I used to get one or two useful posts from Crikey per week. But, as a younger cohort has overtaken its management, it has become more woke and very much less useful.
To anybody except blood-sucking corporations, that is.
Let me explain via a piece of commentary on Friday by Ben Eltham who has the woke CV par excellence:
Ben Eltham is an Australian freelance arts journalist, essayist, researcher, lecturer, creative producer and social commentator based in Melbourne. Previously he studied neuroscience, philosophy and cultural studies.
Mr Eltham is a good writer with smooth prose, a turn of wit, and cool observation of social trivia.
He is, therefore, a creature very much of his time. A talented mind washed down the drain of fake left propaganda.
To wit:
…it was an absolutely woeful performance. Dutton is no orator. He’s barely even a public speaker. He looked hesitant. He shuffled his papers. He fluffed his lines. His cadence was off. No wonder Jim Chalmers was smirking from the frontbench.
The content was barely more coherent: a tissue of contradictions and thought bubbles. On the one hand, he argued, the economy is in the toilet, and this is Labor’s fault. On the other hand, the economy is strong because the Coalition was in power for nine years. On the one hand, the budget is making inflation worse; on the other hand, we do need to spend more on aged care.
…The attacks on migration will hurt. Dutton has some talking points about “bringing 6000 people a week extra in”, which is “more than the population of Adelaide” arriving in the next five years. Lines about migration putting pressure on housing and infrastructure will certainly find receptive audiences in some parts of the electorate.
It’s not a dog whistle — more like a klaxon. This is low politics, just the stuff Dutton excels at.
There is a view within Labor that Dutton is electoral poison in urban Sydney and Melbourne. I’m not sure it’s so cut and dried. Dutton is a much better doorstop and live media performer than in Parliament, and he has some lines now that will cut through on commercial TV news.
People are struggling in the outer suburbs, in the regions, in over-mortgaged houses all over the suburbs. If Dutton can convince them that their collapsing living standards are Labor’s fault, he has a roadmap for the Coalition out of the wilderness.
Eltham is right. Dutton is a plodder. And he will make headway in the “struggling” outer suburbs. But not, as Eltham suggests, because he is playing the “low politics” of immigration.
Dutton will make headway because he is right that mass immigration is directly
- inflating rents;
- suppressing wages, and
- crush loading all public services.
Ironically, it is doing the same thing to the vast majority of inner-city freelance arts journalist, essayist, researcher, lecturer, creative producers.
This is an incontrovertible fact proven by hard data (Mr Eltham can find the data on MB if he has the integrity to do so).
The workers of Sydney and Melbourne are having their living standards eroded day-by-day and piece-by-piece by excessive and poorly managed immigration.
The winners of the mass immigration policy are a narrow set of vested interests in banking, real estate, and retail that enjoy growing markets for their goods and services without lifting a finger.
Given this, why does Mr Eltham structure his argument with the false binaries of inner city versus outer city, ALP good versus LNP bad, and immigration good versus “low politics” bad?
I put it to you that Mr Eltham is another graduate of that misbegotten school of French post-structural thought that has displaced Marxist class philosophy with corporatised culture philosophy.
Sure, by assuming that immigration is an intrinsic good in any and all forms, Mr Eltham may succeed in preventing a few migrants from being asked “where are you from”.
But, at the price of the economic marginalisation of vast swathes of Australian workers including the migrants themselves, is it really worth it?
