Di and I have made some progress towards re-settling in Australia this week – which is encouraging as it is now a week and a half since we arrived. We are still staying with friends as our house is not yet available, and although we are hoping to move into our home this week, all the indications are that it will still be two or three weeks before our furniture can be delivered.
On the positive side, we now have a car, we have arranged for electricity and internet (both of which should become available this week), and we have ordered a bed (also for delivery this week). We have been looking at other necessary items, such as a refrigerator and a letter box, and less necessary but desirable items, such as a television set and coffee maker.
It has been great to catch up with our family since returning. Di and I have spent good quality time with all four of our grandchildren as well as two of our own children, and we are hoping to catch up soon both with our other children and with my elderly mother who lives in Queensland.
The photo at the top of this blog shows one of these encounters. We met our daughter Liesl and her son (our grandson) Noah at a park beside Sydney Harbour. Noah loves to play shopkeepers, which is what we were doing when the photo was taken. However, as some of my Facebook followers are already aware, I feel that I need to work harder at developing Noah’s negotiating skills, as he agreed to pay me an imaginary $23 for an imaginary avocado sandwich. Feeling guilty, I naturally then gave him a truly bargain price on the imaginary bottle of pineapple juice that I also “sold” him.
It has been interesting to return to Australia in the middle of a national election campaign. Officially, the campaign has only been running for a few weeks, but given the state of Australian politics since the last election three years ago, most people feel that the campaign has been underway in a de facto sense ever since that time.
Having endured the marathon of a Presidential campaign while living in the US, and having been underwhelmed by the quality of debate and analysis of issues during that campaign, I was hoping for something better here in Australia. In that, I have been fairly disappointed, as all the parties seem to be repeating the banal slogans and conclusions of focus groups rather than engaging in genuine and visionary debate about important issues.
Maybe my bar has been set too high. I can still remember as a boy being enthralled by Menzies’ eloquence, and in later years, Whitlam’s grand vision and expansive energy, Hawke’s good-natured rascality and Keating’s sharp-tongued vindictive. By contrast, the two serious candidates for the Prime Ministership this time are positioning themselves as what I would call ‘low-profile targets’, avoiding as many specifics as possible which might become challengeable. As a consequence, neither candidate seems to have captured the imagination of the voting population.
There is an old saying in Australian politics that I remember first hearing in the 1970s, which is that “oppositions don’t win elections; governments lose elections”. If the opinion polls are to be believed, that adage is likely to be repeated on election day in six days from now. And if that is so, then in the words of one veteran political commentator, “Those among us with a morbid desire to witness political train wrecks will have been disappointed by this disciplined election campaign, but it won't be long before the lid blows” (Source).
I wonder how today’s political scene in Australia will be described by commentators, not so much in the next month (I think that is fairly predictable) but in a generation from now. This question came to my mind as I was recently watching the brilliant two-part ABC documentary called “Whitlam – the Power and the Passion”. Chronicling what has become known as the Whitlam era in Australia, the documentaries (to quote the official ABC blurb) describe the period in these words:
“It was a time of power, of passion, which divided us as a nation in a way that hadn't been seen before, nor since. As a great orator, with a brilliant mind and bulletproof self belief, Gough Whitlam spent over 20 years fighting civil wars inside the Labor party before eventually leading them to power. He was hailed as a Labor messiah – with a greater downfall than any politician in Australian history.”
The documentary described Whitlam’s arrival on the political scene as “an Orpheus in a bogan underworld”. The documentary also described the tragic saga in which Whitlam was let down repeatedly by the incompetence and treachery of his subordinates while not being supported (and in fact being undermined) by those whose duty it was to listen and accept his advice (principally the Governor-General).
The legacy of that experience still haunts Australian politics, and this is so not only for those of us who were in their formative years when the events unfolded. The Whitlam story showed that even the strongest, most visionary and most capable leader can be let down by incompetent subordinates and the treacherous undermining of those whose duty ought to have been to support the leader and provide stability. Many have argued recently that the tradition of internal treachery within political parties is alive and well in Australia today.
Sadly, I have seen the same thing happen in schools, where the consequences can be at least as destructive because, in the case of schools, the precious futures of young people are at stake.
The focus through much of the current election campaign has been on the leaders, and perhaps rightly so. However, my hope is that the subordinates of whichever leader wins this Saturday’s election will prove to be more proficient than many of their media performances have hitherto shown them to be.
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If you are interested in watching “Whitlam – the Power and the Passion”, a preview can be seen online here and purchased through several sources including this one
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On a totally different and more light-hearted note, this is something I wish I had seen three years ago before I moved to the US: http://bigstockblog.squarespace.com/blog/20-british-words-that-mean-something-totally-different-in-the-us
I could also add a few extras of my own that led to some some significant though fortunately usually hilarious misunderstandings.