Labor’s Election Blues

It seems to me that the Victorian Labor party is doing everything it can to lose the upcoming state election to the Liberals. It was only a month or so ago, that Labor was in a seemingly unloseable position for the win, but with the latest Dictaphone saga it seems that we are now headed for a 50-50 election. Daniel Andrews has already shown his inability to act when crises arise, a major problem when your party may well take office. The Victorian people will ultimately decide the next Premier on which party they feel is dominating the political scene (which at the moment is neither party) and whose party will govern in a more convincing way (after the Dictaphone scandal probably neither party). A month ago, I would’ve said that Labor had it in the bag, now with this scandal, coupled with their support for the East-West Link, an infrastructure catastrophe, the Frankston bullying saga and the fact that very few Victorian governments get beaten after one term due to the want for stable governance leads me to believe that while Labor might have the edge, the Liberals will come very close.

 

My Take: Power and Rape

India’s rape problem has been in the news recently, particularly for the extent that Indian culture has allowed these atrocities to happen. The latest story, reported by the AFP, is that of a Bangalore private school roller skating instructor who is alleged to have raped a 6 year old girl at Vibgyor High School and has been arrested. This is a new low, and has outraged parents at the school for obvious reasons, particularly as it happened in a classroom in an expensive institution with a long list of well-off alumni. My take is that the biggest problem with this is that not only was this allowed to occur, but that it seems in modern society, such actions by people in power seem commonplace. For example, Rolf Harris’ indecently assaulting girls as young as 7 years old, that he has only recently been convicted for. It seems to me that a number of the people who are famous and are in position of influence, public life or wealth are predatory in nature and are drawn to fame and power due to the easy access it allows to get to innocent victims. Rape in India has been a big issue since the 2012 Delhi gang rape, in which a 23 year old woman and her male friend were so brutally raped and killed on a bus, and is made even worse by the lack of justice which allows criminals to kill women while knowing they’ll get away with it and also India’s patriarchal culture in which the victim is often blamed for the rape.

Australia’s racist heritage

Australia’s history was born out of racism. In order to colonise the landscape of this great land, the British settlers killed and pillaged the country in the name of colonisation. It was in Tasmania where the settlers committed genocide and very nearly wiped out the whole Aboriginal population in that state. It was in our culture that the people who first inhabited our land were treated as flora and fauna, and were given voting rights in 1967. It is in our country that the excuse of “terra nullius” was used by settlers to justify the killing of more than 65,000 Aboriginal people from 1788 to 1838 in Queensland alone, in a war for which there is still no true recognition.  It is in our country that Aboriginals, despite making up 2% of our population, have 25% on the imprisoned population, and over 300 Aboriginals have been killed in police custody since 1991. Yet this is the country that is constantly labelled “the lucky country”. Our history is riddled with racist atrocities and genocidal activity and we must never forget this.

My Take: The Middle Class: an integral part of liberalism

The first mentioning of the middle class was in James Bradshaw’s 1745 pamphlet “Scheme to prevent running Irish wools to France”. The term in Bradshaw’s world meant the people in the class hierarchy in between the proletarian peasants and the bourgeois nobility. However, this term came to mean the petite bourgeoisie, people who are educated, have qualifications and work in professional industries like business and managing roles. In theory, this seems like a best of both worlds scenario, with the education and fiscal security of an upperclassman without the image of an aristocrat, however, in modern politics, of the ideologies currently in the worldwide political arena, only one has a vision that includes the middle class as its centrepiece: liberalism. While many libertarians and neo-liberals see the class struggle as between the rich and the rest (also called social Darwinism) and many socialists see the struggle as between the working class and ruling class, modern liberalists sees no class struggle and a utopian harmony where the upper, middle and lower classes live in peace. Unfortunately for liberals, neoliberal ideology is ascendant in many countries including Australia, where both major parties have spread neoliberal ideas such as privatisation of state assets and deregulation and the United Kingdom. These ideas have put our respective middle classes in grave danger. In the United States, while the ultra-obstructionist Republican Party continue to pass bills attacking the middle class, President Obama continues to simply sprout lines on why the middle class needs to be saved rather than actually acting on it at a time when poverty rates are at 15% and rising ever higher and the percentage of people not in the labor force is at a 36 year high and continues to rise. The most shocking stat is that just 44% of people consider themselves to be middle class as people start to realise that their dreams of living the high life and the American Dream are just a dream. The middle class in the west will continue to shrink so long as liberalism doesn’t defend it. The problems of poverty and unemployment were the same problems that were the triggers for the Arab Spring revolution.
With all the talk on liberals and conservative neo-liberals, seemingly the mainstream political ideologies today, it maybe time we think about the socialists, whose concept of the working class proletariat rising up to form one “middle class” is a concept that is foreign to the liberal view of the middle class being the educated, aristocrat-like group it has become.
My take is that the middle class is a concept that in its current form is fabricated by liberals to keep the class struggle between proletariat and bourgeois away from the limelight and that really their efforts to keep a flourishing middle class will be undermined, by both the neoliberals, who are the default ideology under capitalism, and the socialists, the radical fringe, who won’t back down from the working class, rather than the middle class being the answer to inequality. Within 50 years, whether we are governed by capitalism or socialism, the middle class in its present form will be a forgotten concept, never to be seen again, or if it does exist it will be a group, not a class.

