Geoff’s Lemon Comment

I hate it when people I respect say something that makes me question why I respect them. Case in point: Geoff Lemon. Hilarious superstar of the blogosphere and an incredibly impressive human being all round. I often cried with laughter reading Geoff’s posts on his blog, Heathen Scripture. Some of my favourites are  Australiar and the f*cking idiot dilemma and As a poet, Rinehart makes a great billionaire.

A couple of months ago I noticed that Geoff’s posts weren’t as regular as they had been and his Tweets were few and far between. He recently posted this explanation as to why he hasn’t been updating Heathen Scripture as often.

As he explained, he was spending his time on other activities, such as editing a journal, sports writing and sports commentary. I can relate to this situation. My blog is often neglected when I have a lot of other things going on in my life. A demanding full time job, renovating a house, writing books, playing hockey, watching footy, hanging out with friends and family. I don’t know how I find time to sleep!

But the part of Geoff’s explanation that really grated on me and led to the slight reduction of my aforementioned respect, was this statement:

 People who get immersed in politics can start to take that shit way too seriously in a very short time. They take themselves way too seriously into the bargain. They treat five hours of Twitter commentary like an event of substance. From where my father is currently working in the States, he reminded me the other day that no-one there has ever heard of Tony Abbott. That’s worth bearing in mind. It’s also good to remember that not every debate demands your personal contribution, and not every idea you have needs to be seen through. Whether it’s the self-importance brought on by having any kind of audience, or the depression induced by realising what a spectacular clusterfuck our national situation is, politics can eat you away from the inside like a hydrofluoric enema.

It took me a few days to let this statement settle, before I realised just why it annoyed me so much. No doubt it hurt a bit since I could count myself as someone who does take politics seriously and I do enjoy commenting on it on Twitter. I also spend many conversations in the offline world analysing politics with family and friends. But I don’t think the reason I take politics seriously is the reason that Geoff implies. It’s not a hobby. It’s not something I do because I don’t have anything else in my life. As I said, there is a lot going on in my world and yet politics still squeezes itself in the gaps.

Geoff’s statement sounds to me like he treats an interest in politics like an interest in sport, and that he’s overdosed and is sick of it. I too understand what it is like to have a fanatical interest in sport. My family and I are devoted supporters of the Port Adelaide Football Club, and when the club isn’t going so well (like now) it definitely affects our wellbeing during the winter months. But I don’t think that losing a football game is the same as losing an election. My family has talked about this idea a lot. Coincidentally, Port Adelaide won the grand final in 2004, the same year that Mark Latham lost the election to John Howard. In 2007, Port was humiliatingly defeated in the Grand Final (by Geoff Lemon’s team Geelong!) but our misery was short lived as we soon had an election win to celebrate after Kevin Rudd beat John Howard.

The comment that no one in America has heard of Tony Abbott isn’t very helpful. When your team loses a football game, it’s a shit feeling. But it doesn’t affect your life in the way Tony Abbott winning an election would affect me, and millions of other Australians.

The reason I couldn’t let Geoff’s comment slide was that it occurred to me that most main stream political commentators share Geoff’s flippancy when they speak of the foregone conclusion that Gillard will lose the next election. (Which by the way, I don’t believe is a foregone conclusion.) They say ‘Abbott will repeal the carbon tax’. They say ‘Abbott will get rid of the NBN’. They say ‘Abbott will cut spending on government services such as health and education’. And that’s all they say, as if they’re reporting that Port Adelaide just lost by 10 goals, now go home and get over it. They never go on to say how damaging his actions would be to this country. This damage fills me with fear and dread. I worry about what the country will be like under an Abbott government. I believe taking action on Climate Change is more important than bitching about what Gillard said before the election and what the Greens wanted her to do once the minority government formed. So that is why I care about politics more than I care about sport. Politics is not a sport. And talking about it on Twitter is a worthwhile experience. Sharing ides and information with likeminded people is an incredibly important part of our democratic society. Twitter and independent blogs have become even more important in a media environment where the main stream press choose to turn a blind eye to newsworthy accounts of what this country would actually be like if Abbott wins the next election.

