Wonders will never cease, from Janet Albrechtsen today:
In the final days of a long election campaign, we should celebrate the messy, vexed, complicated, glorious business of our democracy. To be sure, we have our own problems. But they are piddling compared to the political, economic and cultural ructions shaking the US, Europe and, most recently, the United Kingdom.
If we want to avoid the same strife, we should look and learn from this most recent political earthquake, and vote with care on Saturday.
As tempting as it is to buttonhole the Brexit vote into a single cause, there were myriad reasons why 17.4 million people decided Britain should leave the European Union. Many voters rejected outright an EU that morphed from a common market under the Treaty of Rome in 1957 into a supranational political behemoth that has treated the voters of nation states with disdain. Many cast their votes in particular against the EU’s dreadful mishandling of immigration, a crisis caused by German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s foolhardy decision last year to welcome more than a million asylum- seekers from the Middle East.
Others saw the EU as the hapless driver, rather than the reformer, of Europe’s deeply flawed social democratic project: big ticket welfare, higher taxes, multiculturalism run so rife that cultural relativism replaced moral judgments. Just as the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the fall of communism, the monumental Brexit vote represents the removal of sizeable bricks from Europe’s conceited supranational castle in Brussels.
The common thread of the Brexit vote is profound disillusionment with elites who will say anything to get power and to keep it. The Eurocrats’ rule of thumb: tell voters to trust us because we know better, but don’t trust the voters. The June 23 vote confirms the growing political divide about how politics should be practised, who should participate and for whom political structures exist.
…Against this backdrop of acute disillusionment, Australia is fortunate. Under Bob Hawke and John Howard, our government understood how to run the economy, delivering unprecedented growth, rising wages and higher living standards. Turning Hansonism fire into fizz, Howard understood that successful immigration depends on a government controlling who comes to the country and having respectful conversations with voters rather than reaching condescending conclusions about those who raise questions about immigration.
Wanting something new, rather than raising baseball bats, voters chose Kevin Rudd who soon squandered our budget surplus, opened the borders to appease empty chants of compassion from his own party and ushered in seven years of internal Labor dysfunction.
The same issues that have shielded Australia from the deep political disconnect in other parts of the Western world are the same issues Labor cannot be trusted on: the economy and immigration. Bill Shorten is embracing the same flawed social democratic model falling apart in Europe: the deadening cost of increased spending, a $16.5 billion budget blowout, higher taxes and a Johnny-come-lately promise about understanding immigration. Scandalous Medicare lies add insult to injury.
Disheartened by both sides, voters contemplating a vote for minor parties or independents ought to measure their disillusionment against events in other countries. Will feeling good on Saturday by registering a protest vote genuinely alleviate their disillusionment or lead to greater long-term disgust at politics when a messy, motley Senate entrenches further paralysis in Canberra?
That’s a decent assessment of the underpinnings of Brexit but where’s reference to the class dimensions of the vote? A protest by those disenfranchised by globalisation (and the EU) were a central force, from the Washington Post:
But we know why it gets no mention don’t we. If Albrechtsen were to mention the elephant in the room then it would trample her argument to support the Coalition and its big business mates like Rupert Murdoch:
- well managed immigration is not just about “stopping boats”, it’s about ensuring that it raises standards of living and the last three years of Coalition bungling has very clearly failed on that score. Moreover, recent decisions show the Turnbull Government has an unalloyed commitment to the population ponzi to support the extant rent seeking sectors in banks, property and retail;
- the defining characteristic of both the Abbott and Turnbull governments has been lying on scale never before see in Australian politics, as I wrote recently, so how is the Coalition in a position to repair the damage done by “elites who will say anything to get power and to keep it”;
- the defining choice in this election is between a $50billion tax cut offered by the Coalition that will largely benefit the global elite that Ms Albrechtsen fails to mention have so pissed off the Poms, and Labor’s negative gearing reform policy that will address housing affordability for the asset poor by removing a tax rort grotesquely favouring the wealthy. If there’s a Brexit policy dimension to our election it clearly favours Labor.
None of these things mean that the Coalition is about to lose the election in some Brexit-like boil over but its total failure to address them is the reason why this election is a contest at all.
