The headline above is the key sentence in an essay published on 04 May 2025.
That essay’s headline: Are the Liberals in danger of becoming the Kodak of Australian politics?
Yesterday’s Pelican Yoga post included its most telling paragraph.
It is a direct quotation from a speech delivered in 1946 by a young, multiply-wounded ex-RAAF pilot; in 1949 he became a Liberal senator.
In 1968 he – John Gorton – became Prime Minister.
As the essay’s author observes:
His vision was generous, compassionate and cosmopolitan: of an Australia and a wider world “in which meanness and poverty, tyranny and hate, have no existence.”
The essay’s author – Frank Bongiorno, Professor of History at the Australian National University – goes on:
It is almost impossible to imagine a young, aspiring Liberal with their eye on a political career speaking in such terms today. He, or she, would be practised in attacking Labor, Greens and, perhaps most of all, teal independents. The new party to which Gorton attached himself was liberal, progressive and idealistic. The old party Peter Dutton led to defeat on Saturday was conservative, populist and cynical.
The standard issue facial expression is the sneer, the verbal reflex the sledge. And not just the sneering at and sledging of the political opponents you are actually fighting. Early in his campaign, Dutton was talking about how he could coerce those involved in woke “indoctrination” of students in schools. He insulted and threatened hard-working teachers and school communities in the interests of prosecuting US-inspired cultural wars. Later in the campaign, he disavowed any intention of interfering in the national curriculum.
What was this all about? My best guess is that the first was Dutton acting on his right-wing populist instincts. The backflip presumably came out of more mature calculation as an increasingly disastrous campaign went well off the rails.
A later paragraph:
The Coalition also suffers increasingly from its friends in the Murdoch media, who continue to pursue personal vendettas against enemies including the teals — invariably accomplished professional women in whom other women see something of themselves and their aspirations — and culture wars that most voters regard as the obsession of fanatics of a kind they would avoid at weddings, parties and bar mitzvahs. The Liberals would do well to treat voters as sensible adults capable of exercising reason and judgement rather than as bundles of appetites, prejudices and fears. They could even extend their interest in countering racism beyond an antisemitism to be pinned on their opponents for political gain, and their engagement with anti-discrimination beyond the supposed disabilities suffered by Christians.
As a party claiming special skill in economic management, they might consider refraining from wasting billions of dollars on cheap petrol and expensive nuclear power. They might lose their addiction to fossil fuels, and to the favours of deeply unpopular billionaires such as Gina Rinehart. They might look at how it was that under Menzies, rates of home ownership increased from 50 per cent to more than 70 per cent. (Hint: it wasn’t by making interest payments tax deductible for first-time home-builders for five years.) They might drop the “immigrants are stopping you getting a home” stuff.
Click here for the full essay.
Footnote
The featured image’s aggressive, seemingly-sneering “seals of disapproval” are actually long-nosed fur seals.
A lone silver gull did its unwitting best to emulate Australia’s indifferent/bemused electors.
I took the accidentally-allegorical photo on 09 April 2025, near the mouth of the River Murray in South Australia’s Coorong National Park.
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Musical bonus
In 1972 Stevie Wonder issued a landmark LP, on which he was author or co-author of everything and the player of almost everything.
Talking Book was his fifteenth studio album: Wonder was then 22 years old!
The prodigiously funky “Superstition” topped both Billboard’s Hot 100 pop & soul singles charts.
“You are the Sunshine of My Life” topped both the Hot 100 and Easy Listening charts.
Stevie Wonder has won a great many awards, and appeared on many “best of” lists.
To my knowledge, he has never featured in a list of “protest songsters”.
However, the first of the aforementioned numbers was a politically conscious song of protest.
Another track from Talking Book is a very angry protest song, addressed to a certain sub-species of politician.
53 years later, “Big Brother” retains its sting, globally:
In 2009 the ancestrally Indian, American pianist Vijay Iyer delivered a wonderful, wordless version.
(on his trio album, Historicity, with bassist Stephan Crump and drummer Marcus Gilmore)
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