Class Warfare – Australia’s Untouchables

Yesterday I saw the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel. I give it five stars. This is not why I’m mentioning it in my post. One small part of the film got me thinking about the Australian class system, and why it is the way it is.

In the movie, there is a servant working at the hotel who is from the Indian ‘untouchable’ caste. I’ve always hated hearing about the caste system in India. Such entrenched disadvantage and discrimination is terrible for a society. That train of thought got me thinking about whether Australia has an ‘untouchable’ class, and, influenced by this article I read in the SMH by Peter Hartcher, I’ve decided we do. But unlike India, where the untouchables are poverty stricken, Australia’s ‘untouchable’ class is the richest people in our society. It seems to be that this sub-set can do or say anything they like, and remain completely untouched by criticism or scrutiny.

As an example, apparently Clive Palmer, mining billionaire, can get away with saying that the Greens are financed by the CIA in a conspiracy to bring down the Australian coal industry (WTF!), and can then days later joke that he only said it to help the LNP’s chances in the QLD election that weekend. A party to which he has donated millions of dollars. Australian journalists report this all as if Palmer has every right to ‘play’ the media and the public in this way. Supposedly because he’s rich. So why does his wealth make him so untouchable? Why can he say and do anything he likes and the media will report it as genuine news, when anyone with half a brain can see that his only motivation in life is to further his own wealth? He’s not fighting against the carbon tax because he doesn’t believe in climate change. He just doesn’t give a shit that the climate is changing. As long as his wealth is growing, his needs are met. In Hartcher’s article, Greens leader Bob Brown was quoted as saying: “This (Clive Palmer’s comments) has generated more publicity in Queensland than the whole Greens campaign. Our campaign launch had zero coverage.” This situation is completely beyond ridiculous. Every time Palmer, or fellow mining billionaires, Rinehart and Twiggy open their mouths to let out a belch of tax hating, wealth loving, greed promoting, self-interested gibberish, the media report it as fact and such very important fact at that. Wake up people!

The Australian public on the whole have a very strange attitude towards class. I assume it’s similar in most western societies, where a large proportion of the middle class would like to think of themselves as upper class, and do their best to espouse this belonging by being derogatory about the working class. I see this attitude a lot through two of my passions – football and politics. I’m a passionate supporter of my football club, Port Adelaide. My club has a long and proud history of success (even if we are going though a bit of a dry period at the moment). I support this club because my grandpa did, and my dad and now my whole family. The club has working class roots and these days has a huge mixture of supporters from the very poor, to the very rich. Having been back in Adelaide for a couple of months now, I am reacquainting myself with the way that many in this city use snobbery about Port Adelaide to make themselves feel like they belong to a higher class. Basically, by being derogatory and rude about Port supporters, in most cases to our faces, they are making themselves feel like they must have achieved some sort of status in the world, as only those who aren’t working class could be in a position to degrade the ‘bogan ugg boot wearers’ from Port Adelaide. If I didn’t find it so offensive and downright annoying, it would be amusing. Similarly, I believe many people in this country vote for the Liberal party because they believe that this signals that they are not working class, and have thus achieved something in life. Little do they care, or try to understand, that the Liberal party doesn’t exist to support middle class Australia.

Perhaps the division between left and right wing in this country is much simpler than I am making it out. A study by Canadian academics has shown that “right-wing ideology forms a ‘pathway’ for people with low reasoning ability to become prejudiced against groups such as other races and gay people”. In my experience, you can add class to this list as well. All you people out there with low reasoning ability, who think Clive Palmer is untouchable because he is rich, and think that by being derogatory about Port Adelaide you are embedding yourself in a higher class, perhaps it’s time you had a think about what is motivating your prejudice.