an extraordinary reprimand of Australia by the United States

Let the record state: never has a United States president reprimanded Australia on Australian soil and never has an American president so bluntly and firmly as a positive ally told Australia it is strategically in the wrong.***

We are a country in which the major parties fervently support the alliance with the United States, for reasons positive, obtuse, opportunist, cringely, take your pick, pick your moment.

The overturning of the mean spirited and stupid policy perspectives of the Abbott government on several issues at the G20, the pigheaded and fantastically misguided imagination that they could change the world by being their stubborn ideological selves, as hosts who insist that guests eat old pig and drink plonk, has come a cropper.

Read and admire:
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/nov/15/g20-obama-puts-climate-change-in-spotlight-as-australian-agenda-sidelined

Of course, of course, Abbott and his team will say this is just a passing moment in American president, this president will be washed away by the tea party in the Congress now and the presidential elections in two years time. But this is to fail to understand history and become entangled with US politics as not before. I wrote in an earlier entry that a very important thing for any new government is to understand the feasible and know how to get it. They have not learned from the bitter lessons of their budget, and indeed Abbott, playing anti-statesman, has whined to the G20 about his failures. And will be scoffed here and abroad. If I were there I would leave early like Putin may or may not.

*** Nixon and Kissinger despised the Whitlam Government but did not make it a centre point of any speech. Nor did they take the opportunity to address a receptive Australian audience in Australia to lay it all out and get swooning support for things the Australian government hates.

Cate Blanchette at the Whitlam memorial service

A wonderful intelligent speech by Cate Blanchette reflecting on the Whitlam initiatives, as they made possible her life path at various stages, as they changed the nature of Australia, as the placed women where they should have been, in equality and the placing of the arts at the centre of national life.

Where Pearson's speech contains an important catalogue of the rolling back of legislation and attitude discriminatory to indigenous people, Blanchette weaves the history of removal of discrimination against women.

Transcript at SMH

ABC News video, as uploaded to YouTube.

Excerpts:

"The loss I felt came down to something very deep and very simple. I am the beneficiary of free, tertiary education. When I went to university I could explore different courses and engage with the student union in extracurricular activity. It was through that that I discovered acting.I am the product of an Australia that wanted, and was encouraged, to explore its voice culturally.I am the beneficiary of good, free healthcare, and that meant the little I earned after tax and rent could go towards seeing shows, bands, and living inside my generation's expression. I am a product of the Australia Council.I am the beneficiary of a foreign policy that put us on the world stage and on the front foot in our region. I am the product of an Australia that engages with the globe and engages honestly with its history and its indigenous peoples.I am a small part of Australia's coming of age, and so many of those initiatives were enacted when I was three... 


... Women were probably the main beneficiaries of free tertiary education. So here today I may stand as an exemplar, but if you combine the modernising and enabling capacity afforded women by his legislation you can begin to see that the nation was truly changed by him through the arts and through gender, thereby leading us towards an inclusive, compassionate maturity. So much of this achievement is directly attributable to policy initiatives Gough Whitlam began with a series of reforms to extend the degree and quality of social opportunities to women in Australia."

Noel Pearson at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam

Noel Pearson delivered an extraordinary speech-of-a-generation or more at the memorial service for Gough Whitlam yesterday. It began from his own experience of the massive changes to the situation and opportunities of Aboriginal and Islander people made possible by the Whitlam program. It went on to deal more broadly with issues for Australia, the transformation of Australia. Speaking before positive people and also in front of those who would corrupt it all again.

The transcript is here. The ABC News video-audio as uploaded to YouTube is embedded below.

Here are some excerpts:

"Of course recalling the Whitlam Government's legacy has been, for the past four decades since the dismissal, a fraught and partisan business.Assessments of those three highly charged years and their aftermath divide between the nostalgia and fierce pride of the faithful, and the equally vociferous opinion that the Whitlam years represented the nadir of national government in Australia. 

Let me venture a perspective.

The Whitlam government is the textbook case of reform trumping management."

 ...

"...In less than three years an astonishing reform agenda leapt off the policy platform and into legislation and the machinery and programs of government.The country would change forever. The modern cosmopolitan Australia finally emerged like a technicolour butterfly from its long dormant chrysalis.And 38 years later we are like John Cleese, Eric Idle and Michael Palin's Jewish insurgents ranting against the despotic rule of Rome, defiantly demanding "and what did the Romans ever do for us anyway?"Apart from Medibank and the Trade Practices Act, cutting tariff protections and no-fault divorce in the Family Law Act, the Australia Council, the Federal Court, the Order of Australia, federal legal aid, the Racial Discrimination Act, needs-based schools funding, the recognition of China, the abolition of conscription, the law reform commission, student financial assistance, the Heritage Commission, non-discriminatory immigration rules, community health clinics, Aboriginal land rights, paid maternity leave for public servants, lowering the minimum voting age to 18 years and fair electoral boundaries and Senate representation for the territories. Apart from all of this, what did this Roman ever do for us?"

