s child. ‘The pioneers’, said Farrell, ‘reared a sunnier England, where the pain / Of bitter yesterdays might not arise …’
In the mid 1890s, before she went to Paraguay and the New Australia that William Lane tried to build in the jungle, the young schoolteacher Mary Cameron, the future Dame Mary Gilmore, was escorted by Henry Lawson to see the misery of Sydney slums. ‘He used to take me out to see the wrong things, the things repressive of the rights of Australia; the things like a blot upon her and which prevented her being herself. The low-wage workers … underground cellars lit only by a grating in the street, the huddled houses … the pale seamstresses … the neglected children of the Quay and elsewhere.’ It is significant that young Mary saw Australia’s destiny as a blessed place, and that it was only ‘the things repressive of the rights of Australia’ and ‘the things which prevented her being herself’ that stood in the way.
To some, Federation represented the culmination and basis for Utopian Australia. A clergyman at All Souls Anglican church in Leichhardt in 1898 foresaw federated Australia as ‘a great and magnificent country … a kind of Paradise for the world, the envy of the nations’. It was Sir Henry Parkes of the 1891 convention, at which a provisional constitution was hammered out, who proposed the utopian name ‘Commonwealth’ for the ultimate proposed federation. The word, say Quick and Garran, ‘did more to arrest the public attention and kindle the public imagination than any other word in the English language could have done … It stands today for the type and the ideal of Australian nationhood.’ Though in the minds of many of the delegates to the Constitutional Convention, Commonwealth had more to do with the equitable sharing out of the federal customs revenue, it also resonated in the minds of radicals such as Kingston from South Australia and of visionaries such as Deakin as a dream of just terms in a society.
In the 1890s depression, as in the depression of the 1930s, the working man’s paradise, the Commonwealth proposed by Parkes and the ‘sunnier England’ invoked by Farrell, came under acute pressure. Yet the idea that most sufferings and indignities were somehow un-Australian but were ‘things that prevented Australia from being her true self’ remained very strong. I know this from the atmosphere in which I grew up in a bush infancy and a suburban boyhood.
If one goes forward some decades from Federation to a summer Saturday afternoon, well described in David Day’s biography John Curtin, when Japanese landing craft lay off Malaya and the Japanese fleet was fuelling its aircraft for a historic attack on Hawaii, we find an atheist and socialist prime minister named John Curtin attending the rededication of the Presbyterian church near Canberra by his clerical friend the Reverend Harrison. On that afternoon Curtin saw the faces of Presbyterians who had settled the plains of Canberra in the nineteenth century, and he felt stirring in him the concept that this was a race too precious to be obliterated by the tide of Asian militarism.
This powerful assumption that Australia was precious because it was a unique social experiment, a social experiment that could easily be borne away by internal malice or external threat, was a concept in which I and others of my generation were raised by parents who did not, at first sight, have a vast stake in Australian privilege. My actions have been influenced, when they rise at least for a few moments above my natural apathy, by the old proposition that special concepts of fairness operated here. My parents were not fools. They were aware of profiteering when they saw it, and the fact that the basic wage was very basic indeed unless margins for skill and competence were added. But like Mary Gilmore they looked upon the wrongs as un-Australian and the rights as Australian. The belief was as powerful in them as it had been in Gilmore when she saw in slums and workshops ‘the things repressive of the rights of Australia; the things like a blot upon her and which prevented her being herself’.
These days two major Federationist boasts, Protection and White Australia, are far gone. And yet the utopian impulse remains. The present prime minister believes as strongly in the specialness of Australia as nineteenth-century utopians did, and so believes too in the special nature of Australians themselves. To celebrate Australia Day, Julia Gillard concentrated on the natural catastrophes of last year. ‘Some people said it is incredible, the generosity of strangers. But they weren’t strangers really. They were Australians.’ She quoted the historian Gavan Dawes, who wrote of Japanese prisoner of war camps that even while starving, the national groups of prisoners ‘remained inextinguishably American, Australian, British. The Americans were the great individualists of the camps. The British clung onto their class structure like bulldogs. And the Australians kept trying to construct little male-bonded welfare states.’ Julia Gillard says that now we have moved beyond ‘simply male bonding’ and ‘welfare states’, but the special ethos of solidarity among Australians remains. It was there in the 1940s, and is here in the twenty-first century in events such as the floods. Indeed the floods provided all of us with examples of Australian fraternity. The question of whether this was peculiarly an Australian brand of goodwill or a goodwill innate in Homo sapiens sapiens seems merely a quibble in the face of what people did voluntarily in Queensland.
In this century, though, is the invocation of utopian brotherhood a delusion to be pitied? Is it mere mythology (if mythology can be mere), is it mythology in the modern and regrettable misusage by which the word is a synonym for a lie? I believe that the utopian myths can be a positive force in Australia, especially now, to help guarantee some minimum standards of dignity. They can also be a cover for a cynical claim that our society is fairer and more equitable than it is. But as frequently as that expectation of the fair go might have been thwarted in this century, do we want it to vanish?