Defensive Rights in Sports

Whenever I hear someone saying that the AFL’s scores are too low or that these rolling mauls are becoming too much like rugby, my reaction is one of disgust because defence is becoming an endangered species, on the brink of extinction. Defence, together with offense are the main facets of any team game. The critical idea of defence in sport is to stop the other team scoring through any legal means possible, and thus coaches use tactics and structures to minimise the damage by the other team on the scoreboard. Many of these tactics and structures have been banned by sports and leagues to restore a “beautiful aesthetic” to the game. In the AFL, Paul Roos, then coach of the Sydney Swans was criticised by AFL CEO Andrew Demetriou for his team playing “unattractive football”. This by a man, who in his time as CEO, did more than anyone to restrict the role of defence in the AFL. Many supporters of the AFL, mainly of clubs that lost to Sydney during that premiership winning season, agreed with Demetriou, saying the football Roos’ team played was “ugly” and various other denigrating phrases.

Defensive tactics should be and will always be an integral part of any game, but many bosses of sports have put in place draconian measures to make offense the order of the day. One example of this in the AFL is the deliberate out of bounds, to stop teams clearing the danger of an opposition attack to the safest part of the ground. In cricket, there are the ridiculous field restrictions to stop captains and coaches putting fielders where they want to. And from the king of the dumb anti-defensive sport, basketball, there is the defensive 3 seconds rule, basically stopping elite level teams from a zone defence, because most zones revolve around blocking off the key and lay-up opportunities, and also there is the blocking rule, which means an attacking player can run into a defender, and if the defender moves even slightly he/she is charged with a foul.

The second part of the anti-defensive rights movement is the idea spun to us by sporting head honchos that high scoring matches are more popular to watch than low scoring games. This is a fallacy because the reason people go to games isn’t to watch a beautiful looking match, it’s instead to see their team win. To most fans it doesn’t matter if their team wins 23-22 or 125-115, a win is still a win. Evidence of this is that the highest scoring VFL/AFL Grand Final of all time, the 1972 decider between Carlton and Richmond, when the score was 177-150 had a lower crowd than the 1968 one when the score was 56-53. People would rather see a strong battle between offense and defence, but too often in sports, defence is neglected and abused to create the illusion of a “beautiful” game. We need our major sports to find a way to allow more defensive tactical rights to coaches and teams to stop offense having a monopoly on modern sport.

My Take: The Left’s troubles with unity

Ever since the very first political party, approximately 1500 years ago, the issue of unity, has been a key part of the battle for power. In Australia, with the most recent Labor government from 2007-13, we saw disunity raise its ugly head with two elected Prime Ministers knocked from the party leadership, some of which due to bad poll numbers, but mostly because of selfish traitors, namely Simon Crean and Bill Shorten who put their own promotion ahead of the team and it’s ability to govern and gain support. At 2013 Federal election, Labor was smashed winning just 55 seats to the more unified Coalition’s 90, much of this was put down to the crippling disunity that destroyed its reputation and dropped Labor’s first preference vote to its lowest point since 1934. The Coalition has had its disunity troubles too, namely recently when Malcolm Turnbull attacked Prime Minister Abbott’s best media buddies Andrew Bolt and Alan Jones, but their troubles are nothing like Labor’s.
While this lack of unity behind political leaders is a major issue, my take is that the bigger issue is the unity or disunity on policy issues, otherwise known as ideology. Again, Labor comes across to me as a party that aims stridently for ideological unity, an impossible idea when your party has 44,000 independently thinking members. This has led to two main factions, the Left and Right and further factions have sprung from these. In recent years, these factions have been in a bitter brawl, with the Right faction generally dominant. The difficulty for the Left is that on the conservative side of politics there are certain policy views that a large majority share, like low taxes, capitalism, low spending on services and small government. Now, of course, there are differences, but they are the exceptions not the rule. There are so many different positions, for higher taxes for the rich, for lower taxes for all, for small-l liberalism, for democratic socialism and so on. On the Left, differences are the rule, not the exceptions. This is why unity of thought will always be difficult, particularly for left-wing organisations. Why doesn’t the Left, like Socialist Alternative, value their differences and not try to always unify with a party that is similarish, because in modern left-wing politics, purity of thought should be everything.