Toughing it out and the Gillard myth

When I came back through American customs recently after an overseas trip, the customs official looked at my passport. We started the usual chat about where I was from. In a thick American accent he said “do you know they’re gonna change the name of the Labor party?”, followed by a short quizzed, jet-lagged expression from me, “they’re gonna call it “The Screw Up party””.

It is certainly not a good sign that the woes of an Australian political party can reach an American customs official in LAX. But Labor has made enough bumpy landings on enough issues that their troubles are well known across the seas.

The Gillard plane jolts down onto the runway, but then rights itself again and again.

There are moments of restored hope, or should I say events which quieten the violence of despair. There are bumps in polls, shiny presidential visits, theories about Abbott’s No-ism not being able to last, the Carr coup appointing him as foreign minister.

And of course, the leadership ballot which was supposed to give Gillard all that “legitimacy” - a proud scout badge she can now wear on her uniform.

So, the theory goes, all Gillard needs to do is to keep toughing it out. Keep surviving the lows, and exploiting the rare highs.

A Labor staffer said to me a little while ago that all that was needed for Gillard to survive the next election was for voters to see that she was “tough as guts”. Once they saw her wade through the shit with a smile, they’ll respect, even admire her and then vote for her.

Of course, who knows how 2013 will work out. But this idea of toughness being her saving is odd for many reasons.

For one thing, Abbott already owns the “toughness” branding in Australian politics. From the start of his leadership he has owned this space and will continue to do so for as long as his hairy chest is beating. For Australian voters, “toughness” is a male quality. Women can’t be too womanly of course, but they can’t be too manly either. The catch 22 of poltical gender roles.

But anyway, even if people could warm to Gillard, it’s the Labor brand that stinks. This association in the public mind is strong and would be hard to break even if Gillard were shining.

And then what do we really mean when we say Gillard is “tough”? Is she tough when she ignores the vocal anti-carbon tax, anti-pokies reform, anti-mining tax citizenry? Well, that’s easy enough – don’t go out and meet with Joe Public in any public appearances without getting your advance staff to do their jobs properly.

As mentioned previously, she does at least face this group through the media, and in that sense she toughs it out. But why anyone would think these efforts would translate into votes is another question entirely.

But maybe the “toughing it out” idea refers to internal battles? I.e not getting defeated by Rudd? The leadership episode surely was tough for all, but Rudd really never stood a chance with so much bile left over from his time as PM.

It could mean just sticking to the policies even when they are getting you in trouble. Well, surely if she backed out of the carbon tax, mining tax and the rest, a) the public would just completely check out of the whole mess b) a fragile minority government would find it hard to proceed without the Greens and independents.

I think the “Gillard is tough” idea is more about an internal party message. A pep talk mantra, a Labor party “hold in there” kitten poster – positive affirmation written into the larger political context.

If we can just hold on, just keep going, stay the course, balance that tightrope...

Abbott not so hairy-chested, as the PM toughs it out Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/opinion/politics/abbott-not-so-hairychested-as-the-pm-toughs-it

Despite conspicuous displays of manliness, Opposition Leader Tony Abbott is decidedly cautious in his choice of media outlets. And it appears that the strategy of going to the media that will let him off lightly is paying off. So much for manhood Tony.

Ironically, Prime Minister Julia Gillard has been the one with hairs on her chest, taking on the shock jocks and appearing before less-than-hospitable co-hosts presumably in the belief that that if she appears she will be able to ram home the message.

Abbott, however, is having more success, while Gillard is floundering.

Take her choice of media appearances. Most recently she went on a panel of business leaders who were all gunning for her government's policies. She fronted Westpac's Gail Kelly, Westfield's Steve Lowy and media mogul Kerry Stokes in a Q&A session. All took umbrage with one policy or other, whether it was the carbon tax or the government's stubborn determination for a surplus.

She was in the thick of it defending her policies, in the face of yet more polls results that showed support was dwindling. Her courage bore all the hallmarks of the hapless Jim Hacker in Yes, Prime Minister.

