Business
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Bracks: Just another empty suit dazzled by the big end of town
Harold Hark
22 November 2002

For both major parties, the frame in which they pitch their promises is constituted by the narrow assumptions of economic rationalism, which valorise the short-term transactions of the market above collective action for the longer term. If one party realised that voters do not necessarily see this as a good thing, we would be faced with real choices at the ballot box again.
Ray Cassin, The Age, 10 November 2002

The Victorian state election on 30 November is the first election, state or federal, since Jeff Kennett's rise to power in October 1992 that is not a virtual battle between the forces of good and evil. It gives us a chance to yawn and pay scant attention.

Not that the Labor incumbents are worthy of retaining office. They aren't. For the briefest of moments I even hoped the Illiberals would pull off an upset. (As my wife threatened to sue for divorce on the grounds of mental instability, I quickly set aside the aberrant thought.)

But the Opposition is merely a dull reflection of the glory days of the Kennett regime; Der Jeff and his henchmen were rank bastards to a man and woman, perhaps the best team a tyrant has had since Hitler.

Now, with ex-Shadow Treasurer Robert Dean's own goal, Robert Doyle's mob is pretty well out of the picture. They'll still get plenty of votes from the people who would vote for them even they turned out to be terrorists and serial killers. But Bracksie is a shoo-in.

Dean's blunder is more than a disservice to his party. It speaks of the incompetence bordering on contempt that is rife in both parties, but particularly the Illiberal Party, state and federal. Howard's government has been plagued by a nose-thumbing disregard for ethics and propriety from the beginning. It's just that "Honest John" has been able to count on public apathy and forgetfulness, aided by his dog-whistling bigotry.

Dean's fundamental error has also put paid to the highly touted Illiberal Party claim to be good economic managers. They are not, and they never were. Like big business, whose economic management is always to taste, the Illiberals have made a hash of public money expenditure. Their reputation in this department is akin to a big oaf being called "Tiny". Or John Howard being called "Honest John".

Both parties are rotten. Like Telstra, whose monopoly over the nation's communications system allows it to treat customers with disdain, Labor and the Liberals have ceased to compete. Whichever party is in power, it is the traditional Illiberal methodology that holds sway. The privilege of governing has become nothing more than a temporary job, a stepping stone to a future in Australia's legalised-Mafia, corporate business.

Most politicians would be dimly aware, however, that it is supposed to be more than a job. A job is something you take when you don't yet have the skills or talent to do something you'd really like to do. Slinging esters of fatty acid at Macca's is a job; working the till at a supermarket is a job; answering nut and bolt questions in the corridors of Bunning's is a job.

Instead of bowing to the antisocial interests of big business, politicians were supposed to govern for the wider community. Alas, the trough rules: they are only in it for themselves.

We've seen the Australian Democrats new leader, Andrew Bartlett, turn from an honest assessor of Andrew Murray's treachery a few months ago, to a man who links political cliches in a droning monotone. Exit Dems.

Simon Crean just keeps missing the point. Surely one of his advisers reads the papers and tries to point out to him that what people want are policies instead of ratios and waffling from a cardboard cutout? How about a firm stand on immigration or an absolute no, UN or no UN, to the upcoming war to increase The Boy Emperor's oil reserves? Craig Emerson's marvelous outburst the other week earned him thousands of appreciative emails from Labor supporters caught in the quicksand of their party's desertion. Oh, well. Truth is, all the policies Labor is likely to come up with will not regain it the position of Australia's party of conscience, because they will not be founded on tolerance and the fair go. As long as Labor endorses mandatory detention and the indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers, nothing they propose will mean anything.

And Victorians are stuck with Steve Bracks and the big end of town's glove puppet du jour, John Brumby. Yours truly left the Bracks camp back in 2000 at the WTO protests in Melbourne. Two years later at least three of Bracksie's S11 baton twirlers are going to cop wrist slapping disciplinary action. Bracks wanted to fete these same thugs at Parliament House with a barbecue in honour of the beating they gave protesters. (Labor leader Bob Carr, proving that too long in power deranges the mind, allowed Police Commissar Michael Costa to enact worse against protesters at last week's WTO conference in Sydney.)

Since then, Bracks has turned into Kennett Mark II. Instead of Der Jeff's mean-spirited arrogance, we have Bracks' nervous non-fluency as he tries to extend Kennett's policies. For 20 per cent of the state's revenue to be obtained from gambling is a disgrace. And Brumby has gone out of his way to implement the commercial devastations of Alan Stockdale, particularly through his odious public-private partnerships for capital works.

Gough Whitlam recently said we should all vote for the party duopoly and forget the minor parties. We would, if they were distinguishable, one from the other. The minors will continue to grow in power until Labor finds itself or is replaced by them. All major left wing political parties have caved in to big business. Their gradual collapse into sameness with the right is a worldwide phenomenon, a plague of selfishness in which the corporate paradigm has taken over the running of societies and turned them into measurable economic enclaves of consumer worth. There is no room in such a polarised system for proper expenditure on the institutions that bind a society together. When the cult of profit becomes government policy, the community is weakened and destroyed.

At least we are still allowed to elect representatives not of our choosing. But who knows, in the not too distant future something like "national security", a furphy for which we are already paying with reduced rights, might be invoked to suspend elections. Temporarily at first, and then...and then we would not be allowed to elect representatives not of our choosing.

The internet itself, the last bastion of democracy, is under threat. [See: The Death of the Internet.]

In the meantime, these are the days when every government should be turfed out after one term. Somebody has got to "govern" but since they all do it so poorly, so unjustly, none should be given a second go. A few decades of this and maybe the one-dims and the shadows would look elsewhere for employment, allowing men and women with that nemesis of right wing ideology, vision, to take their place. And business, as it must eventually, if civilisation is once again to flourish, would return to its rightful place as a subset of human endeavour.

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