Culture Wars: Hot & Cold

# 591

Battle of the titans in Liberal ranks. With apologies to Charles Leslie, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme (c.1841)

Federal elections only come around every three years, so bear with me as I devote one more week to politics! I know some readers lap up the political stuff while others would prefer that I stuck to cultural commentary. Aside from the fact that there’s a lot of crossover, I’m amazed by the way the politicians inhabit a world of their own when they’re not up for election. It seems extraordinary that Albo should dump Ed Husic and Mark Dreyfus to appease factions so soon after his election victory. It leaves an ugly scar on the win.

If their current leadership race is any indication the Libs are even more messed up with their internal politics. What can we expect in ‘cultural’ terms from parties that spend so much time and energy fighting amongst themselves? The arts are no more than decoration for Australia’s politicians. They’re happy to leave them to those of indifferent ability and dubious motives whom they have put in charge of so many of our cultural institutions. All our cultural problems begin with the indifference and complacency of our political leaders. They could make a difference, but they can’t be bothered.

Look at the Liberals. Following their catastrophic defeat in last week’s election, it’s been widely touted that the party has a good deal of soul-searching ahead of it. But is there a soul to be searched? Only three years ago the Libs were “soul-searching” after their biggest ever electoral loss. The ultimate result was an even bigger loss.

As I write, the party is about to go into conclave, jostling to choose a new Pope. Will it be Pope Sussan or Pope Angus? What a choice! It’s like deciding whether to be boiled in oil or flayed alive – two unpleasant options that end badly.

The very fact that this is the choice facing party members gives a pretty clear indication not a lot of time and thought has gone into developing the talent pool - no more than was devoted to developing policies before the election. When one considers that Sussan Ley was Peter Dutton’s trusted deputy and Angus Taylor the architect of his economic strategy, shouldn’t they be taking their share of the blame for the defeat? It seems the former leader gets to keep all the hubris to himself.

If one looks at the credentials of these two dazzling candidates, it’s hard to forget Sussan running up a $400,000 bill for parliamentary expenses in six months during 2015, then using taxpayer funded trips to the Gold Coast to go shopping for an investment apartment – trips that forced her resignation from cabinet in 2017. Her speedy return, post-Malcolm Turnbull, may be due to the Libs’ glaring need to put a woman or two into the cabinet, or a willingness to overlook a little financial skullduggery. She also did an excellent job keeping the Great Barrier Reef off UNESCO’s In-Danger list. Who needs all that coral anyway?

She’s “Sussan” because numerology told her that an extra ‘s’ would ensure an exciting and interesting life. May she continue to live in interesting times.

As for her rival, if P.G. Wodehouse had thought to set a novel in Australia he could hardly have gone past Angus as a leading character. He would, of course, have a name like Sheepdip Taylor and spend his time not at the Drones Club, but maybe the Blowfly Club. He’d be urged to take on the leadership of the Liberal Party by one of his aunts but would much rather hang out at the races.

In a desperate move to shore up his own popularity (or self-confidence), in May 2019 Angus resorted to praising himself on Facebook. After announcing the infamous rort of “1,000 extra carparks for rail commuters right across the north of Hume!”, he felt inspired to reply: “Fantastic. Great move. Well done Angus.”

When not congratulating himself, Angus has excelled in getting things wrong in Question Time and in public. He asked Albo a ‘gotcha’ question in 2023 but mistook the yearly rate of inflation for the monthly rate. He claimed Clover Moore’s team at the City of Sydney had run up a bill of $15 million in travel expenses and refused to concede his error when it was shown he was working from a doctored document. Moore pointed out the real figure was $229,000.

Even more bizarrely, he spun a tale about when he was at Oxford in 1991, and fellow student, Naomi Wolf, had tried to ban Christmas trees. It was left to Ms. Wolf to point out she had come and gone from Oxford well before Angus arrived. For good measure she also accused him of anti-Semitic dog whistling.