Is there another option than to weather the storm stoically? If she hadn't appeared then Kelly, Lowy et al would have sledged her policies anyway, so she might as well attempt to have a right of reply, even if it was case of hit and miss.

Gillard has even stared down the talkback hosts. Earlier this year she appeared on Alan Jones's radio program on Sydney's 2GB just after the government had announced that the multi-party climate change committee had agreed to a carbon tax, with an emissions trading scheme to follow.

Outrage about her pre-election commitment not to introduce a carbon tax was at its peak, but nonetheless she went for what she knew would be a tough interview. Jones went into overdrive, firstly berating the Prime Minister for being 10 minutes late. He then launched into an extraordinary attack, saying "people are now saying your name is not Julia but Ju-liar and asking her of she accepted that she "stole the election" with a "false promise", all the while constantly interrupting her.

Abbott, meanwhile, is playing a winning hand by not taking much in the way of risks. He has tended to focus his media appearances on regional radio, and with interviewers who, one could say, are more likely to go easy on him.

Since election day, he has been on John Laws's program six times, Melbourne Talkback Radio eight times and has had seven interviews with Jones with barely a difficult question asked in any.

Contrast this with the number of interviews on ABC's 7.30 (two), Sky News agenda (four), and once on Radio National. There have been a few probing interviews with ABC's AM, but Abbott's answers have stuck to a familiar.

Take Abbott's media blitz after his budget in reply speech to the House of Representatives. One principal criticism levelled at him was that the speech lacked detail or any alternatives for budget spending.

The following day questions on that issue were notably absent in his interview with Alan Jones. On the same day, the ABC's Sabra Lane put that criticism of his budget reply speech to him only to be accused of being in the pocket of government spin merchants:

Lane: "But this was a budget reply. Aren't Australian families entitled to hear your alternatives? Or are you treating them with contempt?"

Abbott: "Oh, look, Sabra, please. Let's not get government spin on the ABC. This is . . ."

Lane: "It's not government spin. It's a budget reply, Tony Abbott."

A similar retort was given when Joe Hockey was grilled by press gallery journalists at his post-budget National Press Club address.

It appears the government's strategy hinges on the hope that at the end of this tunnel, the light of the electorate will once again shine. As Gillard said recently on the carbon tax in an address to an embarrassingly small audience at the Victorian Labor conference: "When the sun rises in the east, cows keep giving milk, chickens still lay eggs, our opponents know their campaign of fear will be exposed as a sham." And the Gillard government, by implication, will appear resplendent for having done something worth all the pain of the moment.

Yorkshiremen Syndrome

The debate emerging from the budget about limiting government payments to families earning more than $150,000 really got out of control. It suddenly became a game about who was doing it tough and then who was doing it tougher still. It’s like we got trapped in that Monty Python sketch with the four Yorkshiremen - oh, you lived in a broken down house? Luxury! All we could managed was a hole in the ground. Well, we lived in a rolled up newspaper in a septic tank dreaming of a hole in the ground. And so it went until the rhetoric in the public sphere finally came to the person who lived in a shoebox in the middle of the road, sucking tea from a damp cloth.

Can we just stop trying to out do each other with how tough we’re all doing already? Can we take into account the fact that we might not have an ability to measure “hardness” and that maybe this is a relative yardstick in constant flux before we judge total strangers on how they’re managing. And could it also be taken that the point about indexing family welfare payments to people earning over this given amount didn’t mean a judgment was made about whether they were rich but whether they were in genuine need. This over-blown reaction has now meant the government is modifying its policy and ending the freeze in 2014. WTF?

Julia Gillard said on Sunday that there had been “a mischaracterisation of these measures” and that “the media coverage which has suggested that somehow I or the Treasurer think people on $150,000 a year are rich is completely ill-informed. We’ve never said that. What we’ve said is that we need to make our system sustainable.” The skewed debate has now arguably contributed to one of the worst reactions to a federal budget in some years, both in terms of whether the punters think it will be good for the economy and how it will affect their own personal financial position.

