| Australia's Journal of Political Character Assassination | Melbourne, Australia |
SCUM AT THE TOP | Final issue |
| Editor: Harold Hark | Volume 6 No. 8 |
2 a.m. election night and well over point oh five The majority of Australians have spoken. And they have been found to be trash. Mostly white and well off, but other colours too. Lots of immigrants who have counted their blessings and said, "I'm safe, shut the door!" Australia is now clearly defined as the ugly country. Let's hear no more about being clever or lucky. We are officially a nation of the small, the selfish, the frightened. The Ugliest Australian of them all has triumphed. Goodbye public hospitals, goodbye Medicare, goodbye education for all of us, goodbye a fair go, goodbye Telstra, goodbye Ansett, goodbye honest and proper government with full and frank disclosure. It will take a generation to recover. Those who voted for the Coalition should hang their heads in shame, but instead will raise their right arms in the most dreadful of salutes, and all in the name of fear and ignorance. "I don't care about education, I just want to be safe," said one Illiberal voter at the shopping centre. When asked what she wanted to be made safe from, she said she didn't know. What she also didn't know is that she has just voted for a political party of business elites for whom her safety is the last priority. She has in fact voted for social chaos. By her actions her worst fears may be realised. A course has been set for Australians: that of paranoid fear of The Other. Today it is boat people. Tomorrow it will be each other. God help the people of swarthy or Asian complexion, especially the ones who voted for the Coalition. Their votes will not keep them safe. They will scream, "I voted for Howard," but their white trash brethren will stomp the life out of them nonetheless. Muffle the drums and beat them slowly, for Australia has sunk to a new low. The founders of the Federation implemented racist policies with innocence compared to this band of cynical thugs. In spite of corruption, mismanagement, elitism, racism, xenophobia, the Howard Government has earned a third term from an electorate of moral cowards. How are we going to recover? We will, because we--the human race--always have. But it's going to take an awful long time. The fear that precipitated Howard's re-election has been given a life not unlike Frankenstein's monster. The events of September 11 may well have shaped a hideous future, to which this election is but a reflexive adjunct. But the diminishing worldviews of a John Howard have been in place for decades. The reasons for the attacks in America and that country's response are reflected in Howard's victory. Exclusive policy begets retaliation begets war. No one in power is acting in the interests of humanity. Their justification for the evil they perpetrate, from Usama bin Laden to George Bush, may in the end take the whole planet down. So counsel your young children well in the vast difference between right and wrong, because the people who re-elected John Howard do not know it. Australia will not regain its rightful place among nations until this generation achieves maturity. To Kim Beazley, I offer grievous condolences. Though his defeat should have been with the greatest of valour, it is merely ignoble. Beazley could have been a great prime minister, I suppose. Then again, maybe not. He is nothing now. And he has left his party with nowhere to go. There are no replacements. Simon Crean? The howling winds of the wilderness simply increase at the thought. Jenny Macklin? Her spin on the defeat is as deadening as her flat persona. Mark Latham? "A right-wing authoritarian zealot" as someone has accurately described him. There is no one in the Labor Party to take over the leadership. We now have nothing left. We must expect the worst. Do not for a moment believe that life in this once great country will be the same. This was not just another election. It was an election to preserve what was left of the soul of Australia. That soul has been eaten alive by vipers. That soul has been offered up to John Howard by larval voters for whom ideals and integrity are as foreign as the refugee children who drowned without their sympathy. Australia's future has been sacrificed to the banality of evil. Were it not that the majority of Australians are a lazy, lame lot of cowards with nothing to fight for beyond the pallid hope that they can continue to shop at the local supermarket without being shot at, we would be facing the same future as Serbians under Milosevic. Yet by their very cowardice, voters have opened up this dreadful possibility. Coalition policies will continue to put people out of work. Sooner or later, crime will become a national epidemic. With vistas no larger than the thumbnail of a Neanderthal, the majority of voters have revealed that all they care about is consumption and defecation. You see them everywhere. Faces devoid of spirit, emotions truncated, absorbed in an upwardly material mobility that excludes, barren of soul, their bodies looked after with the finest, most expensive products of entrepreneurial charlatanry, while the most basic necessities of others go unheeded, unobserved. Vale Australia. The dream is over. The dark ages are well and truly here. The majority has spoken. Many of those whose vision for Australia finally died on Saturday night asked themselves the next day: ``What will I do?'' My fear is that the brain drain will escalate and that many progressive intellectuals will leave the country. We'll return to the 50s and 60s, the cultural cringe days. Struggling to come to terms with the meaning of this election, I have been looking at this blank screen for a long bloody time. Suddenly, a piece of music I haven't listened to for decades came to mind. Just recently I bought a CD of it at the local Big W for the grand total of $1.87. A cut rate way to add some of the old war horses to my collection. Thus, a favourite of my pimple-popping years of pubertal angst, Cèsar Franck's Symphonie in D-Moll (love that German word for Minor) offers some consolation. I'm sure that were he alive today, and not from the 19th century to which Australia seems determined to retreat, Cèsar would have written it in commemoration of Australia's descent into infamy. Go Cèsar. As well, last week I started re-reading an old favourite, The Illuminatus! Trilogy by Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson. As often happens, a passage from whatever I happen to pick up at the moment will relate, not just to current events, but to the very idea I am working on. Last night I came upon a description of the American Democrat Party's 1968 convention in Chicago and the violent attacks on protestors outside, attacks ordered by the convention's host, Democrat Mayor Richard J. Daley. What it represented for hundreds of thousands of supporters was the end of their faith in the Democratic party. Here in Australia on November 10, 2001, there were no teargas or batons, but for