Either Way, Labor Wins

Politics, Australiana

I've been thinking a bit about how awful it would be if and when Tony Abbott should become Prime Minister of Australia. Yes, Tony Abbott, he of the strident Monarchist position, the aggravatingly negative Opposition leadership, the un-costed, retrograde policies, the morbid fear of progressiveness, the dodgy accounting. That Tony Abbott. I often imagine other blue-blood Liberal Party types must be squirming at the hectoring boy-gone-sourly-bad routine Mr. Abbott displays. So much so that even Peter Costello has pointed out that Tony Abbott isn't genuinely a Liberal Party type; He's actually Catholic and from the old Democratic Labor Party mold. That is to say, it is as if the right wing Catholic breakaway of the ALP of old, has somehow infiltrated the WASP establishment Liberal Party. Had things been a little different in his life, he might have been one of those conniving pragmatists of the NSW Centre-Right Faction down in Sussex Street. He might have been their bovver boy instead of the other side.

Then there are the Greens. As far as I can tell, the 10-12% who vote for them seem to be former communists and disgruntled ones at that. They've certainly broken off the left side of the Australian Labor Party and their economic policies seem about as credible as the Comintern announcements of old. But they're unmistakably a breed of Labor gone bitter on the shelf as the NSW Centre-Right kept throwing them under the bus in the last two decades.

All of this is to say that Australian politics is moving into an era where even the right side is imbued with Labor Party thinking and the far Left is an off-shoot of the Labor Party. It's as if the entire polity has basically become Labor. The blue-bloods must really hate that.

The Aftermath of Intellectual Elitism

Educational Elitism gets a bad rap. In the days of old, elites got good education. That is all gone now. So today the leaders of the world are coming to the world stage equipped with pretty poor general education. This is true of Australia as well as many other countries around the world. If there actually were intellectual elites that could step in to the spot and change things, they would be most welcome. Instead, the tenor of debate, say in the US Republican Presidential race is abominably low. Barack Obama looks like a genius next to those guys - and that might be why he would be felled net year in the election; he's just too elite for the average, ignorant,  plumber Joe.

The Diet in Japan is filled with entitled fourth an fifth generation politicians who barely read a book in their varsity days. The bureaucrats who come from top flight universities are largely ineffectual and narrow-minded.Similar things are going on in France and Italy; and as for Greece, well, we've seen where that has gone.

The point is, the global crisis of economics and finance is partnered by a great global crisis and absence in intellectual courage and prowess by the politicians. And all of this came about because we thought things like classics and history were irrelevant so now we're busily living the dictum where we're fools, doomed to repeat history. There are big issues to be tackled, but what seems to consume our politicians is name-calling and idiotic prescriptions for immensely complicated problems.