‘Faint-hearted nation’: Would you flee Australia if war broke out?
Political leaders of both sides had been behaving so poorly in the eyes of most Australians, we were already thinking of fleeing the country anyway, writes Charles Wooley.
Opinion
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THE bravery of the Ukrainian people has been an inspiration to the free world, and we must hope dispiriting to the tyrannies. Perhaps democracy isn’t such a pushover after all.
But then this week a Compass Poll presented a less optimistic assessment of how one great democracy would fail to stand up to invasion and tyranny.
The opinion poll asked the citizens of that country what they would do if today they found themselves in the same position as the Ukrainians.
Unexpectedly, 53 per cent of responders said they would leave the country. Given the chance of fighting or fleeing, only 47 per cent of those polled said they would stay and fight for democratic freedom.
That’s a big fail, right?
Do I hear you say, “I wouldn’t want to live in such a faint-hearted nation?”
Well, here’s some really bad news.
You do. The country in which the poll was conducted is Australia.
Now of course polls are only ever an accurate snapshot of how people feel at a precise time. And at the moment of polling, political leaders of both sides had been behaving so poorly in the eyes of most Australians, we were already thinking of fleeing the country anyway. Only a little less frightening than being invaded (by you know who) would be the re-election of Scott Morrison or the election of Anthony Albanese. Neither of these blokes is deserving of the honour of leading their country, but both would sell their own grannies to get there.
Is it not at least a little disturbing that leadership of Australia comes down to a contest between two men of their calibre?
Are they really the best a nation of 25 million people can find to choose from?
We can blame the party system, but it’s no wonder that 53 per cent of Compass Polling’s Australian respondents were up for decamping to greener pastures.
The polling was commissioned by John Anderson, the former National Party leader and deputy prime minister of Australia from 1999 to 2005. As John Howard’s deputy, he was seen to acquit himself with distinction before resigning because of ill-health.
He now runs a polling company and an interesting website devoted to discussing major issues.
And today what could be a bigger consideration than “Are you going to run, or will you stay and fight?”
A breakdown of the figures is interesting. On political lines, Coalition voters would stay and fight by 56 to 44.
Labor exactly reverses the trend, with 56 per cent running away and 44 per cent staying to defend their patch.
A cynic might discern a degree of self-interest: by and large conservative voters own a bigger slice of Australia and so have more to defend. But whatever happened to simple patriotism and the Spirit of Anzac?
No doubt the current weary national disenchantment contributed to those unhappy polling results.
Another survey this week, a Roy Morgan poll, suggested 46 per cent of voters prefer Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to lead the government. Only 28.5 per cent supported keeping Scott Morrison.
Apparently, the PM has really done a job on himself to get his supporters down to about half the number of those prepared to fight for their country.
Roy Morgan chief executive Michele Levine, believing her own material, said: “If the LNP government wants to maximise its chances of re-election, it must make a late change and elevate Treasurer Josh Frydenberg to the top job.”
In Tasmania this week we experienced the changing of political horses mid-stream. In our tiny polity, governance will no doubt continue to bumble along much as before, and in a month’s time we won’t even be talking about it. But in the federal sphere in such challenging times, you might dismiss the idea of changing leadership so close to an election as both dangerous and a bit far-fetched.
But wait a minute, hasn’t this happened before?
In February 1983 the then prime minister Malcolm Fraser called an election, and on that very same day the ALP dumped its hapless leader Bill Hayden, replacing him with the charismatic Bob Hawke.
It was a brilliant strategy. Labor secured a landslide victory and Hawke went on to win three more elections before he was in turn unseated by Paul Keating.
Before Hawke took the reins, the nation clearly lacked a popular leader whom the mob could trust and follow. It’s exactly the same today. ScoMo is as unpopular as Liberal backbenchers are nervous. But will an increasingly jaded electorate really accept that the slimmer and restyled Albo fits the leadership bill?
Liberal dissidents are already suggesting that if they exchanged their leader for the more popular Frydenberg, Labor would be confounded because they have no better replacement waiting in the wings.
Bob Hawke once observed that his deputy, the clever and affable Kim Beazley, never made it to leadership because he didn’t have “the mongrel” in him.