More seriously there was the ‘Watergate’ scandal of 2019, in which it was revealed that Angus as a minister had invested tens of millions of taxpayers’ dollars in a company he had co-founded before he entered parliament. Huge profits accrued to the Cayman Islands-based firm, but little tangible benefit to anybody else.

Goodness knows what Angus learned at Oxford. The list of gaffes and scandals could be extended even further, but I haven’t got 10,000 words to spare. His latest brilliant gambit has been to lure Senator Jacinta Nampijinpa Price away from the Nationals, to become his deputy, should he be elected Liberal leader. As Angus botched the Coalition’s economic policy at the recent election, while Jacinta tarnished their image with her strident Trump worship, it sounds like a marriage made in heaven.

What are the other options for the Libs? There’s hawkish Andrew Hastie waiting in the wings to launch another verbal assault on China – but he’s still a better prospect in terms of his public image. Then there’s amiable Dan Tehan, who drones on and on in a way that makes Albo sound like Cicero. Dan comes across as boring and goofy, but hey, that’s got to be better than candidates who have been mired in corruption scandals, skilled at making one high-profile gaffe after another.

On election night, I briefly caught former Labor leader, Bill Shorten, offering some free advice to the Libs: Cleave to the centre. Australian voters don’t favour the extremes, left or right.

This advice has been echoed in many places over the past week, with the demise of Peter Dutton and Greens leader, Adam Bandt, being cited as examples of what can go wrong when a politician adopts attitudes the general public finds too strident or aggressive. Albo, on the other hand, was preaching the gospel of kindness and respect. Cringe if you must, but it worked.

Will the Libs go down this safe and sensible path? Frankly, it’s hard to imagine. If Ms. Price ends up as deputy leader, we’re almost guaranteed another three years of culture wars. She may not be up there with those African American politicians who debased themselves for Trump, but she obviously enjoys her unique status of being both Indigenous and militantly right-wing.

Even if Sussan gets the gig, the pressures to keep leaning into anti-woke topics will be immense. A mere glance at The Australian post-election, finds the usual gaggle of columnists foaming at the mouth, calling for the Libs to veer harder to the right. They would like us to believe the Coalition failed so miserably because they got a bit too soft under that pansy, Dutton. Writers such as Peta Credlin are convinced that pursuing the culture wars is the way to win hearts and minds. She was equally convinced the Libs were going to triumph on election day.

Neither should we dismiss the views of political philosophers such as Gina Rinehart, who knows the Libs owe their downfall to a scare campaign conducted by the “left-wing media”. What they obviously need are “Trump-like policies”, presumably the same sort of policies that have made Trump the most unpopular President of all time after his first hundred days and brought the U.S. economy to its knees. What we require is more mining, smaller taxes for Very Wealthy People, less government regulation, and an Israeli-style Iron Dome defence system. Fantastic. Great move, Well done Gina.

The idea that the “left-wing media” somehow swayed the Australian public with their seductive lies is hilarious. The bulk of the Australian media, led by the Murdoch press, has hammered Albo relentlessly for the past three years. Media Watch last week showed the headlines of papers around Australia before election day, and they were uniformly anti-Labor.

Unless we believe the Australian population are overwhelmingly secret Guardian readers, we need to accept that the press played a historically small role in influencing the way people voted. The traditional media are becoming more and more irrelevant, even if the Coalition seemed to believe everything it read in The Australian or watched on Sky Channel.

Now the party is in danger of making exactly the same mistakes they made last time, looking for excuses and scapegoats rather than confronting their own ideological delusions.

Take the much-vaunted nuclear policy. Liberal Senator Maria Kovacic has soberly diagnosed that for most voters this idea was about as popular as leprosy. Let’s ditch the nukes, she says.

Not so fast, says the smarmy Tim Wilson, inexplicably re-elected to parliament at the expense of Teal candidate, Zoe Daniel. Tim is a big fan of nuclear energy and wouldn’t dream of leaving it off the platform.

