I’ve been having trouble putting words around my thoughts about the election and its outcome. But this morning I was drifting through the Internets and found a couple of commentary/opinion articles that seem to express similar thoughts to mine…
Divisive Leader who squandered Australia’s hopes - Sydney Morning Herald
As you can guess from just the headlines, they’re more about the old than the new. The general gist of both is that many Australians were tired of the Howard government’s tricks, manipulations, fear mongering, wedge politics, etc.
The Howard government was characterised by the spreading of fear and distrust - of boat people, Muslims, immigrants in general, unions, Labor, terrorists, drug dealers, of losing our jobs, of State governments, of public hospitals, of public education. The government also feared and distrusted us - look at the anti-terrorism laws (we might be terrorists), Internet filtering efforts (we might let our kids look at porn), “mutual obligation” and jumping through hoops to get government benefits (we might bludge off government money), even the intervention in the NT (because people who don’t live like us are scary - make them learn English, make them live in houses, make them toe the line by regulating their lives). And we corresponded, I think, with fear and distrust of the government - how could we trust them, when they were busily involving us in wars, stripping away our rights, ignoring the environment, and discounting and invalidating our concerns about all of the above? And I haven’t even mentioned their dinosaur views on same-sex marriage, or a bunch of other things that they weren’t interested in thinking about…
So the Rudd government we have now was really chosen as the lesser of two evils. Not that I think they are in any way evil. They have a chance here to make good. They succeeded in this election by being “Howard without the icky bits”, but now they’re going to have to show 1) a continuing lack of “icky bits”, and 2) some positive stuff, including the things they promised in the election campaign - action to secure worker’s rights, to look after the environment, to avoid antagonising the rest of the world, some compassion and genuine help for Aboriginies, etc. We know they’ve got a hostile senate for a while, it’s cool, no rush - but we want to see you thinking and planning and consulting, starting to make a change for the better, for inclusion and compassion and honesty. That’s all we really want, :p
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