Change That Never Was
Author: Peter Kuttner
Date: 01 November 2009
On the face of things, politics has changed in Australia and the United States with the replacement of longstanding conservative governments by left of centre administrations. But the appearance of change may now be giving way to underlying continuities. Peter Kuttner reflects on the familiar tone of current debates.
Among leading liberal democratic nations, the US and Australia are now swimming against the electoral tide which has seen conservative governments assume, or about to assume, power. A majority of voters in both countries wanted change in their national politics. They chose a more liberal, compassionate government after having to contend with eight and more than eleven years respectively, of two of the most hard-nosed conservative governments since World War Two.
The newly elected leaders, Barack Obama and Kevin Rudd, promptly obliged with commitments on the environment and social justice. The relief and euphoria was such that it led their more ardent supporters to hope that what they regarded as the extreme and uncaring politics of George W Bush and John Howard had become history. However, as with the flagged and hoped for measures to curb excessive corporate pay in the grimmest days of the global financial crisis, it did not take long for the old ways to reappear. In the minds of the perpetrators, it seems, mere moral outrage was never going to stop business as usual.
Issues such as health care in the US and boat people in Australia have encountered the kind of response, which I suspect many of those who elected Obama and Rudd as the antidote to Bush and Howard, hoped would no longer be on the political agenda. It is a cruel slap in the face to everyone who dared wish otherwise, and it is confirmation that an ugly force is reasserting itself. In the case of Obama’s health care legislation, it has only taken a few months for malign conservatism to emerge from Republican electoral defeat and, seemingly unchallenged, shout Obama down. In Australia, Howard’s malign conservatism, having come up with the Pacific solution, Temporary Protection Visas and locking up children in detention centres, has reasserted itself in making boat people the top political issue.
After the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to President Obama, I received an email from a global, grass roots campaigning organization, seeking a million people to support him by signing a congratulatory email (which I did), urging him to push ahead with his pledges on nuclear weapons reduction, global warming, Middle East peace and measures to relieve world poverty. Obama’s election campaign was regarded as a triumph in the way it mobilised support from previously untapped voters in their millions. But where were his supporters when Obama needed them, to send the opponents of health care reform packing? It is as if, having elected him, they felt they had done their duty and had nothing more to do. If that was the case, how wrong they were. On this defining issue, Obama needs the support of millions, not from around the world, but within his own country.
The truly shameful and sad thing about the current boat people debate in Australia is that it is framed in John Howard’s populist terms of fear and loathing and is souring the nation’s mood. Howard’s arguments are being recycled by an opportunistic opposition in its attacks on the government’s policy changes, which in turn not only dictate the government’s response, but also the way in which the media discusses the question. The policy changes have been widely welcomed and are to be applauded. But because of the government’s regrettable failure to go further on the issue by knocking John Howard’s core argument for six (that boat people are a burgeoning horde of queue jumpers and thus a threat to national stability), it finds itself mired in a sordid political contest.