Prepare yourselves for three more years of in-fighting over an idea that should be buried somewhere in the Nullarbor in a lead-lined casket stamped with a skull and crossbones and wrapped in a Peter Dutton election poster.

Enter Janet Albrechtsen, with a column in the Oz, titled “Liberals must not tremble over ‘culture wars’ – but own them”. To be fair, Janet makes a stirring case, but her definition of “culture wars” seems much broader than most of us would accept. She seems to suggest that standing up for literacy and freedom of speech makes one a culture warrior ready to take up the good fight. By this standard any government that doesn’t believe in such bedrock issues – on either side of politics – would be doomed to failure. The problem with the way the so-called “culture wars” were pursued by politicians such as Dutton, was that they came across as stupid, brutal, and reactionary.

The most basic observation is that the ‘culture wars’ were an unsuccessful distraction from the bedrock issue of the cost of living. It’s simply frivolous to make a fuss about race and gender protocols when people are struggling to pay their rent and buy groceries. The more the Coalition got caught up with these matters, the more they lost potential voters who were looking for concrete answers for day-to-day problems. Labor, who should have been in line to cop the blame, managed to grab the initiative from an Opposition that spent too much time on non-core issues.

To be a sophisticated conservative is a rare achievement nowadays, although an Oz columnist such as Henry Ergas manages to do it. Albrechtsen could do it too if she were less concerned with taking a partisan stance vis-à-vis the hapless Libs. It’s easy to agree with her view that it’s ridiculous – and intellectually lazy – to call everything a “war” when it’s simply a disagreement that admits of reasoned argument. Those who make real wars, such as Vladimir Putin, prefer to use euphemisms such as “special military operation”.

The shrewd politician must choose his or her ‘wars’ carefully. Just because he won the day with The Voice, Dutton should not have believed it was a great idea to denigrate the Aboriginal flag. The referendum had constitutional implications, but the flag is a sign of good will. Anything that smacks so clearly of bitterness and division will never cut the mustard with the majority of Australians and – unlike America – that majority is obliged to cast a vote.

If the Libs intend to keep waging the ‘culture wars’ or whatever they choose to call them, it will require a more piercing intellect than what we’ve seen so far from Sussan Ley or Angus Taylor. All the nonsense we hear about betraying traditional “Liberal values” makes the large assumption that most party members actually have values, rather than selfish personal agendas. About the only current Liberal politician I’ve heard speaking about values in a persuasive fashion is Keith Wolahan, and he looks set to lose his seat. When the smoke rises from the chimney at Parliament House next week to tell us the Libs have elected a new Pope, let’s hope they’re burning all those dud policies of the past two election cycles and starting afresh.

It would be great if they began by recognising that “culture” should not be exclusively bracketed with the word “war”. Culture is part of the DNA of our community, a massive resource waiting to be tapped by either side of politics that gets the message. Too much energy has been wasted on destructive point-scoring about so-called ‘cultural’ issues while institutions have been allowed to drift into disarray, nepotism, and borderline forms of corruption. We need to start thinking of culture as a positive, community-building concept, not a contest between ideological extremes. Government may be secured for another term, but with Albo wielding supreme power and the Libs preparing to make more bad choices, the prospect of cultural renewal seems as distant as ever.

Speaking of choices, this year’s Archibald Prize at the Art Gallery of NSW has gone to Julie Fragar for a portrait of fellow artist, Justene Williams. Controversially, it was probably the best picture in the show! The AGNSW, now under new management, will have to try harder next year. My mordant reflections can be found in this week’s art column.

The film being reviewed – or rather, profiled – comes from 1952. It’s René Clément’s Forbidden Games, which I recently introduced for the Cinema Reborn Festival. Rather than find a mediocre movie of the present day, I figured it was better to revert to a masterpiece of the past. Perhaps the Liberals should do the same with their policies. For the Menzies government, 1952 was a very good year.