War for the Planet of the Policy Apes

Australian governments have in the past 20 years embraced the lazy path of handouts to households as a way of avoiding reform and buying votes, writes Dan Petrie.

Dan Petrie. Picture: Mark Cranitch.

Australian governments, state and federal, have in the past 20 years embraced the lazy path of handouts to households as a way of avoiding reform and buying votes in a forgettable chapter that at best resembles the societal structures first observed in Pierre Boulle’s novel Planet of the Apes.

The novel was later adapted to become a successful movie franchise where the story’s premise focused on different classes of primates, with gorillas acting as security, the orang-utans responsible for legislating laws and the chimpanzees the scientists, while humans were oppressed and rarely spoke.

Status quo structures aimed at entrenching political power at the expense of good policy are no longer the purview of pioneering fiction.

Short-term fixes in modern-day Australia are all the rage as a mix of one-off payments, suite of home-building incentives, grants and of course utilities rebates are now writ large in the how-to on connecting with the voter.

Movies such as Planet of the Apes and indeed television shows including Star Trek became emblematic of the sci-fi genre in the 1960s and ’70s that best illustrated the societal challenges faced in Western democracies after World War II.

Applying said illustration locally has the CFMEU as the government-aligned gorillas, the dominant orang-utan faction known as the Australian Labor Party legislating the laws, and the sidelined cohort of chimpanzees are experts across sectors challenging the orang-utans.

The poor old voter is the mute human held captive by populist policy making which is both short-term and expensive.

The Miles government’s latest $1000 rebate is a costly measure aimed at keeping the ruling class entrenched and an example of policy expediency so reckless that any fair-minded person could not support it.

On top of a move to doubling the first-homeowners grant and a Treasurer suggesting the inflationary impact is negligible makes Cameron Dick as deputy-orang-utan more like chief baboon.

Clearly it is more challenging taking an electorate on a policy journey when the government has so recklessly politicised the 2032 Olympics and Paralympics over cost while providing a $1000 rebate ahead of an election.

The logic of such positions encourages cynicism over what constitutes a true reform vision.

Furthermore, the own-goal in industrial relations around its cowardly cave-in to the CFMEU over it Best Practice Industry Conditions has ensured that more businesses will be channelling Charlton Heston’s protagonist in the movie, Planet of the Apes, by telling the militant unionists: “Get your stinkin’ paws off me, you damn dirty ape!”

For the beleaguered auditor-general, being the chimpanzee has clearly not been fun as many of the recommendations around government priorities have only angered the gorillas and orang-utans in charge, but obsession about power can do strange things to people considered sane.

Ironically, Pierre Boulle also wrote A Bridge on the River Kwai which was also adapted into film, becoming an instant classic.

That story epitomised how a captured British colonel, in a bid not to be broken by his Japanese captors, would show how British ingenuity was superior to that of those imprisoning his men by constructing the railway bridge demanded by his opposite colonel.

The colonel’s obsession at constructing a rail bridge for the enemy so as not to mentally disintegrate made him lose sight of the overall objective of what his role was.

As a child born in the 1970s, stories of about amazing space monkeys were common, and co-operation between primates and humans had never been stronger (of course there is a caveat with many of the said monkeys living a miserable existence in cages before being placed into tin cans and sent on voyages in the upper part of Earth’s atmosphere).

I cannot recall asking if Sparky the Space Chimp had enough bananas on his mission but was still amazed at the collaboration between the two species.

But as an adult and indeed a taxpayer I am clearly paying too many peanuts to the monkeys in charge of the taxpayer purse.

Originally published as War for the Planet of the Policy Apes