These days, when they dig something like the Suburban Rail Loop, they let the archaeologists in for a while.Building workers found it weird when it started decades ago, now they seem to like it. Who wouldn’t? Bottle caps, pens, lapel pins, fallen down cracks of floors, dozens of teeth beneath old dentists’s floors, heartbreakingly once, at the old Commonwealth Offices site, a canvas-enveloped ‘mash note’- a letter declaring affection, usually hand-delivered, but not directly to the object of attentions - caught between the boards of a double levelled floor, spared the gnawing criticism of the mice. Slipped under the door, and sliding through a crack to oblivion, and perhaps, a love that never was.
When future renovators of the suburban rail loop call the archaeologists in, they are going to have a field day with working out what the Andrews-Allen era was. There it will be, beneath the mud, preserved on the day it was killed off by Ben Carroll a man who even his supporters call a ‘K-mart Keating’*. This extraordinary event, bloody and wonderful and disastrous and much more , what was it, what was it all about?
There are two completely separated courses of explanation for that. If the Andrews-Allen era had a character, it was…what? Socialist, with Victorian characteristics (ie privatise everything not nailed down)? Left corporatist? Gangster progressive?All of these? It claimed to be a genuinely socialist government, combining categorical shift of infrastructural ‘plant’, with progressive policies. These were, are, meant to combine to make real change in the way we live, and who we are, a more mobile, empowered, society with more opportunity, with multiple forms of inequality addressed.
There is and was something magnificent about that. But so much of it has a double character. The skyrail, yeah sure, it looks great, feels like you’re in the future etc. But it only shaves a few minutes off a rail journey, benefits cars and makes people more likely to use them, and carved up the centre of numerous living neighbourhoods. The Metro tunnel? This vast ten year project, for one line, and with no contribution to increasing capacity on the northern lines it was designed to improve? The Suburban Rail Loop? I……………… . The vast state owned land sell-off to business, under the guise of remedying the past crime of the Housing Commission Flats -places which people now know and call home and want to keep? The hospitals and schools? Great. But then the seeming, just giving up. The genuinely lethally dangerous firebombings caused by a tax measure. And finally, the gangsters….
But that’s the visible political angle. There was a more prosaic reason for much of what was done, and that was a result of our geographical-political structure as a nation. Without doing something, Victoria and Melbourne, in relation to NSW and Sydney, were heading towards a sharp decline, as Melbourne’s status as the industrial heart of Australia slipped into memory. The circuits of global capital run through Sydney; Melbourne was facing a return to dowdy second city status, and a decline spiral resulting. The answer? Well Keynes famously said that if you can’t do anything else to create aggregate demand, put money in old bottles, bury them, and tender out the digging up. That’s pretty much been the Andrews-Allen approach. Pay Lendlease et al a motza to dig holes in tunnel shapes, tell them the unions they’ll work with, let them charge vast wages bills, and the money goes in all directions. So it has proved. The final part of the trick is the political one, to keep the vote of a cashed-up, asseted working class whose interests now point in a Liberal direction. The CFMEU, ETU and others made it explicit to tradies in ads: with Andrews Labor and its successors, you’ll have uninterrupted high-paid work your whole career. They duly delivered two huge victories, sealing a generation of Labor rule, with the Ted Bailleau interregnum, barely noticed, not least by Ted Bailleau (appropriate that he was deposed by a country vet, whose name sounds like a lethal chemical. Never did a spill look more like the mercy killing of a dumb animal than the despatch of Ted Bailleau).
What to think? So much of it is magnificent, so much of it is stupid. The money sucked from education and health operations to build, build , build. The CFMEU given free run because their factional weight was required to keep the left in power. The multiple taxes - land tax above all - that corporations could weather, but which killed small businesses, exactly as conservatives say Labor does. Treaty, yeah! Then giving every new school and hospital an indigenous name only, so that none of them reflect recent community history. Some names? Of Course, absolutely. But all of them simply makes indigenous culture a political tool, a progressive bludgeon (mainly to make sure theynot outflanked by the Greens in the inner city). If you think that wasn’t good for a few per cent for One Nation, think again. Getting people in the exurbs, in the country angry to such a degree that they scream at politicians in the street. And much of it done from the position that the enemy was within the gates: basically the Conroy right, heritors of the Catholic right tradition, a forelock tugging, conservative workerism, willing to accept paltry gains, and a lack of real change, under the Divine Order of proper authority and frugal comfort.
