The oppression we had to have

Thoughts on the election of Barack Obama, and Kevin Rudd's Australian Labour Government, one year on.

“Since the general civilization of mankind, I believe there are more instances of the abridgment of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpation”
- James Madison, 4th US President 1809-17

Until a year ago it seemed that John Howard might go on for another decade, prosecuting an unwise war against the clear wishes of the majority, refusing to sign the Kyoto Protocol or say ‘Sorry’ To Indigenous Australians, among many other signature ideological positions that had embarrassed Australian internationally for a decade. Yet, since the ‘correction’, no-one seriously questions Kevin Rudd’s remedial policies as anything other than the good and proper actions of a responsible government. The election of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States was, until September this year, an impossible dream. Now the world can hardly wait for January 20 2009, when it takes effect.

The parallels between Australian and the USA are striking, and commentators have variously hailed the Obama victory as the end of the Reagan era, the demise of the Neocons as a political force, the realization of Martin Luther King’s dream, or The Age of Aquarius finally getting underway after a shaky start. Regarding the last, apparently it’s just before breakfast. And all because an intelligent, well-educated, charismatic black man has been elected President. Or, in Australia’s case, a swotty bloke with reasonable positions on almost everything.

Yet if we look at the elected leaders of most Western, Latin American and Asian democracies since WW2, it’s apparent that the trend has long been towards centrist, consensus politics. The hard-right exceptions prove the rule… Nixon, Thatcher, Reagan, George W Bush and, in Australia, John Howard.
But Eisenhower, JFK, LBJ, Jerry Ford (the Accidental President), Jimmy Carter, Bush Senior and Clinton could all be described as reasonable men governing from the political centre, and pursuing a broad consensus foreign policy. Even Nixon, for all his avarice and dishonesty, ended the war in Vietnam and reached out to China, and Reagan succeeded in ending the Cold War, albeit with a military build-up that eventually sent the Soviet Union broke.

In Australia you could broadly characterise Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke and Keating as centrists – if Whitlam’s policies seemed radical at the time, they are mostly uncontroversial now. In the UK John Major, Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and the current Tory leader are broadly of the same political stripe, along with every postwar Prime Minister of Canada, Japan, most of Europe and the Balkans, including most former Soviet vassals.

If the USA and Australia have merely ‘corrected’ back to the centre with the election of reasonable and humane technocrats, they now resemble most other democracies, and have much in common with a generation of European and Asian leaders who support multilateral solutions, good-neighbourliness and diplomacy over bombastic unilateralism. The real aberrations have been John W. Howard (JWH) and George W. Bush (GWB), those brothers in arms, the nagging exceptions to the centrist thesis for most of the last decade.

If it’s true that people get the government they deserve, then Australians apparently deserved, for a decade spanning the millennium, a hard-right ideologue, dog-whistler, wedge-meister and dirty fighter who governed in the interests of his own supporter base – essentially the entrepreneurial class. There are some credits of course (gun control, East Timor) but Australia’s longest sustained economic boom was just their dumb luck… a result of the Hawke/Keating reforms and a worldwide economic growth bubble, now popped. The rich got a lot richer, and the trickle-down effect was enough to keep many voters employed, happy, and spending big on their mortgages and credit cards.

The USA has followed a similar trajectory. Clinton/Gore got the economy competitive again, and back in the black. They governed from the political centre, built multilateral approaches to security, terrorism, Israel/Palestine, the Middle East, climate change, trade. It was promising, for all Clinton’s shortcomings as a man, and there was every reason to expect a continuation under stolid Al Gore. And yet, with a ‘stolen’ election and no popular mandate, the USA took its hardest turn to the right since Reagan. The effect was immediate – relations with China, Russia and the Middle east soured almost overnight, and Palestine, where the Intifada had been quiescent, erupted again. Was 9/11, obviously long in the planning, fast-forwarded in response? We’ll never know if it would have happened under Gore, but we can suppose that the response would have been more measured, and wiser counsel would have prevailed.

Instead a cabal of arch-conservatives … Perle, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and of course the arch wedge strategist himself, Karl Rove, got their way on policy. And their political vehicle was a not very bright man – untraveled, unread, deaf to the lessons of history and his great forbears in office. It was a perfect match – “The haves, and the have mores”, to quote Bush himself.

