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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.
I have always considered myself pro-life. It’s not something I’ve felt a need to wear as a badge of honour, rather it has always been a default position. But terminology matters. Indeed, frequently, calling myself pro-life has drawn the derision or raised eyebrows of people around me, nuns and priests and radical ratbags alike, it has connotations.
I was invited to a party the night of the 2019 election. The night’s entertainment was invite-only, with long tables of bread and wine, and I stepped back from the sounds of celebration to hear the political coverage on my phone. Standing at the far window, I looked up to see people in the night below, out in the dark, silent. Behind me a party guest shouted over the noise ‘what happened?’ I looked away from those outside and answered: a loss.
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.
In purely economic terms, the upcoming Federal election is extremely unusual. The shut down of the Australian economy for almost two years because of health measures really has no precedent in our history. Only war can produce that type of shock. The Federal government’s financial response was as extreme as the state of emergency measures, including a sharp increase in Australian government debt. It remains to be seen, however, if the government gets much credit for injecting so much free money into the economy. It is unlikely.
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.
Palm Sunday alternates between March and April. When, as this year, it is celebrated in April it keeps company with a number of days that provoke us to ask what and who matter, what and whom can you trust. If it is a cruel month, it is so because it tests, even mocks, our comfortable assumptions. In a year overshadowed by manifestations of climate change, of persistence of Covid and of the horrors of war, it is not a bad month to endure an election.
In 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic raged globally, as Australia shut its borders and some states shut in their people, massive government income support was introduced. The government was a little slow coming to recognise the need for such measures. Once they had, they wanted the support rolled out as quickly as possible. Frydenberg, Scott Morrison and their colleagues recognised that a demand side boost was absolutely necessary to sustain economic activity. The government was uncomfortable, though, with this approach.
At this point, the media cycle is mostly internal, and while the media is talking to itself, Scott Morrison is talking to a rapidly growing base with significant resources. The devil isn’t in the headline here, the devil is in the detail, in the appeal itself.
The experience of the Covid-19 pandemic has been like the aerosol used in those heist movies, where the cat burglar breaks into the museum and sprays the air to reveal the invisible lines of power that criss-cross the space between the door and cabinet where the treasure is kept.
Peter Dutton has recently argued that funds for defamation actions should be a ‘workplace entitlement’ for Members of Parliament (MPs). I’d like to repeat that another way: the Honorable Peter Dutton, Commonwealth Minister for Defence, would like the taxpayer to fund MPs to sue members of the Australian public for defamation.
The Glasgow United Nations Climate Change Conference has been advertised as an effort to focus on sustainable environmental solutions. What got much less attention, if any, is that it is probably at least as much about having a sustainable financial system. Many noted that China, did not send its leader: Xi Jinping, president of the world’s greatest CO2 emitter. There was also another significant absence: the financiers who are hoping to profit from the trillions allocated into climate change projects.
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