January 15, 2008
Via Nicholas Gruen at Club Troppo
Guy Rundle adds yet another take on the Australian culture wars at Arena magazine. It's a long essay but worth a read for a version of this ongoing stoush tracing it back long before Howard weighed in and confused everything by getting Australia mixed up with America.
There are quite a few versions of how it all came to this, mostly focused on politicians trying to force cultural change from the top down. Or in Pauline Hanson's case, from the bottom to somewhere even further down.
Rundle gives a clear explanation of the role Murdoch, and The Australian in particular, played in all of this from a longer term view than we are normally offered. He has a go at holding the Murdoch conservatives responsible for political disengagement and it's an interesting argument. What passes for public debate these days is a series of ongoing brawls between a select few in small magazines and The Australian op ed pages. The people who write them don't generally spend a lot of time sinking beers and shooting the breeze with the 'mainstream, ordinary, pragmatic, salt of the earth' people they claim to represent.
I think there's an equally strong case for arguing that it has always been thus, with engagement coming and going depending on what's at stake at any given time, or the introduction of a new novelty. Whatever. We can still enjoy speculating.
Anyhoo, this is Rundle's response to Paul Kelly's spew we discussed a while back.
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Lyn,
I started reading it last for a possible post on philosophy.com, but Rundle didn't seem to be saying anything other than giving a history of the culture wars and the role of Murdoch's Australian in developing a conservative culture based on a hostility to social liberalism and The Left. He's telling us what we already know, I thought, then nodded off.
Is Rundle saying anything more?