At the end of last week, in the media, every other story was a case study of a family on a combined income of 150,000 struggling to afford mortgages, car repayments and child care. And so with these online articles would run a million comments below it telling said family to harden up and stop whining. There was one about the Grays family who were on a combined income of more than $150,000, there was another about the Allardyce family and another about the Hardcastle-Fowler family . The implication from tone of all these articles was that there was a judgment being made in the government that these people were too rich, therefore ‘victims’ of Labor’s war on class. An aspect of this whole debate which totally misses the point, i.e whether or not you’re giving to people that need welfare or a side debate about the inefficiency of giving with one hand (benefits) and still take with the other (taxation).

Regardless, what was interesting was the reaction to the who is really rich question that the media played. One commentator said “Maybe I can sponsor one of their kids in the next '40 hour famine' wouldn't want them all to go starving on a mere $150k per year. It's all the governments' fault. If only they didn't make them borrow all that money so they could live in a mansion.”

And another; “Look who's whining. I manage to save living with my wife and a kid on a combined income of $44000...” And another : “Mr Gray - you live in a McMansion in Castle Hill. Get a reality check buddy. Living within one's means includes factoring in the house and suburb you buy into, the car you drive, the Foxtel you have, your iPhone cap, brand name clothes, eating wholesome and home-cooked foods with ingredients bought at Aldi, etc. Being sensible with your money is not that hard. People need to let their egos go a little and be wise.”

One Herald Sun reader even said that people earning over the threshold who can’t afford the bills should be put on income management. You also had Paul Howes weighing in and talking about kids in the Phillipines rummaging through garbage to make a living. These perceptions are all particularly interesting given we are about to head into a pretty important minimum wage case, with further polling on the issue of wealth in Australia showing a serious overestimation of poor people’s income and and underestimate of rich people’s income.

Matt Cowgill’s article put this all neatly into perspective and showed realistically what is the typical Australian income. But it is amazing this ability we have to completely ignore reality and just look at this whole debate as a competition. This is because people will inevitably look around them and always see someone ahead, someone richer, and not look at our own slice of the pie and be satisfied. This whole debate played on something very visceral and human, our complete inability to be happy with what we have and constantly compare ourselves to others even when it doesn’t make sense to. This is some philosophical Alain de Botton type stuff, it’s the Yorkshire men syndrome. It’s a debate where no one wins because it becomes too emotional and detached from a government simply trying to make a welfare system sustainable with some pretty modest cuts.

THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
But you know, we were happy in those days, though we were poor.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Because we were poor. My old Dad used to say to me, "Money doesn't buy you happiness, son".
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was right.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye, 'e was.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
I was happier then and I had nothin'. We used to live in this tiny old house with great big holes in the roof.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
House! You were lucky to live in a house! We used to live in one room, all twenty-six of us, no furniture, 'alf the floor was missing, and we were all 'uddled together in one corner for fear of falling.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Eh, you were lucky to have a room! We used to have to live in t' corridor!
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Oh, we used to dream of livin' in a corridor! Would ha' been a palace to us. We used to live in an old water tank on a rubbish tip. We got woke up every morning by having a load of rotting fish dumped all over us! House? Huh.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, when I say 'house' it was only a hole in the ground covered by a sheet of tarpaulin, but it was a house to us.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
We were evicted from our 'ole in the ground; we 'ad to go and live in a lake.
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky to have a lake! There were a hundred and fifty of us living in t' shoebox in t' middle o' road.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
Cardboard box?
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Aye.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
You were lucky. We lived for three months in a paper bag in a septic tank. We used to have to get up at six in the morning, clean the paper bag, eat a crust of stale bread, go to work down t' mill, fourteen hours a day, week-in week-out, for sixpence a week, and when we got home our Dad would thrash us to sleep wi' his belt.
SECOND YORKSHIREMAN:
Luxury. We used to have to get out of the lake at six o'clock in the morning, clean the lake, eat a handful of 'ot gravel, work twenty hour day at mill for tuppence a month, come home, and Dad would thrash us to sleep with a broken bottle, if we were lucky!
THIRD YORKSHIREMAN:
Well, of course, we had it tough. We used to 'ave to get up out of shoebox at twelve o'clock at night and lick road clean wit' tongue. We had two bits of cold gravel, worked twenty-four hours a day at mill for sixpence every four years, and when we got home our Dad would slice us in two wit' bread knife.
FOURTH YORKSHIREMAN:
Right. I had to get up in the morning at ten o'clock at night half an hour before I went to bed, drink a cup of sulphuric acid, work twenty-nine hours a day down mill, and pay mill owner for permission to come to work, and when we got home, our Dad and our mother would kill us and dance about on our graves singing Hallelujah.
FIRST YORKSHIREMAN:
And you try and tell the young people of today that ..... they won't believe you.
ALL:
They won't!