Well they were Right in holding off the Right, but now the Right is here. Courtesy of what’s now known as the SouthEast left, formerly the (Alan) Griffin left, formerly the old Federated Clerks Union, wrestled from the right by Lindsay Tanner and co, in the 1980s. People like to say there’s no real political difference in the factions, or sub-factions, but that Left has long been more willing to ditch any real appetite for grunt change in favour of the mildest of Rawlsian mild amelioration. But really, of course, by now, they had no choice. Some staged breach within the party was the only way to gain a chance of victory, even if it’s like watching Valkyrie on Channel Nine again. ‘Long live sacred Boronia!’ Bang bang bang.
Truth is, it was worth it, because there is a chance. The Libs remain in disarray, largely because dropping Brian Loughnane in as Prez was a decision made without realising that the dude is actually older than his wife’s blow wave style. He’s made peace, but the party’s central apparatus is rusted up, as Brian demands sugar water for breakfast and has his Bath Chair pushed into the morning sun. It also has One Nation coming at it, and is led by what appears to be the Head Prefect of Fintona proposing to be Premier and Treasurer at the same time. Unfair, but that’s how some will see it. If Kmart Keating can persuade enough swinging voters that he can keep the animals under control, and take the party back to a Bracks-Brumby model, they will look askance enough at the right to get Labor in the zone. It may then enter its fourth decade in near-uninterrupted power. Worth a shot. Politics is a mash note to the future, with no guarantee of requittal, or that it was ever even received.
**
Pauline Hanson has had a fresh win against Greens Senator Mehreen Faruqi in the ongoing battle over speech. Technically, it was a loss, as the Federal Court upheld an 18C judgement against Hanson over ‘certain remarks’. But whatever happens in this case, Hanson wins.
To recap: Following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, Faruqi made remarks to parliament of the ‘colonialism’, racism’ etc etc type:
“Condolences to those who knew the Queen. I cannot mourn the leader of a racist empire built on stolen lives, land and wealth of colonised peoples. We are reminded of the urgency of Treaty with First Nations, justice & reparations for British colonies & becoming a republic.”
La Hanson shot back on Twitter/X:
“Your attitude appalls and disgusts me. When you immigrated to Australia you took every advantage of this country. You took citizenship, bought multiple homes, and a job in a parliament. It’s clear you’re not happy, so pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan - PH.”
The 18C tribunal ruled (via The Guardian summary):
The tweet portrayed Faruqi as a “second-class citizen” who took advantage of Australia and who, as a migrant to the country, “should be grateful for what she has and keep quiet” – a position he declared to be “exclusionary”.
Stewart found Hanson’s comment that Faruqi should “piss off back to Pakistan” was a “variant of the slogan ‘go back to where you came from’” which he said was a “racist trope” and a “strong form of racism”.
This struck one as bizarre at the time. That has not been lessened with this new judgement. For a start, we were told that 18C would not be applied to general political exchange of opinions, which this clearly is. Secondly, it doesn’t treat Faruqi as a ‘second class citizen’, but as an equal adversary whose view is being contested. It does treat Faruqi as having a particular type of relationship to Australia. That doesn’t demand special duties, but it can surely be used to make a case about what attitudes are moral.
Thirdly, Hanson’s argument is in no way comparable to’go back to where you came from’, in its isolated expression . That is used to reject someone absolutely, as the person they are. But Hanson is making a case: you think the country is so irredeemably bad, then you aren’t, and won’t, be happy here. So why not return to the other place where you have right of residence?
