Alison Dellit
As the dust settled on PM John Howard's decisive victory, across Australia social justice activists have been trying to make sense of the election outcome. This discussion has not been restricted to the opinion pages of the print media, but has intruded into campus forums, pubs, coffee shops, workplaces and dinner tables. And unsurprisingly, it has been a hot topic on the email discussion list for Green Left Weekly readers, <GreenLeft_discussion@yahoogroups.com.au>.
One of the more pervasive views was expressed eloquently by Clive Hamilton, in an October 11 piece for the Sydney Morning Herald headed "Self-absorption wins the day". Arguing that "It was not the extraordinary public spending spree of the election campaign that sank Labor, but the sustained private consumption binge that Australians have been on for the past decade", Hamilton claimed that the Coalition's victory reflected the "narrow-mindedness and preoccupation with self that characterises modern Australia after two decades of market ideology and sustained growth."
"Private greed always drives out the social good", he added. "Not even engagement in a dangerous foreign war, exposed as being based on lies, and the threat of terrorist attacks can bounce people out of their financial preoccupations."
Hamilton's argument — that most Australians voted with their hip pockets, out of greed, not need — has been echoed by many commentators. In an email forwarded by another activist to the GLW discussion list, industrial organiser Peter Woodward commented: "The (slender) majority of actual human beings [who voted for the Coalition] strongly affirmed their support for the capitalist system and its particular values. That the interests of individuals are best maintained by wealth-accumulating corporations whose economic interests it is the Coalition's job to serve.
"That the interests of the individual transcend those of the community. That you get the best personal result by living in a society where small amounts of wealth trickle down from those who have a lot and that you get your share by crawling over others."
Woodward, however, does not believe that it is all bad news. Pointing out that the Coalition had the "massive and overpowering support of the corporations and their corporate media", he argues that "there is a really big minority of people amongst whom many individuals have stood up for issues of principle that transcend mere day-to-day selfish material concerns". This minority, he argues, has shown itself impervious to the lies of the media and offers a way forward.
In contrast to the approach of Hamilton and Woodward, one list commentator (and regular GLW journalist) Mike Karadjis has come out swinging. "Let's get over it", he wrote. "Working people, a great many of who handed victory to the right, vote on the basis of what they perceive to be in the interests of their livelihoods. Of course, they made a mistake, the Liberals are definitely not in the interests of their livelihoods, and for those young folk preferring the ALP to Greens, or Libs to ALP, ditto, but the fact that working people vote on this basis is not 'conservative', is not because they 'think only of their pockets rather than what is good for society' ... it is conservative when the left does not recognise the importance of these issues."
Karadjis argued that the problem with Hamilton's analysis is that it "fails to distinguish between those who have profited from 'booming house prices' and those suffering from 'unprecedented levels of debt' just trying to buy a house ... the private greed of the top 200 families who have increased their wealth from $4.3 billion in 1983 at the dawn of the Hawke era to $67 billion today, and the 'private greed' of those too poor to be able to afford a mortgage on one home anywhere near the inner suburbs."
According to Karadjis, a survey of those around him revealed that the shift to the right of the NSW government provided another reason for many to vote for the Coalition. "Working people hate the state ALP government. Sure a lot of the more organised and thus better-off sections of the class stick to the ALP, but what do you say to school cleaners whose service has been privatised by [NSW Premier] Bob Carr and who thus are losing their jobs and livelihoods?"
Finally, Karadjis took issue with Hamilton's characterisation of young people as "apathetic": "Such terrible young people! Imagine them even not giving a stuff that a bloody bourgeois election was on! Imagine them thinking that whoever was elected it would make no difference to their lives! That if they voted in the equivalent of the Carr government federally, there would be lots of good jobs, decent unions, public transport, they would cease being harassed when they walk out their door — how 'clueless and unconcerned' [they are]."
The discussion continues. To join in, visit <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/GreenLeft_discussion>.
From Green Left Weekly, October 20, 2004.
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