Unless there's a political shift, Gen Y won't come to the party

Generation Y just won't play ball in Australian politics. We're not joining major parties, and we're not voting for them either. The interest in political issues is there, but the traditional party structures are foreign to us.

Young people's reluctance to even dip a toe in the water of the party political system must be annoying to the party animals concerned about renewal. They should be concerned, too. Both Liberal and Labor party membership numbers are in decline, and the average age of ALP members is 50. No firm figure is available from the Liberal Party, but an educated guess would be that its membership is older still.

So why won't we join? It's complex, but here are a few thoughts.

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First, for many of my fellow Gen Yers, joining a party says to the world that you subscribe to a set of political philosophies in a cookie-cutter way. Yet we are a generation that is used to expressing our individuality and exercising choice. If something doesn't fit us, we are willing to walk away without a second thought.

Second, many of us reckon we wouldn't have the time or don't know how to get started.

Third, respect for politicians as professionals is, well, lacking. This is certainly not Generation Y-specific, but cynicism seems to have been snowballing through the generations, to the point where Generation Y sees the griminess of Australian politics as fact, reinforced by media focus on the worst of our pollies' behaviour. As a fellow Gen-Y traveller said to me, ''Everyone there [in political parties] is a wanker … plus everyone will hate you, and you won't get anything done that you want to.''

Alternatives to the mainstream parties are also abundant. There are the obvious groups like GetUp! and the Youth Climate Coalition, which are very sophisticated at attracting members in schools and unis and who understand the online sphere. They also focus on single-issue campaigns, which tend to be more popular because then we don't have to squeeze ourselves into that political cookie cutter.

For these non-party political groups, membership is easy, just a click away. Political parties are improving on this front, but joining up online is still difficult and over-complicated. At the moment if you try to join NSW Labor, the page comes up with an error message and simply says ''We're Sorry''. Symbolic perhaps.

Members of Gen Y, maybe more than previous generations, like to feel empowered. These alternate political groups have an ingenious ability to make young people feel like we're part of something larger and that our contribution is important. Whereas in political parties, the power for younger members is close to zero, and there are old networks that are not for the likes of you and that operate through different mediums to what you're used to. Things are organised through phone calls and meetings, not Facebook or email. Even if you're willing to work your way up that greasy pole to elected office, your power is tempered by the party itself.

There are, of course, still young idealistic people who do join the parties. I asked a couple of them why. Liberal member Paul Boulus, 21, and Alex Cubis, 24, a member of the ALP, both said they saw that society needed change, and they believed that in our democratic system the major parties were the best vehicles to bring that about.

''By being involved you can do a bit of good,'' Cubis said, adding that being in the party offered ''great life experience'' to young people. Boulus also saw empowering young people as very important, and said the parties could do a lot better in this regard: ''The way the parties run themselves today, it's not conducive to new members and it's not conducive to young new members especially,'' he said. ''I don't blame some people for not bothering.'' But he added: ''Those existing structures don't change unless younger members sign up - the more young people there are voting in the party, the more power we have to influence the direction of the party.''

When Tony Blair's famous media spinner Alastair Campbell was interviewed about a film based partly on himself, he confronted the interviewer saying: ''If people like you [in the media] just go round the place … spreading that message that politics is venal, and politics is crass … then don't be surprised if young people then start to say, 'Why should we give a shit about the world?''