...

 "I don't know why someone with this old man's upper middle class background could carry such a burning conviction that the barriers of class and race of the Australia of his upbringing and maturation should be torn down and replaced with the unapologetic principle of equality. I can scarcely point to any white Australian political leader of his vintage and of generations following of whom it could be said without a shadow of doubt, he harboured not a bone of racial, ethnic or gender prejudice in his body. This was more than urbane liberalism disguising human equivocation and private failings; it was a modernity that was so before its time as to be utterly anachronistic. For people like me who had no chance if left to the means of our families we could not be more indebted to this old man's foresight and moral vision for universal opportunity. Only those born bereft truly know the power of opportunity. Only those accustomed to its consolations can deprecate a public life dedicated to its furtherance and renewal. 

"This old man never wanted opportunity himself but he possessed the keenest conviction in its importance.For it behoves the good society through its government to ensure everyone has chance and opportunity.This is where the policy convictions of Prime Minister Whitlam were so germane to the uplift of many millions of Australians."

Thank you Mr Pearson.

after Whitlam

This is a very comprehensive obituary/history of former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam whose death was announced yesterday. According to the news director of the Sydney Morning Herald, Gough insisted that the retired author of that piece be the one to write it. It is nonetheless sufficiently dispassionate as well as warm.

A friend observed to me yesterday that perhaps the upswell of feelings about Gough would bring more people to political engagement. I hope he is right.

Noely, already and very independently engaged with politics, wrote warmly thus yesterday.

Another friend a week ago said that while one might expect in the normal way of things that politics swings from right to left and back over time, he was apprehensive this time that this pattern would be broken. I shared that concern, especially given the pace with which the present government is disassembling governance generally.

Which makes mental re-engagement more urgent. There is no time to waste.

The seeming assessment of the ALP that it can just await the defeat of the government is childish, in my view. People want something on offer, want a vision. Otherwise it is not opposition that wins, it is despair of the nation at democracy and politicians that will continue, government will become more elusive, more people with run to hide behind scaring conservatives, fewer will register to vote and fascism gets centre stage.

I recall again the observation of the late Norman Mailer at the outset of the Iraq war in 2003:

Fascism is more of a natural state than democracy. To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad. Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it. 

You can listen here.  And for future access I've put a link in the right column.

Let us write this large:

"Democracy is a state of grace that is attained only by those countries who have a host of individuals not only ready to enjoy freedom  but to undergo the heavy labor of maintaining it." 

I only suggest replacement, for Australia, of the word 'attained' with the word 'sustained'.

Someone wrote to me today about wanting to return to Australia and participate in politics. We all have to engage and participate. Read (I suggest some sources in right column), think, join in. We seem at a point where the whole political discourse may need to change, existing parties displease many. But we either join a party to get it the way we would like it to be or we dream and create some means of doing something constructive, not just grumpy.

For the record, I offered this short comment at The Guardian, among the warm notes and snide comments of trolls, on Gough's passing:

Here is a nice note on the air of uncertainty beginning in Australia in 1974.

Insight into that time: see also Wikipedia on Clyde Cameron, the flavour of his early years, his sustained confidence, his labour policy reforms, his employment of young people who became great, and his falling out with Whitlam. This line is important: 

It was the tragedy of Labor politicians of Cameron's generation that Labor spent almost a quarter of a century in Opposition from 1949 to 1972, with the result that Cameron, like many others, spent his best years out of office. 

This was a major problem for Labor, on taking government in 1972. The notion of ministerial responsibility and cabinet solidarity never did sink in for some. Doubtless contributing to the necessity of Whitlam's whip approach if he wanted to get stuff through the cabinet, also contributing the the massive array of new programs and ideas adopted. Recent years have demonstrated the preference of the electorate for the simple and the fear of the complex. When I was a candidate for local government in 2008 the news editor of local commercial radio, to whom I had mentioned the old dictum of the 'thirty second grab' (getting your point clear quickly), kindly advised me that for the news for the older listeners' station it was down to 16 second, for the youth station 8 seconds. Abbott knows.

On the other side of the parliament in the Whitlam years, the conservatives sustained and played their 'born to govern' 'natural government' psychological state and self-projection, which continues to play well in many minds.