Peter Boyle
"The thing I love most about politics is the game playing", wrote Sydney Morning Herald economics editor Ross Gittins recently. "It's such fun working out the true motives for the things pollies do."
Gittins was writing about the claim by Treasurer Peter Costello that he had commissioned a new review of the tax system. In these days of virtual politics, he argued, politicians are more concerned with appearances than reality and there are always hidden motives to uncover. His conclusion was that Costello was putting on a show to cover more tax cuts to high-income earners, to present himself as having the initiative on the "tax reform agenda", as the world's best treasurer and perhaps a suitable successor to PM John Howard.
But Costello and other Coalition politicians have been putting on another, nastier, show of late. It is about race.
Last week, Costello took time out from gloating about the long economic boom to deliver a sermon on "Australian values" and to threaten the Muslim community. If anyone doesn't accept these values, they are not welcome in Australia. Howard rushed to back Costello on this and, shamefully, the federal leader of the Labor Party, Kim Beazley, also chimed in.
Then it was the Christian fundamentalist Coalition leader of the house Tony Abbott's turn to play the race card in parliament.
"Are there any Australians left in the so-called Australian Labor Party today?", he asked in question time on February 28, after repeating allegations in Murdoch's Australian of ALP branch stacking in Victoria by Spanish, Greek, Vietnamese and Cambodian migrants.
Abbott retracted his racist "real Australians" comment in the face of uproar from the opposition in parliament, but the next day he was back making racist jokes about tabling documents in the Khmer language to help an ALP politician door-knock his constituency.
So what is going on here? Is there a real proposal to administer some sort of "Australian values" test to migrants?
After all his carry-on, Costello later admitted to Barrie Cassidy, on the January 26 ABC's Insiders program, the oath that new citizens take includes a commitment of loyalty to Australia, democratic beliefs, acceptance of the rule of law, and the rights and liberties of others, and he didn't have any changes to propose.
And just a week before his latest racist performance, Abbott dismissed the need for any test of "Australian-ness" in a speech in Philadelphia, according to conservative columnist Gerard Henderson.
Why are Abbott and Costello beating the racist drum? The pundits have come up with a number of explanations:
1. This is a populist play that is part of Costello's push for the job of PM. His simple message is: I delivered prosperity to Australia and we "real Australians" have to unite against "others" to keep it. In short, greed and racism are good.
2. The Howard government sees this as a way to turn attention away from the Australian Wheat Board corruption scandal to the "sleazy" factional infighting in the ALP, where it is a fact that some Labor politicians have exploited patronage in migrant communities to win their pre-selection and election campaigns.
3. The Howard government is preparing for a greater combat role for Australian troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. More troops have been sent to Afghanistan and Howard has said that there will be a new role for Australian troops in Iraq once their soon-to-expire mission to protect Japanese engineers in the south of that country is over. There is speculation that US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's March 16-19 visit to Australia will discuss this new role in Iraq.
4. The Howard government is using the race card to sow disunity in the working class in preparation for the implementation of the anti-union and anti-worker Work Choices legislation at the beginning of April.
All four explanations seem plausible as they fit within the general pressure on all governments in wealthy capitalist states to redirect popular anger and frustration at their uniform neoliberal (corporate-profits-first) policies. When the real conflict is about class, talk about the "clash of civilizations" instead.
From Green Left Weekly, March 8, 2006.
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