We're stuck in a terrible loop here: elements of the major parties present themselves poorly, the media focuses on the worst of party politics, young idealists don't join, we get more people of a less-than-idealistic nature joining, which in turn makes the parties even worse. Then the membership becomes even narrower and less representative.

If the big parties really want to turn this around, they're going to have to drastically change and start playing ball with Gen Y. And maybe Gen Y, too, will have to brave those shark-infested party political waters to make things better.

How Twitter tweeted before Obama sang

Osama bin Laden's death could have been just another Twitter rumour but before it was officially confirmed, the social media site was telling us what US President Barack Obama was going to say before he said it.

For at least an hour in the lead-up to his televised address, there were Tweeters guessing and joking about the reason why Barack Obama had called a late night press conference. The arrival of the iPhone5 or aliens were just some of the more ridiculous ones to emerge from the Twitterverse.

But the first serious tweet came from Keith Urbahn, a staffer for former defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld. He tweeted at 12.24pm Australian time that he had a reputable source telling him US forces had killed Osama Bin Laden.

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Then strangely WWF wrestler the Rock alluded to Osama's death in this tweet and CNN's Steve Brusk tweeted that Obama would be talking about a national security matter.

And then CBS Capitol Hill reporter, Jill Jackson confirmed it at 12.32pm, tweeting "House Intelligence committee aide confirms that Osama Bin Laden is dead. US has the body."

This first tweet may have only come a hair's whisker before the TV networks, but in news, who's first matters.

For those looking, you could have even seen signs of Bin Laden's death in the Twitterverse much earlier. About nine hours earlier in fact when @ReallyVirtual or Sohaib Athar tweetedfrom Abbottabad, the village where bin Laden was killed, that he had heard gunfire and helicopters.

"Helicopter hovering above Abbottabad at 1AM (is a rare event)." Later he tweeted that he was just "a tweeter, awake at the time . . ." and there weren't "many twitter users in Abbottabad."

But after the tweets from Jackson and Urbahn, the number of Osama-related tweets mushroomed, and again when CNN was running it as a confirmed story on their network. So before Obama told the world, many avid Twitter fans had already known for at least an hour.

Before Obama's address one in five tweets in the world were about Bin Laden's death. Indeed Twitter itself said that the story had prompted the highest sustained rate of tweets ever, 3000 per second.

An internet poll last night of 11,500 people, had nearly 36 per cent say they found out about Bin Laden's death first through Twitter, and about 14 per cent said they found out first through television news. Even Facebook beat the TV networks, with about 19 per cent finding out that way. Bear in mind this was a poll of social media users.

Even so Twitter's role in delivering what is one of the biggest news stories in recent years must be the tipping point for the microblogging site; that Twitter will finally be taken seriously as a news source.

But this could easily have been just another rumour, it's happened before. We saw this most recently when Twitter told us that a Qantas A380 had crashed in Indonesia, parts of the story were true (for example debris falling into the jungle) but the rest of the story was obscured by online hysteria.

Twitter is perfectly designed to be the best generator of Chinese whispers; lots of people, not much detail and and a speed unrivalled by any other media. It also has the ability to bemuse as happened yesterday when there was persistent confusion among twitterers between the hash tag #osamadead and #obamadead.

But what makes it a dubious news source is also what makes it the best news source - when it gets it right. It delivers faster than anything else can because it's like the chaos theory of news generation. And it delivers it with wit, humour and original voices.

Despite the gravitas of yesterday's situation, Twitter's irreverent humour was at its best. For example, one of the top tweets of the day was "R.I.P Osama Bin Laden - World Hide And Go Seek Champion (2001 - 2011)". A few tweeted along these lines: "Osama dead: Donald Trump demands the death certificate." And yet another had this punchline on the day: "Osama probably regrets signing up for the Playstation network I'm guessing."

