Today I got a roll of toilet paper in a box. At least it was unused, unlike a similar package received by a colleague during the Wik debate.

I thought it was one of those vituperative, ugly personal hate contributions I sometimes get which make me feel ill all day. Such diabolical communications reached a crescendo during the Wik/One Nation debate in 1997/98.

 

But when I read the accompanying letter, it was a missive from the left, an entity called “Flush Productions”. “Val” was marketing toilet paper wrapped in a picture of John Howard with the caption “Wipe the smile off his face”.

“Despite the ongoing knockbacks, including the unwillingness of anyone in Australia to manufacture it, the appropriateness of wiping your bum with John Howard pushed me along. People are loving it, including Liberal voters. It seems to reaffirm their views and empower them,” Val wrote.

 

I must be a Queensland puritan, I suppose, but the “present” struck me as just as unfunny as the far-right hate mail I get. Still, it exemplifies the level of hate on both sides of a bitter political divide in Australia these days. It’s funny that this sits side by side with distaste on all sides with our two major parties.

 

In this column, an emerging theme is the conviction that Australia is, in effect, a one party State, serving not its public but party political self-interest and the ideology favoured by interest of people and groups with the real power who direct it.

 

Several right wing commentators have noted with disdain (fear?) that left of centre opinion – after seeking to bury Pauline Hanson alive – is reassessing her effects since her demise.

I, for one, now believe that Hanson’s scream from the margins had several positive benefits, including forcing the powerful to acknowledge the suffering of the losers from globalisation and trying to assist them join the party.

Perhaps most importantly, it showed all dissatisfied Australian voters that voting for minor parties – left or right – could pack a huge punch at the establishment parties and their policies.

 

Now, both parties are chasing the disaffected One Nation vote with conservative social policy. But this too will destabilise traditional support for Labor and Liberal from social progressives, and force them to consider the Democrats or the Greens, particularly in the Senate. In the ruck, perhaps fresh more open conversations between traditional enemies will ensue.

 

Today, a contributor wrote a piece responding to my essay on the effects of Hansonism (Webdiary, Hansonism Then and Now). He is a One Nation supporter, and the first of many Hansonites who’ve written to me not to hurl abuse. So, first, ROB HERRON, ON supporter, then LINDY EDWARDS on the demise of democracy in the United States, JEFF RICHARDS on how country people are turning to Labor, and LINDA BACCAUL-PETRIE on how direct action might be better than wiping one’s bottom on John Howard’s toilet paper. Four people, four topics, four perspectives. Spot the common themes.

 

ROB HERRON

 

I write to you because I just read your article on Hansonism-Then and Now and from reading it I can tell that although you are in many ways misguided, you are obviously thoughtful and sincere.

 

I am, no doubt, what you would consider a Hansonite. However, I am urban and about as middle class as you could get, as are, not surprisingly, most of my acquaintances. I’ll tell you if you have a minute why I and many of my friends feel the way we do.

 

First off, we liked her as a person for her courage, her sincerity and her straightforwardness. Clearly she was unsophisticated politically and not very educated, but when she spoke it was with the intention of revealing rather then concealing what was on her mind.

 

She stood for small government and individual freedom. She stood against policy being determined by the loudest minority lobby group. As some of these groups were ethnic based she was quickly labelled racist.

 

As a white urban middle class, middle aged, self supporting male with his own business I don’t have a group lobbying for my needs. I felt just as disenfranchised by lobby group politics as do rural folk who felt abandoned by the National Party, which they saw as just a lackey to the Liberals . I believe the Nationals response to the gun legislation was particularly disappointing to country people.

 

I believe Pauline largely appeals to people who feel they have been ignored by lobby group major party politics. The lefties had the Greens and the Democrats, the rest of us had Pauline.

 

Probably the most talked about part of Pauline’s policy has been her opposition to multiculturalism. I couldn’t agree more. I resent the influence of the ethnic lobby groups and I resent the deleterious effects on my lifestyle that has come about as a result of mass migration from certain countries over the last 20 years.

I rather liked life in Australia in the 50’s and 60’s before the influx of migrants, especially from the Middle East and Vietnam. Sure the food was boring but there was far more trust and harmony in the community.

 

However, like many affluent countries we were in need of people prepared to do the shit work and had to import them.

I have friends of many nationalities, a wife who is Chinese and my only employee is Filipino. I don’t care where someone comes from or who they worship, how they dress or what they eat as long as they come here to obey the law and work for a living and contribute to the community as they can.

Whether I want to socialise with people depends on their personality not their race.

