Ghost Notes #3
Short takes on things I have been watching, reading, listening to, thinking about, or longing for
The Sounds of Silence: This article in The Guardian is no doubt correct in what it says, that the LNP and Labor are in the process of stress-testing their policies and talking points in preparation for the next election. But what is most interesting about the analysis is what it leaves out: the nearly one-third of voters who no longer vote for either of those “two” parties. This is what happens when your political analysis is top down rather than bottom up and it is as a mindset apparent in the “major” political parties as much as it is the legacy media. Any article about the next election, about Australian politics in general, that leaves out the crossbench is as nonsensical as a review of The Lord of the Rings that doesn’t mention the Elves.
I am just a poor boy though my story’s seldom told: Half the time, the value in paying attention to mainstream media is not that they fulfil the function of democratic watchdog, let alone perform any sort of straightforward educative role. Their use-case amounts to what their reporting reveals about the underlying assumptions, values and biases of the political class itself. How often, for instance, do we hear them talking about the “two sides of politics” or “both sides of politics” as if there were no other options available? It’s extraordinary. They even talk about “climate wars” as if Labor and the LNP were on opposite sides rather than both being involved in different sorts of delaying tactics. Are we meant to conclude from these slips of the unconscious that we are being well informed? Don’t make me laugh. Here’s David Speers with his Insiders last Sunday talking about prospects of legislation to ban kids from social media: “We're not going to see anything happen anytime soon on this; there are still trials of this technology and finding the right way to do this. But is there also an argument that at least both sides of politics, the two leaders, saying we don't think kids should be there?” Speers occupies a rarefied spot in Australian political reporting and he didn’t get there by being insightful. His go-to approach is to frame almost any given issue in terms of Liberal Party talking points and pass it off as a counterfactual. This clip of him interviewing Penny Wong is a case in point, so blatant that Wong pushed back hard.
Even more interesting is this exchange with Samantha Maiden and Patricia Karvelas in which our Dave expresses his shock that ordinary voters might have a say in how a democracy is run. Talk about a top-down mindset. Karvelas raises the fact that the NACC chose not to investigate the people referred to it by the Robodebt Royal Commission and notes that because of that decision, the NACC itself is now being investigated. Speers smell a rat: “…I also think it's curious as to why the inspector of the NACC has now decided to launch an inquiry into this and, looking at the statement they put out yesterday as to why, it seems this is purely because of a public pressure campaign rather than any evidence that NACC has done anything wrong here. And this is I guess, a defining benchmark. If people are unhappy with the NACC deciding not to look at something just flood the inspector with complaints and they’ll launch an inquiry of their own.” Oh, Dave! The horror!
American Tune: Every so often we go through a period where some rightwing/ conservative member of the political class decides to make an idiot of themselves1 by insisting that Hitler was leftwing because his party had the word “Socialism” in its title. The most recent example I can remember was journalist Peter Van Onselen running the line on Twitter, and I think it was the proximate cause for him deleting his tweets and leaving the platform. As ever, the truth is much more complex (and interesting) than such attempted gotchas—Hitler was a lefty!—allow, and I am itching to write a long piece about the things we can learn from the Weimar period. You don’t have to oversimply the matter with straight Trump=Hitler comparisons, but we’d be foolish not to acknowledge the related dynamics. This recent—and fabulous—piece by Matt Stoller is worth your time, and if you know your Nazi history it will set off alarm bells. Hitler was basically economically illiterate and was, for the longest time, anti-capitalist. This wasn’t because he was a lefty, Peter, it was because he was nationalist antisemite. Capitalism, according to Hitler, was a Jewish plot. So was communism. “National Socialism” was his politically expedient attempt at resolution. Hitler didn’t believe in class as an organising principle of history (as the Marxists did); he believed in race. His economic program was about Germans owning the means of production, all the better to wipe out Jews. He courted city workers (unsuccessfully mainly2), and he eventually realised he had to get industrialists onside too, and that’s eventually what he leaned into. On 26 January 1932 he agreed to address the Industrial Club of Dusseldorf. He specifically linked private property with dictatorship, telling his audience that “It is nonsense to build upon the concept of achievement, the value of personality and thus personal authority in an economic sense while rejecting the authority of personality and replacing it with the law of greater numbers – democracy – in a political sense.” He didn’t entirely win them over that night, but eventually an accomodation was reached, as they were all terrified of a communist takeover and my enemy’s enemy is my friend, right? Plus, there was enough antisemitism in the room to sweeten the deal. In Stoller’s piece about Trump, he notes that Trump has dialled back the Maga-friendly support for the disaffected working class—livelihoods destroyed by globalisation etc—and is also no longer bashing big business. This is what my friend James Livingston calls “the classic fascist turn”. And Stoller has the apropos quote from business lobbyist, Kathy Wylde: “Republican billionaires have told her ‘the threat to capitalism from the Democrats is more concerning than the threat to democracy from Trump.’” Don’t say you weren’t warned. Meanwhile, in France: same same.