US comedian and writer Dana Gould made the followingobservation: "Bin Laden officially dead, the same week we learned Obama officially born. Weird . . . :

As much as Twitter showed what it was capable of yesterday, it's important to know that while many punters heard it first through social media, that was merely the first step. To know more than the basics or the humour of the day, one had to look further.

But to have news break on a medium and see how a whole group of people react to a single event all on one day in the same medium was something to behold. What it is capable of doing in the future could be even more remarkable.

Bella Counihan writes for the National Times.

I'm as un-Australian as...

Clubs Australia recently launched a campaign against the government's proposed pokies pre-commitment scheme, designed to stop problem gamblers from losing too much on the one-armed bandits. The pokies reform, lobbied for by independent members Andrew Wilkie and Nick Xenophon, was advertised in newspapers and online as a licence to gamble and unequivocally ''un-Australian''.

Well, dammit, I wish someone had told me. I don't want anything to do with it if it's un-Australian. I mean that would make me un-Australian and god knows what would happen then. But this worries me, do I really know which things are un-Australian and which things aren't? Kangaroos, Uluru, Vegemite — now that's Australian, but what about the rest of things that compose this universe?

The term has been around for the best part of the 20th century, rising to prominence in the 1990s but still none of us can figure out what it means. One historian, Klaus Neumann recentlysearched through decades of parliamentary proceedings in Hansard to try and define the term by the people that use it the most — politicians. Neumann found no logic behind the use of the term, instead concluding that politicians' references to un-Australian were basically ''incoherent'' and that the term ''has barely any historical reference points''.

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Whole social studies have looked into the term and have found much the same thing, it means any manner of things to different people, albeit under the same very broad pop culture umbrella. They're all associated but not exclusive to ''violence, intolerance, selfishness, waste, racism, divisiveness, separatism and immodesty''.

With a bit of research I've now made this handy list for you readers out there to realise when you're endorsing something that just doesn't quite cut the Australian mustard enough to belong to this wide brown land. And so in no particular order all the things that I've been told are un-Australian:

1. Not eating lamb, especially on Australia Day - Sam Kekovichtold me that was definitely un-Australian.

2. ''Dibber-Dobber'' Julian Assange - Illustrious men's magazineZoo told me he was not only un-Australian, but the ''un-Australian of the Year''. Gillard and Rudd both featured in the top 5.

3. Pauline Hanson's jailing - The red-haired fox of Australian politics, who very nearly got a spot in the NSW parliament, told us herself that her imprisonment was un-Australian, as well as countless other things during her tenure in parliament. Ironically she too has also been named un-Australian.

4. Lleyton Hewitt — Or just about any Australian sporting star who's had a bit of a sook.

5. Anti-globalisation protesters, nuclear testing in the Pacific and comments by Sydney's Muslim cleric Sheik Taj Aldin Alhilali— Howard told us they were all un-Australian.

6. Asylum seekers — surely there's a radio shock jock somewhere that told me they were un-Australian, I mean come on, they're not even from Australia. How un-Australian can you get?

7. Anything to do with ''banning'' Christmas because of political correctness — Don Randall, the man that brought you the term''Gay-BC'' for the nation's broadcaster, told us that ''banning'' Christmas carols was un-Australian.

8. Vegetarians — Everyone from Sam Kekovich to Wil Anderson (who is himself a vego) has told me these tofu sausage eaters are un-Australian.

9. Dole bludgers and tax cheats — Christopher Skase also comes to mind and all definitely un-Australian.

10. WorkChoices — the ACTU's secretary at the time, Greg Combet, also told us the Howard government's controversial IR laws were ''unfair and un-Australian''.

The list could seriously go on and on and on.

So, at this point all we have to go on is what other people tell us is un-Australian, even if it's ridiculous, even it's conflicting and even if it's obviously over the top. It's a term that can be used anywhere, any time, to discredit and spook us about anything. But hey, maybe me questioning the term ''un-Australian'' is itself un-Australian. Just what kind of dole-bludging, vego, hippy, student am I?

Bella Counihan works at the Canberra Press Gallery and writes for the National Times.