At the end of the recent Queensland floods, a householder who had believed himself covered for the ruin of his house by floodwater found that his insurance policy failed, through a technicality, to protect him. He told an ABC interviewer, ‘I mean, this is Australia, isn’t it?’ He, like the rest of us, assumes that special arrangements of fairness, and treatment along sensible, practical, fraternal lines, are part of the Australian fabric and inheritance. He is no doubt cruelly cured of that illusion now. Yet our continuing and incurable belief in millennial Eden, in Commonwealth and uncommon institutions, remains. When we reach for the fair go, however, are we reaching for a chimera. Professor Belinda Probert writes, ‘Looking back from 2001, it is hard to know which is more remarkable: the stability of the class compromise achieved at Federation or the speed with which it has unravelled over the past twenty years.’
The OECD defines poverty as 40 per cent of the median household income.On this level the compact lingers on with Australian families on welfare being paid nearly 50 per cent of that amount, in part through Bob Hawke’s much mocked but socially effective No Australian Child Shall Live in Poverty program. This compares to 20 per cent of median household income in the United States. It is in neither case an arrangement I would want to live under, but at least the fair go proposition is arguably not quite dead in this case. On a closer look though, the figures are skewed by other factors. The Brotherhood of St Laurence released an oft-quoted and frightening report on Australian equality in 2005–06. Based on the figures of the Bureau of Statistics, it found that the wealthiest 20 per cent of families owned 61 per cent of household wealth,
~~~~~~~~~~ 'nother: so in 2005-06 in Australia the bottom 80% owned 39%, in comparison to ..
Table 1: Distribution of net worth and financial wealth in the United States, 1983-2007
and the poorest 20 per cent held 1 per cent. Four and a half million people lived in households whose gross income was less than $400 a week. Now, as in Lawson’s day, we can assert that: ‘They lie, the men who tell us for reasons of their own / That want is here a stranger, and that misery’s unknown.’
It is true that all of the social democracies are suffering from the pressures which some blame on the economic fundamentalism that produced the GFC, some on globalisation, others both. But in the face of the economic orthodoxy that did bring us the GFC, which still, unrepentant and unrenounced, commands economic decision-making on this planet, and under the similarly unapologetic authority of ratings agencies before which governments quake, can the dream of social uniqueness remain a core belief of the majority of Australians? And can it be invoked by the Australia Day speakers as confidently and validly as it has been in the past?
There are other fascinating aspects of our identity I could look at—the impact of Australia’s un-European milieu on us or the impact of dryness that is so brilliantly recounted in Michael Cathcart’s history of Australia, The Water Dreamers. Even in that regard there has been a shift in my lifetime from the Dead Heart, Lake Eyre, a sump at Australia’s centre where rivers go to die to wonderful Uluru, an upside- down lake, bounty, altar where the despair of nineteenth-century explorers has now been replaced by a sense of wonder. And still it seems that part of our character is to dream of the tropical north blooming. There is similarly the question of what impact our sharing of English, the new global lingua franca, has on our culture and whether such a thing as the Australian voice can survive.
Meanwhile, one of the best remaining chances for Australian equity is the very expectation we all have as citizens of decent minimum levels of public health, public education and public communications.These issues represent a divide in American politics, but here in Australia they represent a consensus. Both Bob Katter
~~~~~~~~~~ Robert Carl Katter (born 22 May 1945) is an Australian federal politician, a member of the Australian House of Representatives since March 1993 for the Division of Kennedy, and the leader of Katter's Australian Party.
and the Labor Left opposed the Telstra sell-off for fear communications would suffer. Detail is a matter of political argument, but the basic propositions about state responsibility are not. Abstracting for the moment from the debate on a Bill of Rights, it is also along the same lines that free speech exists. Notable and heinous restrictions were imposed upon it under post-9/11 legislation, and generally reasonable ones under anti-vilification laws. Free speech is not explicitly mentioned in the Constitution, though in 1994 the High Court detected an implied freedom there. But it is, above all, because people believe free speech is unarguably guaranteed that it exists to the extent it does.
And so perhaps might Utopianism in Australia defy world forces in this century, at least for a time. The fear that it will be squeezed from our marrow by the force of new realities is one we are uneasy to face, for without it we will definitively become, in spirit and in culture, someone’s merely unequal and dreary province. Our glittering array of resources gives us a chance for equity and also a chance to deal people out of the equation. Thank God a resources tax is at least canvassed. Otherwise we could be headed in the direction of Brazil, with only Deakin’s fig leaf to protect us from the blaze of a brutal world.
This essay is based on a keynote lecture Thomas Keneally gave at the University of Melbourne’s Festival of Ideas in June on Australian Identity in the twenty-first century.
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