A Hazy Shade of Winter: Some mid-year polls are suggesting that Peter Dutton is preferred prime minister over Anthony Albanese and, well, Anthony, we’ve been telling you for a quite a while now, haven’t we? Unless you start recognising that politics has changed and that you are leaving a gaping policy-and-values hole that Dutton and co. can fill up with whatever nonsense they like, you are going to be in trouble. But I think it might be too late: not that the Libs will win in 2025, only that Labor has passed a point of no return. A piece in The New Daily lamented that a “Labor government might be expected to side with vulnerable minorities, but Albanese and Marles seem intent on identifying with the powerful, despite the powerful holding them in contempt and continuing through their media dominance to show it,” and look, at some point you just have to consider that that is who Labor really are; that Albanese is the logical outcome of four decades of Labor neoliberalism and nothing will change that. The same poll that showed Dutton leading as preferred PM, gave Labor a primary vote of 28%—down from 32.6% at the last election—and honestly, how much more obvious do we-the-people have to make it that we think the two-party system is no longer fit for purpose? Kos Samaras from Redbridge has data that shows that a pox-on-both-your-houses mentality is developing around Dutton and Albanese and they (Redbridge) are suggesting that “a hung parliament and a Labor majority are almost equally likely outcomes, while there is essentially zero probability at this stage the Liberal-National Coalition will win more seats than Labor.” The LNP primary vote of 36% looks even worse when you remember it is made up of two parties. In the same poll, the Greens’ primary is on 14 and the independents are on 11 (though that’s a bit hard to measure), so both are competitive with the disaggregated LNP figures. Again I say, why do journalists persist with this myth of a two-party system? Why do commentators like David Speers keep saying “both parties” and “the two parties” as if that is all there is? It is so revealing. And you watch: if and when there is a minority government, very few in the mainstream will accept the outcome as the will of the people. They will start running scare campaigns about “hung parliaments” and instability.
Kodachrome: We’ve had a bit of a Kôji Yakusho moment the last few weeks. The Japanese actor stars in two shows we have watched, the Wim Wenders directed Perfect Days, and the Netflix docudrama, The Days. The latter is about the near-meltdown at the Fukushima nuclear power plant and I’m pretty sure Peter Dutton hasn’t seen it. Perfect Days is one of those slow, lovely things that serve to remind you….
In case you worry about these things, yes, I understand the grammar here, and yet I chose to use “themselves”.
The NSDAP always did better with rural workers than they did with unionised workers in the cities. As Volker notes: “For the party leadership, one lesson of the (1928) election was to shift their propaganda focus to rural Germany. ‘There better results can be achieved with lower costs in terms of time, energy and money than in the big cities’, the Völkischer Beobachter (the official Nazi newspaper) wrote in late May. By the autumn of 1927, the party had already stepped up its efforts to appeal to the rural population of northern Germany. On 10 December, Hitler spoke for the first time to several thousand farmers from Schleswig-Holstein, assuring them that the NSDAP was particularly keen to represent their interests. In April 1928, to head off potential criticism, he amended Point 17 of the party programme, which called for a ‘law on the confiscation of property without compensation for public purposes’. The amendment stipulated that this demand only concerned ‘illicitly acquired property’ and was aimed ‘primarily at Jewish firms that speculated in property’.”
Ullrich, Volker. Hitler: Volume I: Ascent 1889–1939 (Hitler Biographies Book 1) (p. 283). Random House. Kindle Edition.
In my job, I've been interacting a lot with the brilliant Ryuichi Sakamoto. We released a documentary some year ago titled CODA, in which he reveals his passion to reverse the nuclear grip on Japan following living through the experience of the Fukushima meltdown. We can certainly add that the long list of quality content that is in no danger of being interacted with my Peter or his echo chamber.
Remarkable isn't it? There is lived experience, and expertise all over the planet loudly calling out the dangers and the heinously large costs. Yet Peter is not for turning. He's got a sort of a policy that Gina and Sky approve, and off he goes. What a backwater Australia is at times.
Cracker of an article TD - uplifted my spirits immensely. Well fancy that: Kôji Yakusho - I saw 'Perfect Days' recently and thoroughly enjoyed it. I was immediately transported back to Japan 2019 when I visited sites in an attempt to understand how a country and its people can deal with so much turmoil - Hiroshima/Nagasaki, 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami & of course Fukushima. Naimi was a town of 20,000 upwind of Fukushima that was evacuated in an afternoon following the melt-down. Quite humbling to walk the streets and wonder how anyone could have coped in a situation like that. Thanks heaps for bringing 'The Days' to my attention. Cheers