It’s Midnight hour for ‘woke’ politics

John Howard once revealed that his favourite Midnight Oil song was Beds Are Burning. This naturally triggered countless sniggers that he would nominate a song whose message – centred on giving land back to Indigenous Australians or at least “paying the rent” – could hardly be more diametrically opposed to his own politics. It’s a song Midnight Oil pointedly played at the Sydney Olympics closing ceremony to embarrass Howard over his refusal to apologise to the Stolen Generations. Those sniggers, I suspect, missed the point. By adopting the song, Howard was showing he was happy to roll with the punches, to be in on the joke, that he wasn’t precious.

But whatever the case, what other song could Howard plausibly have chosen? US Forces, for the man who followed George W. Bush into Iraq? Blue Sky Mine, for the prime minister whose support for the mining industry suggests he might honestly believe “nothing’s as precious as a hole in the ground”, and whose politics on workers’ rights wound ultimately to WorkChoices?

Credit: Illustration: Simon Letch

No, there is no option, and that includes not nominating a song at all. Howard was asked because Labor had just announced Peter Garrett as a candidate in the upcoming election, and Midnight Oil was such an Australian institution that prime ministers were more or less obliged to like them, in the same way they are obliged to have a football team.

Which, in a time like ours, is an extraordinary thing to consider. Here was a band whose anthology consists almost entirely of protest songs, yet whose success is so thoroughly mainstream that even Coalition prime ministers will play along. There is no one like that today. Indeed, could such an act even exist now? If Beds Are Burning were released this week, it would be dismissed in several quarters as woke nonsense: a divisive, radical-left screed completely out of touch with mainstream Australia. It would then immediately become a way of planting one’s flag. There would be no neutral way of liking the song, because your pre-existing politics would determine the matter. In 1987, it blasted across commercial radio. Lord knows how a station like Triple M would handle it today.

The point here is not that Australia was a more progressive place in 1987 than in our time. Surveying the ubiquitous acknowledgments of Country, the broadcasters and sporting bodies frequently noting Indigenous place names, the change in any number of social attitudes on race, gender or sex, that would be a difficult argument to make. It is hard to imagine that “paying the rent” had more devotees in 1987 than it does today. What has changed is our response to such things; our way of receiving political ideas. What changed are the conditions that made Midnight Oil possible.

Peter Garrett and Midnight Oil perform Beds Are Burning at the 2000 Sydney Olympics closing ceremony.Credit: Julian Andrews

And no one has described them better than Garrett himself. Here’s what he told me in an interview last year, which has stayed with me ever since in a way so few interviews do. It’s worth reproducing his response in full:

“I think that the internet’s changed everything as we know, and people will react very instantaneously to things, either like or dislike … I mean, they think about it, but it’s also very reactive. Whereas I think with our stuff, we gave people a chance to reflect on it.

“Because one of the things that really strikes me looking back on it is that in some ways, we wanted to push the boundaries of music-making and telling our truth and those sorts of things – which I think are important for artists – but at the same time, we liked to get down and dirty: play hard and play loud, go to where the people were – go to the suburbs – and actually sweat it out with everybody else. And that gave people a chance to like, dislike, think about it again, chat amongst themselves about it, shout something off the floor of the pub to me about it and I’d shout something back.

“So, it actually evolved, dare I say it, in a more organic and timely way, and over time I think it meant that whether you agreed with what we were saying or not, you believed it was worth listening to because you could see where it had come from.”

There’s so much in this for anyone interested in the debate about whether, in the wake of Donald Trump’s re-election, 2024 was the year “woke politics” finally died. That’s too messy a debate, characterised by too many fuzzy terms, for me to enter here in full. But it is clear that the ascendancy of a particular firebrand style of progressive politics has waned, that a repudiation of some sort – even if it ultimately proves modest – has occurred. And I’ve been thinking about Garrett’s observations ever since, because I think they help us understand why.

“Sweat it out with everybody else.” So much is contained in that phrase. Garrett may be expressing forthright positions, but he is not issuing verdicts from on high, lacerating all who fall foul of them. He’s not detached, separate, pure. He’s among. He’s face-to-face. He’s not demanding obedience: he’s accountable to the heckles. In short, he’s describing a relationship of peers, not proteges. He sees his audience, and they see him. Midnight Oil may have become iconic, but in the scene he describes, they are not behaving like icons.

The relationship is instead one between people, and not abstractions. Abstractions have no feelings, no sincerity, no experiences that form them. They are mere symbols you apprehend quickly, use as you wish, then discard. But people, you give your time. And it is only with time that persuasion becomes possible. If woke politics has been repudiated, it is that form which violates these rules. Which demands obedience over exchange. Which presumes bad faith in its opponents, and has no patience for persuasion. Indeed, which has no time for time.

Perhaps then, the objection is as much to a style as anything else. An objection that embodies a fairly basic principle of political advocacy: that if you have no time for people, they will eventually have no time for you.

Waleed Aly is a broadcaster, author, academic and regular columnist. He is a lecturer in politics at Monash University and co-host of Channel Ten’s The Project.

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