The Null Device

2015/9/15

And in Australia, there is a new Prime Minister—the fifth in a decade—as Malcolm Turnbull wins a Liberal Party leadership spill, ousting Tony Abbott.

On one hand, it must suck to be Abbott right now, having become the shortest-serving Australian prime minister since Harold Holt (and yes, shorter than That Woman), and, more to the point, missing out by a few days on the generous pension former prime ministers are entitled to. It's particularly wretched timing for him; one wonders whether he chose it to escalate any disloyalty from his underlings into a personal attack on his livelihood, or whether he became so unpopular that those who deposed him decided to teach him a lesson in the process; a condemned despot so unpopular that a firing squad of his peers, without a word said between them, unanimously decided to “accidentally” aim for the wrong side of his chest. (Having said that, there is a limit to how much pity one can feel for him, given that he is bound to land, quite comfortably, on his feet. After all, the coal industry takes care of its own, and if anyone was its own, it would have been Abbott.) In any case, here's the relevant First Dog On The Moon cartoon.

On the other hand, while Malcolm Turnbull seems like a breath of fresh air compared to Abbott (a small-minded reactionary authoritarian evoking, more than anything, the demented bush patriarchs of outback gothic films like The Cars That Ate Paris and Welcome To Woop Woop), he is hardly progressive or forward-looking in the grand scheme of things, and has made clear that there will not be a sudden change of direction. There will be no carbon price, no same-sex marriage, no renewal of environmental or research funding, no reversal of restrictions on wind turbines, and no review of the mass surveillance and “national security” laws rushed in; there's even money that the federal government will keep trying to restrict environmental challenges to coal mines, and push Los Angeles-style freeways onto an unwilling Melbourne as well, because we don't do socialist public transport here in 'straya. And, of course, Australia will keep torturing refugees, but then again, that is bipartisan policy, so that is to be expected. There is the possibility that, in the fullness of time, Coalition policies will gradually drift towards pragmatic moderation, or at least that future policies won't be littered with unhinged “captain's calls”, but that's probably as much as one can hope for.

One thing Turnbull is more likely to do, however, is lead the Coalition to victory in the next election. Over the past few months, the opinion polls were looking disastrous for the government, with each poll getting worse. Had things kept going as they did, then come the next election, the Labor Party could have nonchalantly bumbled to victory through the wreckage, all but unnoticed. Now, it looks like the ALP won't win without actually convincingly arguing its case to govern, which means that, short of the Coalition imploding again, it's unlikely to win.

The current leader of the ALP is Bill Shorten, a man without qualities who's mortally afraid of showing any difference from the government. Shorten, who came out supporting Abbott's massively unpopular paramilitary stop-and-search operation in Melbourne after the government actually called it off in the face of protests. Shorten, who spent four hours drafting a tweet in response to Abbott's ouster. Shorten, whose party rubber-stamped every bad Coalition policy passing through the Senate, as if afraid of what the Murdoch press would say if he didn't. Shorten, who put the “loyal” in “Loyal Opposition”.

Were Shorten to face his own spill over the next few months, it is not clear that things would change; none of the other potential candidates acceptable to the factions seem to show any more promise. Beyond that, it is not entirely clear what the Labor Party actually stands for, other than wanting to win elections. It is not the party of a mass industrial proletariat, because no such thing exists any more. It is not a new progressive party or a radical libertarian free-market party or an old-school socialist party, or, indeed, any other specific kind of party, because the interlocking stand-off of factions preempts any commitment to any direction or other. It is, quite simply, an enterprise which has outlived its original reasons to exist, leaving only one goal: its own self-perpetuation, the ultimate sole purpose of any bureaucracy. A pointless, self-perpetuating bureaucracy riddled with warring factions: the Ballmer-era Microsoft of politics.

Perhaps Labor's electoral loss will, in the long run, be for the best, especially if it is by a large margin. A resounding defeat for Labor could hasten the old party's euthanasia, and, with that, perhaps increase the likelihood of a progressive alternative government more fit for purpose emerging. Of course, the price of that would be more years of uninterrupted Tory rule, though, in the current situation, can that be helped?

australia politics 0