 

However I do greatly resent the predictable increase in crime and social security fraud which some of these migrant groups have generated and the laws which have been set in place to counteract this which have removed freedoms I used to have.

 

As far back as Roman times the decivilising effects of being at war was understood. I believe the Hawke-Keating government also knew this but chose to bring these migrants here anyway in the belief they would provide a pool of Labor voters with scant regard for the welfare of the nation as a whole. I think my views on this are typical of most supporters of One Nation I know.

 

Many workers may resent this migration from an employment point of view and looking at the big picture I see their point, but personally now they are here if they get the job because they work harder or for less then good luck to them.

 

Pauline was also very much in the spotlight in relation to the Aborigines, whom she argues are being given benefits beyond what is good for them. Again I feel she is right. Being an urbanite I have had very little experience with them, however my impression is that they are a primitive race of people who are having a great deal of difficulty coping with modern civilization. To pretend this difficulty is simply cultural and not in part genetic only adds to their feelings of inadequacy.

 

They are obviously in need of special consideration, but to make them as welfare dependant as we have done is too add to their woes. So too is the current climate of having them feel that the secret of success in life is to work on increasing white guilt for past injustices real or imagined in the hope of a windfall.

 

The flagrant dishonesty in many of the claims where there is a mentality of the end justifying any means is also less than endearing.This is what I would call a real “cargo cult” mentality. Clearly many have started to believe their own publicity, and as a result are destined to be bitter and twisted for the rest of their lives regardless of what concessions they win.

 

How much special consideration they are entitled too and how best they can be helped is open to debate by people far more knowledgeable than myself, but I do know why One Nation has a much support by people who you might call rednecks but I would not.

 

Her opposition to International treaties signed often, if not in secrecy then very much on the quiet, and then used to justify governmental action without popular approval, also has popular support for the sheer absence of democratic process.

 

And then there is the strange alliance with the Greens over globalisation. The Greens, I assume, hate it because they distrust all business, particularly big business, (and it doesn’t get any bigger than the multinationals) and over concerns about how they treat the environment.

 

One Nation supporters who are pro small business see globalisation from a different perspective. While it may be of benefit to third world countries who get the factories they would not otherwise have, its benefits to Australia are more doubtful. Sure we have cheaper consumer goods in the short term, but we have also lost many small businesses which couldn’t compete against dumping . We have a currency worth less than half what it was and a huge overseas debt.

 

To many globalisation seems to be little more than an opportunity for huge multinationals, mostly American, to bully their way to higher profits. The US hedge funds run our dollar up and down mostly down for their profit. They hold down the price of one of our major exports, gold, again for their own profit. Then we have our primary producers trying to compete on world markets with subsidised products from Europe and the US.

 

The big question is why lefties like yourself are so impressed with it. In answer to your pondering, many ordinary, sedentary middle class folks wished for once they had the energy vigour or time to join the rent -a-crowd protesters who were out on the streets.

 

You were quite right in your criticism of the lack of response by the opposition and the press to Howard’s Fascist (you liked that, didn’t you) Army Mobilization legislation. It was appalling that such significant and dangerous Act like that was just ignored by the press.

 

Now I don’t expect you to agree with most of what I have said or to share my beliefs, but I feel confident that such views are the basis for much of the support for One Nation. I think also that the decision by the major parties and most of the press to defend the status quo by ridiculing Pauline herself from some assumed moral high ground rather than attempt to debate the issues swung a lot of Australians who realised she wasn’t getting a fair go into her camp.

 

Add to that the screaming psychos who turned up to protest at her public appearances and a universal distrust of politicians and journalists who were her obvious enemies and there you have it. Were it not for the immoral but clever use of the preferential voting system by the major parties she would be a significant presence at both state and federal level.

 

The falling away of support is not a signal of any change in attitudes but rather a response to the disintegration of the party. Pauline seems for some reason to be able to make bitter enemies too easily, and David Oldfield for all his political adroitness is such an obvious shithead that there seems little chance of the phoenix rising.

 

As you so rightly surmised, the dragon is just sleeping.

 

LINDY EDWARDS

 

Could it be that the American election represents the inevitable evolution of democracy?

 

No sooner have human beings come up with a system for doing things we start trying to muck it up. The moment well meaning folk have designed a system and enshrined it in law, the players in the system set to work finding ways to make it work to their advantage.

 

They break the system down into its constituent parts and work out how to exploit each part to best effect. They end up engaging all sorts of practices that are not in keeping with the spirit of the system, but they are legal and within the rules. (For the most common examples just ask the tax office.)

