I heard the Prime Minister on the radio yesterday, basically trying to tell off the Victorian Premier Dan Andrews for trying to take measures to stop further community transmission of COVID-19. Victoria has gone back into a lockdown of sorts and Scott Morrison was doing his best to paint Dan Andrews as some kind of pantomime villain; by trying to suggest that the measures aren't necessary and that people needed to be reminded of the value of 'mateship'.
Now I realise that Mr Morrison likes to play the character of the daggy dad but here, he was trying to recall the not so distant past by using the same kind of language that John Howard used. To be honest, I don't know how well that resonates with a public which has moved on twenty years; nor one that has the actual capability of remembering the past that Mr Howard was alluding to. It is worth remembering that within three years, Mr Howard sent this country off to war upon the basis of a convenient pack of lies.
Mr Howard as Prime Minister played identity politics and culturally appropriated the terms of ‘mateship’, ‘battler’ and the ‘fair go’ etc. as a kind of secular religion. What might have previously been shibboleths of the political Left were repackaged as individualist and culturally conservative. At the same time, his government was busy selling off government assets (most heinously Telstra) and redesigning the tax system to make poorer people bear a bigger brunt of the total effective tax burden.
All of this together was actually followed by the cultural left and because they were able to recast those things as decidedly masculinist icons; while at the same time, they were given permission to bash religious institutions. The Same-Sex marriage debate was probably almost deliberately left out there for the Left to win, while the Right went about smashing the apparatus of the state while nobody was looking. It is perhaps only now that the cultural Left has woken up and realised that while they were off fighting the culture wars, the Right already won the economic ones.
What this means for me personally is that someone who is broadly culturally conservative but economically leftist, has been politically homeless for more than two decades.
If the economic left is going to win anything out of this pandemic (because it will change what normal is) then I think that it needs to claim the political ground that nobody has been playing on for almost a century - love.
Yes, I said 'love'. I don't mean in some romantic sense but in that hard definition of brotherly and sisterly love which the ancient Greeks called Philos. I say this not out of some patriotic love of country because quite frankly I haven't yet heard a sensible story or mythos of Australia that I'd like to buy into but rather, the broader notions of Commonwealth that people like Henry Parkes hinted at. Whatever this project of Australia is that we've either been signed on for or conscripted into, the idea that a commonwealth can do bigger things than individuals, is the basis of every organisation since the beginning of time.
I remember the words of John Franklin Kennedy "ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country" and I cringe.
By assuming that the country can do nothing for us, we repeatedly vote accordingly and then wonder why after having stripped it of its capabilities it has become so incapable. We should ask what the country can do for us and then work accordingly to make sure that it can do what we expect.
I think that what we should expect a country to do, is love its citizenry by demonstrating that through practical work. Hard love expresses itself through the work that it does. I don't want to hear empty rhetoric about 'mateship' or whatever else kind of secular semi-religious claptrap that Mr Morrison wants to employ, religion if it is to be worth anything expresses itself through practical love for people. It should look after the elderly, it should look after children, it should look after people who have come to us in distress. The hard practical love which cares about the citizenry of the nation looks at education policy, housing policy, justice, as well as providing enough of a subsistence if life doesn't play out as hoped. I do not know how you can claim to have love for the people of your own country, if the instrument of government is used make sure that the have nots still do not have, while taking what little that they do have to give to the have mores.
Sure, you can frame the debate around 'mateship’, ‘battler’ and the ‘fair go’ etc. and even speak in terms of the economy (praise it), then what's the point? You may as well be banging a gong like a four year old. What if you have economic models which stretch into the future and yet still enact policies which don't care for people, then what? You can bang on about giving people tax cuts, franking credits, changing the rules on capital gains, even reforming the entire tax system but if you don't use the state as the instrument for big practical love, then so what?
You build a nation by being patient. You don't necessarily look to who else is doing well because that doesn't really help. A nation is made great by being kind to its citizenry. It doesn't need to trumpet about itself on the world stage, it certainly doesn't win by weaponising a sense of nationalism and sticking its nose in where it doesn't belong.
In a political sense, you don't win by tallying up wrongs or waving around the injustice that you've perpetrated on the front pages of newspapers. You even engage in truth-telling and confronting the injustices of the past and then demonstrate love by correcting them.
We can make glib statements about how we're all in this together but big practical love just quietly puts up with anything and everything that comes along and does what it needs to. Of course it trusts in the citizenry, shares their hopes, and endures no matter what because in the grandest of political discourses, practical love is the only thing that can be absolutely guaranteed to never become obsolete.
That's why I do not understand Prime Minister Morrison's rhetoric. You can't mine the memories of people who have already died and the people who are suffering don't really benefit from fancy words. The people who are hurting don't need to be reminded of some nebulous value like 'mateship', they need big practical love. If you are running a government, you will be remembered for how you showed that big practical love.
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