The strategy was a simple, and much like John Howard’s approach – make the people afraid, then pick the issues that will divide them one against the other – abortion, intelligent design, gay marriage, prayer in schools, immigration, dole bludging, unions, ‘handouts’ for minorities, to name the most common ones. Obviously it helps if there is evidence of a real threat, and 9/11 and the Bali bombings were certainly real threats, easily conflated in the public mind with Iraq, Muslims, boat people (or criminal Mexicans), so that “defending our way of life” became a catch-all for any number of bad policies. We were sold a vision of the world designed to make us insular and compliant, and persuaded that civil liberties should be curtailed, compassion towards genuine refugees suspended, multiculturalism discredited, and Aboriginal reconciliation abandoned. And over it all hung the threat of a return to 17% interest rates under those dreaded bogeymen, the ‘Union Bosses’.

And it worked, surprisingly well, and for a surprisingly long time, in both Australia and the USA. So, why did the people turn when they did?

One might argue that in Australia GWH had become not just ‘out of touch’ with average voters, but had been seriously out of whack with the underlying centrist trend in Australian politics from the beginning. The unexpected capture of the Senate in 2004, and the consequent legislative arrogance, alerted (and alarmed) the electorate. George Megalogenis’s incisive demographic analysis of the 2007 vote (Labour Market Sees Red, The Weekend Australian Dec 1-2, 2007) quoted Paul Keating as saying “Every now and than the conservative parties of Australia decide to bare their fangs with the full ideological bite … They never really change, it is just sometimes they decide to disguise themselves. I think John Howard just ran out of disguises”. Or to put it another way, the dog-whistle suddenly became clearly audible, and voters grew tired of being taken for fools. I suggest the turning point was the Haneeff affair, but others see it as cumulative, from Tampa and ‘kids overboard’ through AWB, David Hicks, ‘blame-the-states’ and the whole sad litany of wedge issues that worked brilliantly for a while, then just suddenly just stopped doing so, to the evident annoyance of their architects. And now a similar change has rolled through the USA, for very similar reasons. The final straw was of course the financial meltdown – the one thing that conservatives are supposed to be good at is the economy, and credit is the opium of the people. When that fell over, it was all over.

In Australia and now the USA, it seems that this was an ‘oppression we had to have’. Perhaps we needed to see how easily bad leaders can hoodwink us with fear. Not only have we got a decent Prime Minister out of it, but also, finally, a half-decent opposition leader. And Obama looks to be a genuine consensus-builder and healer – something the USA and the world badly needs.

So are we squarely back on the centrist track, or will the pendulum inevitably swing back, and how soon? The architects of the United States constitution were worldly men, and highly cynical about the motives of those in power, so they designed a fairly robust system, which has been vindicated by the election of Obama. But in what dark places will the Neocons dwell until the next time, and can they conspire to ensure that Obama fails, so that Americans turn, afear’d again, towards the next jingoistic hawk of the hard right – Sarah Palin anyone? Will the discredited Australian ideological right heed the lesson? Malcolm Turnbull understands better then most to succeed again the Coalition must recapture the middle ground, and that people want consensus and co-operation. There really isn’t much policy difference between him and Rudd, but the chances of genuine bi-partisanship seem as distant as ever. Barrack Obama will no doubt appoint a number of Republicans to his cabinet, as Democrats do, and is serious about moving beyond the old 'Red State/Blue State' divide, but with our outmoded adversarial system that just can’t happen in Australia. A really bold move would be to break with tradition and appoint Turnbull to the cabinet’s economic advisory group. It would ensure a genuinely non-partisan approach to economic management – we face grave economic times after all – and perhaps Turnbull would stop saying idiotic, opportunist things that he plainly doesn’t believe.

And, finally, we should enshrine a Bill of Rights in the Australian constitution, and by so doing ensure our broad social contract is never again hijacked by megalomaniacs and ideologues of any persuasion. We are one of the few Western democracies without such an instument, and it is reassuring to hear that the Attorney General is serious about, if not full-on constitutional change, then a Charter of Rights which Parliament will be obliged to consider when passing legislation.

'Course we can.