Simple minds

Simple minds

By Victoria Rollison on April 18, 2014 • 

Politics
is a complex beast. The vast majority of Australians don’t want to even
think about how complex it is, let alone read articles about this
complexity. Which I assume is why the vast majority of political
journalists and commentators in this country make it their mission to
tame this complex beast into black and white, easily accessible and
ultimately lazy generalisations.

An
example of this sort of lazy writing aimed at perpetuating the
simplistic idea that ‘major parties are just the same, rotten to the
core, as bad as each other and can’t be trusted’ was predictably
contributed yesterday by Waleed Aly.
Aly uses this theme as the frame from which he makes most observations
about politics. Before you say ‘I can already see where this is going.
Victoria is hell bent on defending the Labor Party so of course she is
going to be annoyed by Aly’s article saying Labor and Liberal are both
corrupt’, please read on, because I hope I’m not as predictable as Aly
is.

I
was mortified by the Labor Party’s decision to put Joe Bollock at the
top of their WA Senate ticket. Bollock is a dinosaur who doesn’t belong
in the Labor Party. I don’t care what apparently amazing work this
dinosaur has done in the union movement. His views on abortion, his
homophobia, his treatment of his Labor Party colleagues and his fondness
for his Catholic buddy Tony Abbott should disqualify him from being
president of a local branch of the Labor Party, let alone the number one
candidate on a Labor Senate ticket (the easiest way to become a highly
paid politician with a very generous pension).

I
am sick of seeing unqualified union parachuted Labor candidates
selected by a few Labor executive members with no consultation from the
community. But (and you will find complex politics requires a lot of
‘buts’) that is not to say that all union candidates are bad (as that
would be a simplistic analysis) and it’s also not to say that all Labor
politicians are ex-union officials because clearly these politicians are
in the minority in the party. In saying that, there is no reason why
the union movement can’t provide an array of highly qualified and
fantastic Labor candidates as it has previously (think Greg Combet, Bill
Shorten (improvement needed) and of course Bob Hawke). Union leaders
work every day to better the working, safety and wage conditions of the
workers they represent. For this reason, I would prefer a politician
with a union background any day of the week over a lawyer (even a union
lawyer like Julia Gillard), a self-interested business owner or, as is
the case for Liberals like Tony Abbott and John Howard, someone who
tried other careers and was no good at any of them.

So
as you can see, the issue of union involvement in the Labor Party is a
complex one. Community preselections should improve the quality of the
candidate, as those who have been put forward by the union or by the
community would be subject to scrutiny before they are chosen to
represent the party. I don’t count Craig Thomson and Joe Bullock as
ex-union officials who I admire, and nor do I count Kathy Jackson,
ex-union official and wife of Tony Abbott’s mate Michael Lawler as a
reputable human being. So just like in the private sector and the public
sector, and in any large community or social group, unions have good
people in them, corrupt people, hardworking and passionately committed
people, people with a sense of entitlement, and mixtures of all these
traits. Like any large cross section of the community, the union
movement can’t be generalised. Neither can union candidates to the Labor
Party, and neither can all members of the Labor Party. Major parties
are by their very nature full of a range of different people and the
behaviour of one, two or even a handful amongst hundreds should not
simplistically dictate how the entire population are framed in the
media. Complex, but not that hard to explain. Are you still with my Aly?

I wrote this week
about the way that bad behaviour, or even alleged bad behaviour, within
the Labor Party is portrayed by the media as a ‘whole of party’
problem, which I’ve even heard called a ‘disease’. Yet the exact same
bad or allegedly bad behaviour in the Liberal Party is treated as
unfortunate incidents in the careers of otherwise upstanding members of
the free market loving community. When commenting on bad behaviour in
the Liberal Party, just as I predicted, writers like Aly do their best
to make the behaviour of the likes of O’Farrell, Sinodinos and Tony
Abbott who stands by these men, a problem for the Liberal AND Labor
Party. In the same breath, Aly explains that this problem is why minor
parties like the Greens and Palmer United Party are seen as better
options to the electorate. And this is where the simplistic ‘major
parties are bad, minor parties are good’ frame becomes absurd.

You
only have to interrogate the values of Clive Palmer’s Palmer United
Party for three seconds to see that the party exists to further the
interests of billionaire Clive Palmer for the benefit of Clive Palmer.
Palmer doesn’t want to pay the Carbon Price. Palmer doesn’t want to pay
the mining tax on super profits. Palmer wants coal to be dug out of the
ground forever, and wants everyone to believe Greg Hunt when he says the
magic pudding of coal will never end. Palmer wants a coal port on the
Great Barrier Reef. Palmer wants the power to reduce the influence the
government can have on limiting his greed. But rather than interrogate
Palmer’s self-interested, anti-community values, the mainstream media
heaps Palmer in with the Greens using the simple frame that they must be
good and pure because they are ‘not a major party and therefore pure
just for the very fact they’re not a major party’. Palmer gets called a
‘larrikin’ politician, a ‘anti-politician’, a ‘colourful character’,
which might work for the simplistic sideshow, but doesn’t really help
the public to understand the policy ambitions of a man who has an
incredible amount of money to help sell his image to the public, and is
set to make an incredible amount of money by influencing government
policy in his favour.

You
would think the Greens would dislike being put in the same bucket as
Clive Palmer. Yet I see a lot of evidence on Twitter that Greens
supporters are happy that Palmer is growing his political influence. The
number of Greens supporters I saw enthusiastically celebrating the WA
Senate election result because there was a swing away from both major
parties towards the Greens, and to a larger extent towards Clive Palmer,
was scary. I thought Greens were progressives? I thought Greens wanted
to save the environment and stop mining coal? I thought Greens wanted to
keep the Carbon Price and wanted the Mining Tax rate raised? I
understand Palmer might have said something positive about the Greens
stance on asylum seeker policy once. Is this enough to make Clive Palmer
best friends with the Greens? Has the world gone mad or has the ‘minor
parties are by their definition pure because major parties aren’t’
attitude become a ‘disease’ infecting otherwise intelligent people
through reading too many articles by the likes of Waleed Aly? But wait,
it gets even more complex. The Greens did a preference deal
with the Palmer United Party in the September election, preferencing
PUP ahead of Labor in South Australia in order to save Sarah
Hanson-Young’s Senate seat. For a party who paints themselves as pure,
surely the Greens have just added a complex layer to their brand of
identity politics that is about as coal-loving politically grubby as you
can get?

Next
time you hear someone simplifying politics down to ‘big parties are bad
and small parties are good’, think about the complexity of what is
really going on. Think about how many hard working, passionate,
intelligent, talented and committed progressive politicians in the Labor
Party are smeared by the ‘Labor is corrupt’ frame that the media
reports every political news story from. Time and time again, I ask
progressives to unite to beat Tony Abbott, and then I see Greens
supporting Clive Palmer and I realise to many, asking progressives to
unite is far too simplistic a plea in what is clearly a much more
complex situation than I can grasp.