If Josh Frydenberg lacks enough mongrel to grasp the nettle, it is likely the not particularly electable Anthony Albanese will simply stroll into power.
Regicide is a grim business, even in the deceitful realm of politics. In recent memory few have had the stomach to do the awful deed: not Peter Costello and not Kim Beazley, both of whom might have made the ranks of the good PMs we never had.
And in literature even Macbeth lacked the ticker, but his wife was of sterner stuff. Today there is one clear advantage for the Treasurer, should he dare to play Lady Macbeth: the present king is unpopular (even in his own court) and this time there will be no Richard Carleton around to challenge the usurper with that forever haunting question to Bob Hawke, “Could I ask you whether you feel a little embarrassed tonight at the blood that’s on your hands?”
Around election times I always miss the late Richard Carleton. After the last-minute knifing of Labor’s leader, Bill Hayden, the “blood on your hands” question was what every journalist covering the story in February 1983 was thinking, but only Carleton would ask.
It wasn’t just that he was so much more daring than all the others, but oddly that he didn’t care. Those who knew him well thought that Richard probably had a milder form of Asperger’s syndrome.
While he had no problem communicating, he lacked those socialising skills that make other people more tactful with their words.
Richard’s wiring allowed him to inflict verbal torment with insouciance. He was never being deliberately cruel. In the moment he genuinely didn’t feel or understand the other’s pain.
Not impertinently, I always found that condition more common in politicians than in journalists.
Richard’s quite uncalculated lack of empathy served him well in television journalism, as he made his name back in the 1970s and ’80s. His nightly eviscerations of politicians on the ABC were bloody and compelling viewing.
When eventually no politician dared to appear in his ABC television studio, Richard moved to 60 Minutes and fearlessly reported from war zones.
He wasn’t killed on a battlefield. Almost 16 years ago he died of natural causes in peaceful Tasmania while covering the Beaconsfield mining disaster.
In May 2006 at a press conference on the mine site, Carleton had just asked one of his characteristically killer questions.
He wanted to know whether it was “greed for gold” that made the bosses send men into an unsafe mine. Until Richard spoke, that was the question everyone wondered but no one had asked.
Immediately afterwards he turned and looked into the camera. And then at 64 years of age, Richard Carleton was gone.
And just like Bob Hawke, there never was a replacement.
EXPLAINED: Tassie’s big week in politics
Stories in abundance.
It is always the same in budget week: we are often so obsessed with the minutiae of federal housekeeping we overlook many other wonderful stories.
Not me. Not this week.
The only Tasmanian Federal Minister is the hapless Richard Colbeck, who despite a poor performance, remains the Aged Care Services Minister. He has just released a government audit of 2600 residential aged-care facilities, shockingly revealing that one in three nursing homes spend less than $10 per resident per day on food.
Now, tell me you haven’t forgotten how Colbeck would have been much more generously catered for in that corporate box at Bellerive Oval, when he really should have been attending to business. Nor do I have time to chronicle the criticisms of his handling of Covid-19 outbreaks in aged care facilities in Victoria (aged care is a federal responsibility) which by August 2020 resulted in the deaths of 350 residents.
I’m not being personal or unkind. I have never met the bloke (or have forgotten if I did) and might only ever have interviewed him on the phone. But I just couldn’t overlook this week’s press release about the ten-dollar-diet, in which Senator Colbeck declared the aged care sector’s performance, “Isn’t good enough.”
Yes Minister.
But perhaps competency starts at the top.
Unkindly some Canberra press gallery scribes have suggested that Colbeck only retains his job to keep Tasmania sweet and because he is a mate of ScoMo.
It’s a fair bet that if the Libs lose the election Colbeck won’t even get to be a shadow minister for his old portfolio.
Am I sure?
Well, sure enough to put my money where my mouth is and bet you a lunch at the Eventide Retirement Home.
Another yarn getting too little attention comes from Spring Street in Melbourne where the Victorian liberals have been embarrassed by one of their members of parliament behaving like… well like a Victorian Liberal.
Speaking her mind, Liberal MP Wendy Lovell told Victoria’s parliament that children who live in social housing should not be re-housed in wealthy areas. Low-income families should not for instance be placed in “the best street in Brighton where the children cannot mix.”