hundreds and thousands of supporters any faith they had in the Labor Party was likewise lost. And it might as well be forever. I know, we had already lost the faith, but were hoping that once elected, Labor would revert to its former position as an honourable party of the people with humanitarian ideals at its heart. But the means it chose--pandering to the racist cynicism of its opponent--gave it the end it deserved. Though it appears to have been largely a status quo election, with the swing to the Coalition currently at 1.38 per cent, the loss is no less devastating. Instead of noble defeat--in which we could have all stood proudly with the resolve to fight the good fight through the next three years--Labor now lies in ruins, a despised band of ignoble opportunists. By contrast, Bob Brown took the just moral ground that Labor jettisoned and was returned handsomely, as was Independent Peter Andren. Brown actually had the courage to say that he didn't care about the electoral consequences of his revulsion with the asylum seeker position of the major parties. Had Kim Beazley been the politician of principle we all thought he was, he might have joined Brown in victory, or at least been able to save his reputation. Whoever is responsible for Beazley's appalling campaign advice, should step forth and apologise to the generation (which includes my ten year old daughter) whose task it will be to recover this nation's soul. Because it will not be recovered until they are old enough to vote. And if the decision was Beazley's, then it's case closed. Given a third term, John Howard has already crowed about "my right to govern [with] a mandate to implement policies and approaches that are consistent with [my] philosophy." That, my friends, means we are lost. Robert Manne cautioned that another term would allow Howard to consolidate almost beyond repair his policies of exclusion. Look what happened in Victoria under Jeff Kennett. 32 years from now Victorians will finally be able to use City Link without paying tolls. As for utilities, their privatisation will not be reversed short of a civil uprising. And come January 1, 2002, the costs for electricity will rise by 13 per cent. It is safe to say that we are no longer a society but merely an economy. And when the economy finally hits the wall, the added costs of the GST will finally sink in to "battlers" and small-minded business people whose shops will continue to close, but with greater rapidity. By then, or shortly thereafter, we will also be faced with Howard's triumphant Americanisation of health and education. The people who voted for the Coalition could care less about education, but the demise of Medicare will wake them up. And they will awake from their nightmare to the same conditions they enjoyed in Cèsar Franck's heyday, with illnesses beyond the reach of their capacity to pay. Or worse. As members of a permanent underclass. How the rest of the world sees us can be summed up by an article in the New York Times. It described this election as a battle to see who had the hardest heart. One columnist said the parties had been running a "whiter than white" campaign. Then again, this newspaper is printed in the United States, whose Congress just passed into law the USA-Patriot Act, which effectively turns the country into a police state. But it's how we will see ourselves in the coming years that hurts the most. I told my next door neighbour, a decent woman who voted Illiberal because she was frightened, that the last man to protect her was John Howard, that if we betray desperate people trying to find a patch of soil on which to lead a decent life free from fear, we will eventually betray each other. The fear of otherness will continue to grow until something we hadn't noticed about our friends and neighbours-perhaps a political position out of step with the majority-will suddenly seem suspect. We will henceforth treat them with the same fear and suspicion that we've been told to treat the asylum seekers with by John Howard. It happened with the greatest of ease in Bosnia. Here, I would like to reproduce a few of the anguished, angry and disappointed letters from this Monday morning's Age: As a disaffected Liberal voter, I made my very feeble protest on Saturday by voting Green. Sadly, this was pretty token in my electorate, so my preferences still helped along the Liberal cause. Perhaps the music I should be listening to is Sibelius' 4th symphony. No work has ever surpassed its bleak hopelessness, it's icy desolation, it's collapsing despair. It is a reminder that what is happening now has happened before and will continue to happen. That the brotherhood of man is as remote as ever, because mankind is but a child. And there has never been a shortage of child molesters. Finally, Bob Ellis' prediction at the 1993 election that the Huns were at the gates was premature. They didn't breach the barricades until 1996. For five and a half years their rule was shaky; it even appeared towards the end of that time that they would finally be routed. Now they are firmly in place and in a few years, we will barely remember the generous time before their coming. It happens to all civilisations. With this despair-laden issue, Scum at the Top comes to an end. True, there have been as many final editions as rock bands have final tours, but this is really it. SCATT was going to be wound up no matter who won the election, but since Tampa that was always going to be with a heavy heart. I never dreamt that the heart would be broken. Thanks to all who have supported me. I've enjoyed ranting and raving immensely. So much so that I hope to be back sometime next year with an entirely new format which is only occasionally political. Then again, I may join the growing number of fed up expatriates. I've always dreamed of a cottage in the French Pyrenees. Living in a country where you know little of the language is a protection against politics. Which, let's face it, is, has, and always will be in the hands of the very worst people. In the meantime, be courageous and keep your sense of humour intact. As for the supporters of John Howard, better luck next lifetime. SCATT will, of course, remain on the web in archived form. Cheers, Perhaps it's time for Liberal moderates and Labor's dwindling left to come together in a new party. How about this for a coalition to kick arse: Liberal wets, Labor's left, the Greens and left-leaning Democrats. Wishful thinking, eh? What's happening now to Labor is worse than the DLP split, and John Howard has turned the Illiberals into the envy of every living dictator. Expect Margaret Thatcher's son Mark to pull up stakes in South Africa and move here. With the money he's made on arms sales, he can afford to move the Johannesburg cottage he built for the old bat to Australia intact. In the interim, they can move in with John and Janette. Imagine how well the foursome would get along. Moaning and writhing to classified videos of drowning refugees. |
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