Op-Ed: Cloning politicians

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As Australia’s new Prime Minister Kevin Rudd jauntily salutes George Bush, whispers seductively in Hillary’s ear, and out-McCains the U.S. ultra-right by committing Australia to an eternity in Afghanistan; global observers yawn wryly that Australia has manufactured a political clone; a reincarnated John Howard.

Indisputably, this feat of revolutionary genetics is unsurpassed elsewhere in the world, but few Australians are crowing about it and there are even intemperate rumours that Rudd’s distraught Australian Labor Party faithful are planning branch Davidian-style mass self-immolations on Canberra’s Parliamentary lawn… cruelly forsaken by their Messiah.

Media pundits and gurus are struggling to come to terms with the emerging reality of the shape-shifting Rudd, but more recently alerted Aussies are still frozen in horror as they contemplate the prospect of another three years under this new made-over John Howard. How did this metamorphosis occur?

On 24 November 2007, Australians punished John Howard by sacking him as Prime Minister in the most diabolically painful way; by electing an elitist female Labor Party neophyte in his own home electorate, and by casting his once all-powerful Liberal/National Coalition into the darkest political wilderness.

In point of fact, this electoral behaviour conformed to a century-old pattern. Australia’s most famous political analyst, Donald Horne, wrote in his 1964 work The Lucky Country, that Australians never vote political parties in; they only vote them out.

Howard was severely punished for trivialising Australia’s twenty-one percent unemployment (Bulletin Gallop poll, 1999; Australian Independent, 2006), instead, pulping the statistic to a miniscule three point two percent. With equal insensitivity, and echoed by a slavish media, he portrayed the contemporary economy as an Era of Prosperity when in fact fifty-four percent of Aussies had incomes below $15,000 and were dying in slow motion from malnutrition and lack of medical and dental care (Australian Independent 2006). The anger was palpable. A small side-sample survey (to the above) revealed that only four percent of voters were unaware of the true depth of despair.

Thus it was that, when the electorate consigned megalomaniac Howard into customised hell, Kevin Rudd and his posturing archangels were sucked onto the throne by the momentum of the Liberal Coalition implosion.

Although many Aussies believe that the saintly Kruddy, as he is affectionately known, will restore Australia’s former egalitarian prosperity, the majority are more cynical, and have merely been waiting for the cracks in the papal visage to show. They didn’t have long to wait; a mere four months.

The first blow fell when industrial affairs Minister Julia Gillard presented Builders Labourer Federation’s championing of underpaid and exploited workers, as the callous bullying of gentle employers. She then made it clear that workers did not have the right to go out in support of other striking workers; a century old fundamental human right.

Then, in spite of the social and economic devastation wrought by decades of tariff removals, which included destruction of two thirds of the nation’s family farms and one third of Australia’s manufacturing sector, the Minister for Trade Simon Crean, offered carte blanche entry into Australia by India’s labour force; and laid out the red carpet for trans-global corporate predators Tata, INFOSYS and UNISYS, to build on their current Aussie job-destroying outsourcing missions. Presumably, this also includes their new global partners Wal-mart, Coke, the Israel/US nuclear industry, Monsanto and others.

And this was only the preliminary betrayals. Kruddy’s Kohorts have now made it clear that the three decades-long impoverishment of workers has only been a softening up for the pogroms to come.

Notoriously vindictive John Howard, in a moment of weakness rather magnanimously ordered small welfare agency debts written off (invariably incurred through agency error). In an act of unprecedented sadism, Kevin Rudd has actually reversed this decision and directed investigators to pursue even the tiniest debt. The primary victims, of course, are people who live in acute hand-to-mouth poverty. Good one, Kev.

Sinking the boot even deeper, Aboriginal Affairs Minister Jenny Macklin announced that recent Federal colonisation of traditional Aboriginal communities in the Northern Territory will become permanent, with governing administrators reporting to Canberra each year. That restoration of family/clan authority is the proven formula for ending reactive dysfunctionalism, is simply ignored; as is the evidence that denial of self-determination is at the heart of all Aboriginal community problems.

All of these betrayals have caused most of the nation to realise that the new regime shows every sign of being significantly harsher than under Howard; and many now realise that both men serve the same masters.

Meanwhile, Australia’s economy is in trouble. With imports at a thirty percent higher value than exports, it is only China’s ore and gas purchases that prevent a more overt recognition of bankruptcy, yet with a decline in US imports from China a commodities boom slow-down has already commenced. Does Rudd have a plan to save the sinking ship?

It is widely acknowledged by community-based and commercial observers that inflation in Australia is largely generated by the actions of two entities: manipulative oil companies and their rising fuel prices; and by price-hiking of supermarket monopolies, Coles and Woolworths, who between them have an 80% strangle-hold on groceries and consumer items.

Does Rudd have viable options? Yes. Unlike other governments in the world, the Australian Government has the power to reduce retail fuel prices from $1.39 to 12 cents per litre simply by removing fuel tax, and disestablishing the Oil Price Parity Agreement in which Aussies pay foreign oil companies international prices for Australian-produced oil.

And as for Coles and Woolworths, Government can regulate their profits.

However, rather than contain this vicious profiteering; surely the very purpose of government, Kevin Rudd permits the Reserve Bank to incrementally increase interest rates every month or two; a futile and disastrous exercise that is destroying a new round of small businesses, preventing an entire new generation from owning a home, and forcing rents and mortgages to levels that swallow from one half to two thirds of family incomes. It was recently published by national consumer research agencies that 300,000 Aussies will soon be living on the streets. We suspect that this figure was surpassed years ago.

It is finally dawning on Aussies that there is no significant difference between the two major political parties; that they are colluding Tweedledum and Tweedledee. The two-party system is just that, a system.

Consequently, small parties, independents and their supporters; social objective organisations, including the Small Business Forum and even Christian groups; have swept aside the political chaff and identified the central causes of Australia’s socio-economic polarisation; the collapse of family farms and manufacturing under the impact of tariff reductions and removals. Thus they formed a coalition of their own, the Tariff Restoration Bloc (TRB).

As TRB organisers point out, both miners and manufacturers have widely condemned the ideologically-driven tariff removals as economic insanity; noting that Australia is the only sovereign nation to have gone down this road. Restoration of tariffs will automatically recreate the three million full time jobs sacrificed over three decades, delivering this result in less than five years. With the re-invigoration of family farms and manufacturing, national wealth will once again be distributed across the demographic spectrum.

Obvious supporters are workers, farmers, manufacturers, unionists and the many pro-family lobbies. And the bad news for Rudd is that most of his own party branch and union members will enthusiastically support tariff restoration. When the tariff restoration campaign commences on a more visible level, his power base will be consumed from within, as well as from without.

The irony is that Rudd will be condemned forever by history for treacherously defending tariff removal, when the real blame should be chiseled on the tombstone of his former ALP colleague, the late Senator John Button.