Now before accusing me of being a “leftie” fifth columnist in this august and conservative journal, let me concede that unfortunately there is often more than a smidgeon of truth in the worst ultra-conservative social slurs. Which of course makes them seem all the more offensive.
Ms Lovell clarified her point to an outraged opposition bench and an embarrassed government, “It’s no point putting a very low-income, probably welfare dependent family in the best street … where the children cannot mix with other children or cannot go to school with the other children.”
Are you still with me? It gets even better and still not entirely inaccurate as Wendy Lovell further explained, “They don’t have the same ability to have the latest in sneakers and iPhones, et cetera,” she said.
No. I’m not making this up. And I am still waiting for a Tasmanian Liberal to say the same thing about the UTAS Realty Redevelopment Company (I am making that up) over their suggested plans to include social housing in the redeveloped Sandy Bay campus.
The reaction might come from the same conservative identity who once rebuked Sue Hickey when, as a new liberal MHA, Sue wanted to discuss homelessness in the party room. She was firmly told, “Sue, you have to realise you have joined the Liberal party and not the Labor party.”
So, don’t be surprised to hear more divisive social commentary along all the same old lines. I hear many of the good burghers of Sandy Bay are alarmed by the possible presence of social housing in their quiet leafy enclaves. After all, everything that Wendy Lovell said in Melbourne might be just as true in Hobart.
Obviously, in Sandy Bay, socially rehoused kids will not be able to go to the same schools (Fahan and Hutchins) as the local kids.
Nor will they have the latest in sneakers and iPhones.
As they say: there goes the neighbourhood.
Almost overlooked this week are the new mining adventures of Joseph Gutnick.
With no fanfare the colourful Australian mining personality “Diamond Joe” Gutnick has appeared in Tasmania.
The Australian newspaper reported this week that after spectacular ups and downs the controversial miner hopes that Tasmania will be where he restores his reputation and his fortune.
Joe made his first pile in gold and diamonds in Western Australia, prospecting there on the advice of God via his Rabbi, the late Menachen Schneerson.
Years later and still following information from on-high Joe is prospecting at Moina in Tasmania’s north-west for fluorite, tungsten and magnetite. These minerals have diverse uses in hi-tech manufacturing and are presently in great demand.
“God sent me here,” Joe told the Oz in Tasmania this week.
I’m not a believer but I get Joe’s reasoning: if God put the valuable stuff there then presumably, He hasn’t forgotten where He left it. Though I am inclined to think that if there is a God, He or She or They should be too busy back in the Gutnick family’s ancestral home of Ukraine to go fossicking for profitable metals in remotest Tasmania.
But as believers say, “God moves in a mysterious way” and although reputedly AFL is not the game played in Heaven, Joe has promised (if he regains his lost fortune) to invest some of those God-given riches in a Tasmanian AFL team.
Mysterious ways indeed.
Hey Joe, do you think Divine Providence might also stretch to chucking in for Peter Gutwein’s new footy stadium?
At the moment we are a little cash-strapped down here on Earth.
Also not getting enough attention, Tasmanian former Liberal leader Bob Cheek’s latest book Dumbbells to Diamonds is a must-read.
Bob’s previous book (Cheeky. Confessions of a Ferret Salesman) was a hilarious account of his 2002 ill-fated bid to be Premier of Tasmania. Just about the best political autobiography I have ever read, it was certainly the funniest and the most honestly revealing. Twenty years later many prominent Liberal noses are still out of joint.
Cheek has finally proven he is no one-book-wonder. He has published an account of his successful involvement in the tough and often dodgy fitness industry. He got rich but it wasn’t easy. At one stage he flippantly called his money guzzling gym in Salamanca, “Club Silly Wanker” but ended up turning one loss-making outfit into a national fitness empire which after eight years he sold for $50 million.
As Bob Cheek puts it, “Talk about rivers of gold…we were sweating dollars…or at least our members were. Diamonds from Dumbbells. Who would’ve thought.”
Imagine what he might have achieved as Premier of Tasmania.
(Dumbbells to Diamonds by Bob Cheek Hardie Grant 2022)
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