|
July 9, 2010
I've noticed that Julie Gillard, our new fang dangle PM, has been doing a bit of policy housekeeping in Canberra this last week or so --cleaning up the "dirty" issues that have been hurting federal Labor in the electorate, such as the mining tax and asylum seekers. The leaks say that the global warming issue will be cleaned up too--pushed under the carpet?
Get these slow burns off the agenda and the ALP sails home to a famous victory. Clever politics says the Canberra Press Gallery. The ALP was justified in removing a badly performing Rudd.
The trajectory of this kind of housekeeping is a marked shift to the Right: appease the multinational miners on the resources tax; appease the angry right wing populists on asylum seekers; and doing a bit of green wash on climate change (its real folks) to keep the ALP looking credible--- ie., not looking as if its been well and truely captured by the coal industry.
Clever tactics says the Canberra Gallery. This pushes the Coalition further to the right (so that Abbott looks extreme) and allows the ALP to stand firmly in the middle ground. This political strategy will ensure that the Gillard Government is elected.
That middle ground looks to be well inside the right of centre territory to me. The clearest indication of that is the reaffirmation that the mandatory internet filter to protect families will remain. What is rejected is education, policing of illegal material and targeted research on the internet and young people.This indicates politics not policy, a politics designed for those Christian populists who feel besieged by rapid change, and who talk about the threats to moral purity and the need to protect the family from “worldly dangers.”
They have, as Gillard put it, a set of concerns about the dark side of the new technology. The images of child abuse, child pornography are everywhere on the internet. This is not clever politics---it indicates that social conservatism is the heart of the ALP. That is what "western Sydney " as Labor heartland means.
For the Canberra Press Gallery, many of whom see themselves and each other as "players" in the "game" we now call politics, what matters is not the policy substance; rather it is the 24-hour contest between our political leaders to win the media on the day. John Hewson describes the politics this way in his Fourth Estate corrupting the political system at the ABC's The Drum:
This is a game where "winning" is everything, and where, increasingly, policy substance, values, ideas and ideologies don't matter. Where personalities, and "colour" and "movement" dominate, and where ability to "sell" or "spin", rather than merit or substance, are more valued and determinate.
What we have with this 24-hour politics of glitz and spin Hewson adds, are two candidates, devoid of real policy substance, claiming to "lead" us on significant moral issues, such as asylum seekers and climate change.
This leadership stuff is spin. We can decode that easily during an election. Only, now we know that once Gillard Labor regains power, they will not pick up the reform baton in in any substantive way, thanks to the heavy hand of the NSW Right. Federal Labor will spend most of its energy putting the brakes on the reform's required to adapt Australia to a rapidly changing world and improve the well being of the Australian population.
|
Hewson makes an good point in Fourth Estate corrupting the political system at the The Drum about the media:
Hewson reckons that today, The Australian seems to have moved away from any specific policy agenda.
I disagree. The Australian has a specific policy agenda over and above just being anti-Labor.--eg., it is anti-climate change; pro war; free markets rule etc.