STRAWS IN THE WIND:
Beazley's nine lives / Over-selling Bill / Dodging the issues
by Max TeichmannNews Weekly, June 24, 2006
Beazley's nine livesKim Beazley could be that cat with nine lives, for by swinging behind the opposition to the workplace relations changes, he has regained centre ground, and captured the issue which is the only one which could bring the Government down ... tired as it is.
The conservatives' obvious strengths have been in foreign policy and military matters; Beazley in fact agrees with most of their philosophies, but has been prevented from saying so.
Fortunately for him, these policies are looking distinctly tatty, due as much to our foreign affairs people as to anything else. But Beazley should say little and let Howard and Downer make the mistakes. He should also tell Rudd to stop running for Leader and keep a low profile while the big workplace relations issue ripens.
The Australian workers and the poor can change their votes, and have done so; whereas the New Class can't, for part of their bogus identity is in being ... Left!
So Beazley doesn't have to pander to them, or keep shovelling money at their self-serving rackets. Just as the Tories keep telling the workers and the young to re-discover the work ethic, so should Beazley's Labor tell their New Class - the bourgeois exploiters of us all - to do the same.
Both parties are right.
Kim knows the people smuggling/mass migration crowd, and all their covers and facades, and sees them as dangerous and as detestable as do most of us. And he's not going to lose
another election trying to defend these racketeers, or condone the troublemaking which these alienated elements stir up between Australia and its neighbours, e.g., Indonesia.
He now has a big dynamic issue, which unites the labour movement - not splits it. So forget the Agony Column ...
Over-selling BillThe longer the Beaconsfield/Bill Shorten saga is dragged out by a media
still trying to recover its initial lavish investments, the more humdrum does Shorten appear. Just another media show-pony; just another rich man's darling. Back to the planchette board - but change your advisors ...
Dodging the issuesThree great macro-political and economic issues, demanding debate and resolution, are Water, cheap affordable Power and the means of Transportation, and Climate Change.
(We don't need to argue about Global Warming. Just say - CHANGE. For the worse).
They directly confront Australia, as they do the rest of the world, and it amazes me how the political class, the media and all the major socio-economic players are dodging these issues, as best they can.
Instead, it's micro-politics - which party is going to win, who is the most important celebrity, how will the social product be divvied up?
And even
these questions are now too hard - so it's wall-to-wall sport, and of course, shop until you drop.
There seems to be more denial of hard realities being
imposed on the public's consciousness than at any time I can remember, since the 1930s Depression.
Are these big issues
really too hard to confront? Do they
have to remain the property of talkback radio or autodidacts, or street demonstrators?
Is this perhaps all part of a general failure of political nerve on the part of Western elites? Or a secret loss of faith in the future? Loss of faith in your country, in the next generation, in the world, or in
your own future?
If so, we scare easily - too easily.
Once upon a time, we were taught there was a solution to every problem. Now that there is none to just about
any problem.
We need Aristotle and his Golden Mean roundabout now, for sport and magical thinking won't do the trick.