What’s bizarre about the legal reasoning claiming this to be racist, is that it’s the advice you’d give to anyone, neutrally, if they complained about somewhere they were. It’s not the only way to deal with one’s dislike of a place, and Faruqi gives the other course of action: change it. But it’s a perfectly reasonable course of action to consider. Faruqi’s vehemence with regard to Australia’s claimed nature, surely suggests it as a reasonable course of action.
This leads to the most inexplicable reasoning of all: that it’s racist to suggest someone go and live in the other place they have residency, if they hate this place. That is of the logical form if person A has emigrated to country Y from country X, and believes country Y to be irredeemably bad, they should return to country X. If any country in the world can be substituted for X, how can the proposition be racist? It seems like a basic category error.
This appears to be a ruling based on what Hanson’s statement is like, in terms of other statements, rather than what it is. But language is a web and a weave. Things closest together have different meanings. ‘People like you don’t belong here’ said to a disabled person at the entrance to a bar is wrong and appalling; said to a visibly straight couple at the entrance of a gay bar, may be brusque but has a totally different meaning and legitimacy. The rulings against Hanson are an absurd restriction on robust exchange of views.
Hopefully the High Court will reverse the lower decisions, whatever anyone thinks of Hanson’s intent or character. Whatever happens, Hanson has won. A further legal loss will simply cement the idea among many of a monolithic political-progressive establishment. The left will lose from this fresh expansion of what racism is. With the Greens now not the insurgent party against planetary destruction by capitalism, but the defenders of the powerful using the law against people who momentarily irritate them. The very heart of the elite.
News that a portrait of ECAJ head Alex Ryvchin had won the Peoples Choice Archibald Award set some tongues muttering about political campaigns. Not true in this case. The votes have to be made at the gallery where the travelling Archibald exhibition is at. If ‘the lobby’ has managed to organize umpteen thousand Jews to see a portrait exhibition, they’d deserve the W. No, the prize seems legit.
The reason that is not immediately admitted, is because this is the second Rychin portrait entered for the Archy in two years, and the first was used for a sleazy political stoush. That earlier portrait was by Johannes Leak, the Australian’s hereditary cartoonist, and was rejected for the longlist for reasons that became clear when it was seen: it was a technically competent, but dull and lifeless pic, which only confirmed the sharp limits of Leak fils talent.
But then The Australian took over, and staged a campaign to suggest that the non-selection of the echt headshot was an exclusion. Oz art critic Christopher Allen was happy to lend his authority to such a suggestion. As, pathetically, was Rychin himself.
Come 2026 and the new Rychin is in the longlist, painted by an artist whose previous subjects include Ben Roberts-Smith. This one shows Rychin in white singlet and jeans wading in whitish-waves on the beach, tefillin wrapped around one arm. It’s certainly a better picture than that of Leak fils, but it still looks like the sort of thing you’d pick up in a Chapel St gallery cos it would match the new sofa. Whatever its merits, its earned public success is overshadowed by the political stoush to which its predecessor was put to use, and the suspicion that it was possibly chosen by the judges, consciously or otherwise to avoid News Corps’s thuggish targeting. As always with these kampfs those who stage them, don’t actually give a damn about the actual kultur.
Ben Carroll’s little daughter, who he couldn’t look in the eye if he deposed Jacinta Allen, ousted as part of factional deal on leadership, and replaced by Stephen Conroy’s daughter
Barry Dickins two weeks dead, now telling St Peter about that Passiona and Choo-Choo bar he had after the Royboys - Gorillas VFL Elimination Final waiting for the RACV to come jumpstart Trev’s borrowed yellow Celica in Waverley car park, Bata Scouts soaked through to his Holeproofs, still only up to 1981…
Getting popcorn and a boysenberry choctop at Hoyts Chadstone, that’s the real Odyssey
Hamas disarmed, but only by comment about how fetch their green headbands are.
Lily D’Ambrosio’s career sent to political graveyard, finally reunited with her branch
Till next week……
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