Australia I'm Standing in It

Having been shut out of Australia for a long time, we have at last been allowed to return. With the links of familiarity broken by absence, it is almost like visiting somewhere new. But, unlike going to a place you've never been, going home after a long, forced exile, brings your memories and expectations up against the reality of your former homeland, which, inevitably, has altered in the time since you left.

I remember an Australia full of wit and fun, as exemplified by the wonderful television comedy that this blog's title echoes, Australia You're Standing in It, of which Tim and Debbie's Brain Space was always my favourite segment:

But the last two years have taken their toll on joie de vivre and silliness, it seems. 

The first thing we noticed after getting here is that many, many Australians, despite being vaccinated, remain thoroughly spooked by the virus that most governments have reacted to with lockdowns and other extreme measures. In Canberra, a place where, if you are walking, you are almost certain not to encounter another living soul, we watched a young woman pushing a pram up Anzac Parade, solitary, on an enormous street, her face almost invisible beneath a mask. 

The only danger she faced from the virus was from us as we drove past, maskless - all the other cars we saw contained solitary drivers, each one masked, with the windows up. 

Of course, we remember our own initial panic when we were told about this new virus and shown the videos of people falling down in the street and sitting in Italian hospitals with fishbowls on their heads. Two years on though, (and fully vaccinated), we have read enough to know that panic is not sensible, and facemasks in the open air are pointless, especially for people youthful enough to be the mothers of babies in prams.

But in Australia, despite the worldwide web, people seem cut off from the "Hell, let's live with it" attitude and remain possessed by fear.

And perhaps as a result of the febrile atmosphere, Australian politics seem to have hit new lows. Nothing that new there, but what is shocking to me is the way that the state-run broadcaster, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, an organisation charged with presenting a diversity of perspectives, never stating or implying that any perspective is the editorial opinion of the ABC and never misrepresenting or unduly favouring any perspective, seems hellbent on bringing down the current government, led by Scott Morrison, who will be facing an election in the next couple of months.

Scott Morrison is not an exciting leader, but he has a certain steady-as-you-go quality that just at this moment in history strikes me as not the worst attribute for someone to possess who is at your country's helm. 

Morrison came to the job of Prime Minister after years of political turmoil, which started when Kevin Rudd took the leadership of the Australian Labor Party and briefly succeeded in getting most of the voting public to fall in love with him. Rudd won the next election and then disappointed the electorate very quickly. Julia Gillard ousted him, but never won the hearts of the electorate and was forced to govern with the help of two rural independents whose own voters were furious that they had thrown in their hats with the left. Rudd ousted Gillard and another election was fought, at which Tony Abbott won a commanding victory. 

Although he had overwhelmingly won over the public, Abbott faced many within his own party who disliked the fact that he was a Christian, was not a supporter of gay marriage and understood that, while Australia could not solve climate change by itself, it could ruin its economy if it went ahead, without China also acting in good faith, and decarbonised. 

Abbott was ousted by an extremely ambitious, socially more liberal colleague called Malcolm Turnbull. I listened to Turnbull quite recently, when he was speaking at the funeral of an Australian businessman who operated in Russia. Turnbull's highest praise for the dead businessman was reserved for the brilliant way in which that businessman concealed from the investors Turnbull had taken to Russia the worrying truth - namely, that the people they were being encouraged to go into joint venture with were extreme fascists, bigots and half-mad. Turnbull's admiration for such unscrupulous behaviour gives a glimpse of the kind of moral compass Australia's Prime Minister had while Turnbull was in charge. 

Turnbull did not make any effort to win over voters when election time came, as his own self-belief told him that he would win a landslide. Instead, he very nearly lost and, as a result of his poor performance, Morrison was put in. To my surprise, Morrison went on to win the next election very handsomely and almost single-handedly. 

Morrison is absolutely not cool or trendy. I imagine him in a different life being the deputy headmaster of a large secondary school. Perhaps it is because there is nothing inner-city about him, no hint of the vegan, no sense that he might harbour a secret passion for quinoa - or perhaps it is because he belongs to a pentecostal Christian church (uber-uncool) - but he is constantly mocked and spoken of scornfully, and he generally gets a consistently mocking press. He is referred to routinely as "Scotty from Marketing", because he ran Tourism Australia in an earlier part of his life - he was responsible, I think, for that embarrassing, but memorable, "Where the bloody hell are you?" campaign to encourage visitors to come down under. But I think, as well, he was responsible for this, possibly the most lovely promotional video ever made: 

In his term in office, Morrison has had to deal with bushfires and flooding - and the media insist that he has dealt with them uniquely badly. I have an idea that no one whose house has burned down or been filled with muddy water is ever happy, and no leader can ever get much right in such crises - particularly in a country with such a huge land mass and such a scattered population as Australia. *

Morrison also mismanaged the pandemic, according to all comers, and I would agree with this, except that the charge against him is that he wasn't strict enough, whereas my view is that lockdowns were an enormous mistake.

Anyway, I don't exactly love Morrison, but I don't think he is a terrible person or a very bad leader. Whatever I think about him is, in any case, not really relevant to what I want to talk about, which is the relentless, blatant - to my eyes new and deeply shocking - bias of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation. 

To give an illustration of what I mean, here are two comedy sketches, both broadcast in primetime yesterday evening. They do not make any attempt to hide their contempt for Scott Morrison. In the first, they focus on a single, possibly slightly ill-judged, picture Morrison posted on his Facebook page, shortly after he had been forced to stay at home because he had tested positive for the virus. The posts all around this one were to do with important issues, demonstrating that his mind was on the floods and the Ukraine situation and all the other things that a Prime Minister needed to be focussing on. But the Australian Broadcasting Corporation's weekly performer chose to grab this single piece of light-heartedness and use it as an indictment, as if Morrison was doing nothing at all beyond posting pictures of his cat. The scorn, the hatred that drips from this performance has no place at the public broadcaster:

The second item to pop up, a very short time later, yesterday evening was this, a "comedy sketch" that not only implies that all those working in parliament for the government side of politics are people without principle, but also attacks a judicial decision, which is odd, given the left is usually full of outrage at any hint that the cherished independence and integrity of the courts come under scrutiny:

No doubt, with the help of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Australia will soon have a new government. Whether that will be because it is necessary or simply because the population has been gently stewed in a rich gravy of government funded (yet anti-government) propaganda is something we may never know.

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*I won't go into the whole question of land management and poor zoning and new ideas about bush flammability and how to prepare for fires, but my many relatives who live on the land point to newfangled ways of doing things as the cause of a lot of the fire and flooding problems that have arisen over the past few years, combined with the arrival in rural areas of more and more people who love the idea of a little place in the country but who do not understand exactly what living in rural Australia and staying safe entails.