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It is unfortunate that World Communications Day is celebrated in the middle of an election campaign. We have seen the worst of partisan media coverage, of shouting as a preferred form of communication, of endless experts promising Armageddon if the result is not to their taste. And yet we have also seen the best of media informing us of the issues that concern people in different parts of Australia. Without such public communication, for all its defects and excesses, our society would be the poorer.
There is an Australia that many people seldom encounter and its citizens number in the millions. These citizens live in all cities and regional towns, often in sub-standard yet costly housing, and struggle to survive week to week on low wages or inadequate government assistance.
We are now three months into the Ukraine war. From an invasion it has turned into a war of attrition that has cost many lives, displaced civilians, destroyed cities, and led to sanctions and the making of alliances with effects that have spread suffering far beyond Ukraine. In this Roundtable, Andrew Hamilton SJ, David Halliday, Michele Frankeni and Dr Stewart Braun explore the ethics of the war and likely paths to peace.
When millions of Australians look back on this Federal Election campaign, they will recall it as one dominated by ‘gotcha’ moments and scare campaigns. Personal attacks, loud and in-your-face advertising campaigns and so-called missteps by politicians have provided countless hours of talkback content. Regrettably, this has taken the focus of too many away from nuanced conversations about the kind of society in which we want to live, and the policies and vision needed to take us there.
I’d been thinking about my own productivity as an employee, as a freelancer, as a parent; about what left me feeling satisfied, worthy, competent or guilty, unproductive, unfulfilled. I’m convinced we should value people for who they are, not what they do, or don’t or cannot do. And yet I catch myself, thinking about, talking about, how much I have or haven’t done on any given day; forgetting to reflect on how I have behaved, on the kind of parent, wife, colleague, friend that I’ve been.
As the election campaign mercifully comes to an end, many of us have been musing on what the new Government should do when it comes into office. It is a difficult question to answer because both Parties have excluded any radical action to address the clear and pressing needs of Australians. Fires, floods and insurance costs highlight the need for immediate and shared action to address climate change. The simultaneous high cost of housing, the inadequate benefits available to the disadvantaged, and lack of accommodation for people in need testify to the need to address the growing inequality in Australian society.
Election campaigns can be defined by all sorts of things. Gaffes, negative ads, international incidents, public policy. It is trite but no less true to say that this federal election campaign has been much more about the first three rather than the last. The policy discussion has been edged into the election mix most seriously by various interest groups and by some of the macro party and independent candidates seeking election.
On May 3, the Prime Minister of the Solomon Islands, Manasseh Sogavare, vented his fury in parliament at ‘the continual demonstration of lack of trust by the concerned parties, and tacit warning of military intervention in Solomon Islands if their national interest is undermined in Solomon Islands.’ The targets of the speech — Australia and the United States — were clear enough.
Mother’s Day was a religious event, as was the older English tradition of Mothering Sunday in which worshippers returned home to their ‘mother church’. But as this new celebration of Mother’s Day spread around the English-speaking world, it preserved in public and private ritual a particular idea of womanhood. It asserted that true womanhood was motherly.
The Church must speak up to be relevant, but those who seek to ‘speak for the church’ must be brave. They risk exposing themselves to claims of bias unless they stick to a very narrow agenda and speak in extremely measured terms. Yet if they are too bland they risk being irrelevant to the sharp end of political debate and their intervention becomes little more than a symbolic ritual.
Few sights are more desperate than old political parties on the run. In this Australian federal election, the challenge from independents and smaller parties has sparked a nervous reaction, much of it negative and most of it misplaced.
This year Anzac Day promises to be a subdued celebration with local events in which people who have fought in wars and their relatives can take part. Few will be able to travel to Gallipoli to remember the invasion. The focus of the day will remain rightly on the sorrow of war and not on the heroic achievements of soldiers or on deemed distinctive Australian qualities displayed at Gallipoli. The association of soldiers at Gallipoli with footballers playing their games on Anzac Day will seem not only crass but ridiculous.
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