 

The US election might reflect a high point of this process in democracy. What began as an endeavour to ensure that the diverse views of the community were reflected in our Parliaments has become a race to secure 50%+1 of the vote. It has become the art of targeting the median voter. It is about positioning yourself so that 50% of the population find you marginally less offensive than the other party.

 

Through a process of systematic polling and careful analysis the political strategists derive package of almost identical policies targetted at exactly the same voters (tweaked slightly to make sure they remain slightly less offensive than the other side to the otherwise ignored 50% of their constituency.)

 

The consequence is that two party democracies end up with two parties representing the same 5 per cent of the population, and the rest of the community is left voting for the party they dislike least. Those in power become almost indistinguishable, and the bulk of the community is left feeling alienated, disgruntled and unrepresented.

 

The US election may reflect the high point of the science of political strategy and the low point of democracy. Two party democracy may have evolved to the point of its own demise.

 

JEFF RICHARDS

 

I read years ago that Hitler was of the view that the United States was a fundamentally brittle political system that would break apart if Germany and Japan were able to inflict major defeats upon it before US industry was able to totally mobilise for war. It was false hope, thankfully.

 

Yet the 2000 election has shown how brittle are the threads that bind America together. A powerful federal state is unable to override counties who can still write their own ballot papers. There are many contradictory forces that are being mobilised. Blacks, Latinos, Jews have gone to bat for Gore; White Americans from that huge middle and southern belt have gone for Bush.

 

I read in the latest edition of Village Voice an article by Donna Ladd on ‘The Right to Bear Arms’ lobby and how they see Gore as attempting a ‘non-violent coup’. I think that there must be some concern among ruling elites that the most powerful state on earth is having a constitutional crises that could escalate into a civil crisis. Given that both Gore and Bush are essentially creatures of big money, you would have thought one of them would have been ordered to pull his head in a bit sooner than this. Perhaps ruling elites are themselves divided?

 

As for Australia, surely the great change will be when the National Party, Australia’s largest political organisation, will see the stupidity of continuing their Coalition with the Liberals. Why they continue to stay in a government that is screwing their constituencies to the wall is probably a testament to the excessive qualities of loyalty that exist among farmers. Rural people have much more in common with labour than the liberals. I don’t have much confidence in the ALP, but at least one could do deals to stop the wholesale retreat from non-urban regions. The Nationals should marketwise their parliamentarians and offer their votes for sale to those parties who will develop the best regional planning models and throw the largest amount of money at rural constituencies (and promising a New Commonwealth Bank and the return of Telstra’s communications infrastructure (not content) to state ownership).

 

LINDA BACCAUL-PETRIE

 

Apropos of your Web Diary about journalistic integrity, the following was sent today to the Courier Mail yet I understand that most papers won’t print letters or articles that have appeared in other publications?

 

Isn’t this in itself yet another crazy type of news-room-policy-censorship which prevents good messages getting out to ‘the people’? (I’m not saying my particular letter is necessarily so great – just making the point!)

 

I say ‘the people’ because in my opinion a large part of news room journalism policy is that because of dominance of profit driven publications and market-forces strategies, interest in informing ‘the people’ has become secondary, and instead skewed and emasculated into interest only in ‘our readership’, a clearly defined demographic which in itself marginalises potential readers not interested in the genre of the publications ‘spin’ and becomes just another form of exclusionist censorship.

 

My letter about the social conscience of Australian Telstra Share Holders follows.

 

 

A lot has been debated about a philosophy of economic rationalism and questions raised about the growing distance between the ‘haves’ and ‘have nots’ and the social conscience of the human beings who run multi-national organisations, which also depend on profits from the ebb and flow of the stock market.

 

World wide globalisation, downsizing and the mind boggling mega-mergers of late that have created the largest companies ever seen on our planet, at the cost of enormous job losses, ought be of real concern to us all.

 

The size of these corporate giants and our feelings of distance from the stage on which most of this is played out quite rightly makes us feel powerless and that all this is beyond our sphere of influence.

 

However in Australia, like the European successful trial of several companies such as Volvo which issued shares to its workers to encourage active interest in their jobs and the future of ‘their’ company, the Federal government has unwittingly turned a potential for real control and a relevant say in how the farm is run over to the ‘mums and dads’ of Australia, with the issue of shares in Telstra.

 

Now, when it’s the jobs of their fellow Australians on the line and the standard of services and service delivery to their Ozzie neighbours and the future of where the profits of our own home grown giant will go, to be considered, I wonder if these thousands of Ozzie small share holders can rise to the occasion, above the pangs of the hip pocket nerve, and perform any better than the multi-national moguls have done in the same situations?

 

Or will they too just roll over, give a yawn and join in the profits-first revolution?