Turning away: Australian politics makes for poor entertainment
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The Yippies had the fun slogans during the tumultuous presidential primaries in the United States in 1968. Apart from some designed to shock and annoy, such as the inversion of Herbert Hoover’s 1928 slogan by promising pot in every chicken, it urged people not to vote at all, on the grounds that no matter who they voted for, a politician would get in. As an alternative, they purported to nominate a pig, Pegasus, for president, saying that if he failed to deliver, he could at least be eaten.
In the US, one does not have to vote, but many in the new left had cut their teeth in voting rights campaigns in the American south in the early 1960s, and later, in protesting the Vietnam War and the draft. What were they doing urging abstention from, and apathy and indifference about politics?
They were responding in part to a strong feeling that the two major candidates, Richard Nixon and Hubert Humphrey were Tweedledee and Tweedledum, and that, at least as far as the Vietnam War was concerned, it didn’t matter much who won. There had been anti-war candidates in the primaries – George McGovern, whose slight early success persuaded the president Lyndon Johnson not to run again – and (as a late convert) Robert Kennedy – but the sense of pointlessness of any crusade for power was magnified by the assassination, during 1968, of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy. And, later, by the emergence of a third-party candidate, the racist bigot, George Wallace of Alabama. Conventional politics, so the despairing thought, was controlled by big interests, big money, smoke-filled rooms and party power brokers. Change was more likely to come from confrontation on the street.
Australia, about the same time and after, was also facing protests and demonstrations, mostly about Vietnam and conscription, if generally without the turbo-charging of wide-scale racial conflict. Two years later, street protesters were described by Liberal national service minister Billy Snedden as “political bikies pack-raping democracy”. But if there was plenty of cynicism about the political process, (accentuated among these groups by the manner of the fall of the Whitlam government seven years later) there was also some spirit of optimism about what could be achieved by organised political action, whether in the parliament or in the streets. It was not all Whitlam, even if his coming came to represent the period. It was also a coming of age of the dreaded baby boomers – the first Australian generation to grow up outside the shadow of war and depression, and in a general prosperity. That very prosperity prompted feelings that ours was a society which could improve, be better, and, in particular, do better by our women, our Indigenous population, our schools and our universities, our hospitals and health care system, and our cities and infrastructure. For those watching close by – and I was often as a young reporter conscious that I was watching history happening – they seemed heady and exciting times.
My bringing this to mind is inspired by conversations with non-Canberra people of about my age, about politics, federal budgets, and personalities, who seem totally fatalistic about what the future might bring. They are not uninterested in outcomes, but have no faith (and plainly have never had any faith) in their capacity to affect them. Politicians, generally, disgust them, as does politics, but to say that exaggerates a bit how much they think about them or it, because they are almost entirely unengaged in the political process. Or, in any significant way, even in the communities in which they live.
One would like to reproach them – to argue to them, as one does to younger people, that they ought to pay attention because it matters. Because the processes, untidy and acrimonious as they might be, are involved with the rationing out of public resources, and the making of choices that affect all of our lives, as well as the philosophies and approaches with which these choices are made. And because nothing makes the stewards of those resources more careful in the making of those choices than the sense that they are in the public spotlight, able to be called to account not only in the parliament, or in courts and tribunals, but on the stump, in the pub or walking about in the street.
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