8 posts tagged “australia”

Thanks to the magic of the Internet, I'm currently watching the ABC's election coverage live early Saturday morning Seattle time. My adherence to superstition by not declaring victory early has paid off. Now I feel it's safe for me to finally say that Australia has decided: welcome to a Rudd government, and welcome back to the fundamental values that I always felt Australia represented, but which were repressed and eroded over the past 11 years -- a belief in the fair go, and a progressive, forward-looking and unselfish nation.

Now that victory is sealed, one wonders what will become of the Howard legacy -- the man who stayed too long, the man whose reputation among his followers was built more on winning elections rather than any core principles or vision that one could speak of. The gravy will be if Maxine McKew can pull off a stunning upset and dislodge a sitting PM in only the second time in Australian history.

As some commentators have pointed out, people in my age range have never known a federal government that didn't have John Howard at the helm. I regret I couldn't be in Australia for this moment, it's always an exciting thing to be a part of change -- not quite the Berlin Wall coming down, but certainly a turning point for my country that will hopefully result in a return to balance after lurching too far to the right.

What an incredible state of affairs: a PM and a treasurer from Queensland, my home state; for the first time a woman deputy PM in Julia Gillard; the prospect of the sitting PM losing his seat; and not a single Liberal government in power anywhere in Australia. Now for a perverse bit of schadenfreude: is Costello going to be elected Opposition leader unopposed once the dust has settled?

Well it's hard to believe it's the final week of this interminable campaign (which admittedly has not been as long and protracted as the current American Presidential one). Jason Koutsoukis of The Age gives a nice summary of the disasters that have befallen the Liberal Party (oops sorry the Coalition) in their losing battle to cling onto power. This is not to say that the outcome is a foregone conclusion, but you'd be a brave man to bet on the incumbents right now.

While I'm basing my vibes on what I read in the online versions of the print papers and the excellent vidcasts courtesy of the ABC, my impressions of Howard have been of a hectoring old man whose main appeal to the Australian people is "don't trust the other mob", which directly plays into the hands of Rudd's lines about Howard not having any fresh ideas for the future. Instead, he resorts to negativity and scaremongering.

What's worse is, what policies they have released add further vindication to the "no new ideas" and "stale government" line -- more tax cuts and more (non-means-tested) handouts. It must seem like a gross injustice to the Coalition in that "more of the same" ought to be a good thing, since that means we should be expecting continued economic prosperity and rising wealth. And yet Australians on the whole (based on the polls) don't seem to be buying it anymore, and certainly not on the back of consecutive interest rate rises.

Perhaps voters can finally see through the fact that tax cuts and handouts are byproducts of prosperity, but the more this largess gets distributed back to them, the more it's likely to simply push up prices for non-productive assets like real estate and essentials like education fees thus cancelling out any benefit they might have seen in the first place.

The greatest irony of the campaign has been the one-two sucker punch the Government delivered to themselves in relation to containing inflation and therefore interest rates. Howard likes to claim that the industrial relations reform no one except big business wanted, WorkChoices, has contained wages growth, thereby placing downward pressure on inflation and hence interest rates. But try explaining to punters how receiving _less_ money in your pay packet only to _still_ be paying a rising monthly mortgage bill is a good thing... How's that for out of touch?

...before the pork-barrelling gets any more blatant?

I haven't posted in awhile lately, and much longer again on the Federal election. I have been keeping up though, although I must say the majority of the column inches in the press has been about the polls and who tricked who into saying what rather than focusing on any substantive policy differences (indeed probably because there are few). Here is my summary of the campaign thus far, which should be all you need to know (probably until ballot day if the parties are as predictable as I think they are):

• The only major policy differences are in the areas of industrial relations and WorkChoices, and climate change. The Coalition will keep WorkChoices, the ALP will scrap it. The ALP will sign Kyoto, the Coalition will not, while still claiming that Australia leads the world on climate change action anyway.
  
• The Democrats are as good as gone, and the Greens have been marginalised.
  
• John Howard claims Kevin Rudd is without substance and cannot be trusted.
• Kevin Rudd claims John Howard is out of ideas and cannot be trusted.
  
• John Howard has attempted to claim credit for good economic management (seemingly manifested by low interest rates), but denies responsibility for interest rate rises (apparently it's everyone else's fault).
• Peter Garrett has been copping it as a sell out.
• Malcolm Turnbull has been copping it as a sell out.
• The left-wig press is salivating at the prospect of John Howard losing his seat.
  
• Both sides are offering big tax cuts.
• The Coalition is again offering middle-class welfare and handouts to pensioners.
• No one thinks Costello should be leader -- not his party nor the electorate.
• On the other hand the Coalition seems to think offering up Howard+Costello as "old+new" but equally "more of the same" is a winning strategy.
• The ALP seems to think me-tooism and refusing to be wedged is a winning strategy.
• The gallery seems to think the ALP is right.

Just to break up the foodie posts a bit, last night's outing ended fairly late (we walked all the way from downtown to Cap Hill trying to find a decent coffee+cake place that wasn't either shut or full -- Seattle ain't no 24-hour city that's for sure). The caffeine was still circulating in my system when I got home at 1.30 in the morning, so when I saw that the leaders' debate was going to be streamed live on the Net at 2.30am (7.30pm AEST), I decided to stay up and watch it.

I called it for Rudd with maybe a 60:40 margin in his favour, but the worm on Channel Nine and a bevy of commentators on The Age seemed to concur that Rudd was the decisive winner.

Howard definitely got testy a few times, and it was a rather strange way to end the debate talking about an education revolution involving going back to basics, bringing back technical colleges and historical re-revisionism.

Rudd, on the other hand, was very good at hammering home his policy initiatives on education and climate change. It's just unfortunate that, to my ears, he sounded far too rehearsed and tightly scripted -- it reeked of high school debating team, with affected hand gestures, prepared counter-points and one-liners which he flubbed with a nervous Spoonerism here and there that just emphasised his robotism.

In the end, we just got More Of The Same: Howard talked about his wonderful economic track record, played the anti-union card, and claimed the Coalition would always keep interest rates lower, while Rudd talked about new leadership, and repeated his policy mantras on education, health, IR and climate change.

The only thing of note was Rudd (finally) countering Howard's attack on Labor's economic track record -- at last, someone brings up publicly Howard's own track record as treasurer, and subsequently defends the Hawke/Keating years for opening up the economy and laying the ground work for the prosperity we have today -- something not even Howard could plausibly deny (17% interest rates not withstanding of course!).

I've always had this preconceived notion (hmmm that sounds like bad sentence construction but I can't put my finger on why exactly) that there are many parallels between Canada and Australia: countries both born of the Commonwealth, both "stuck" between the influences of the Mother Country and the 800lb gorilla, the United States.

This article from the Economist, documenting the parity of the loonie with the greenback, could just as easily describe Australia's economic rise of the past decade -- substitute Australia with Canada, Alberta with, say, Western Australia, and Ontario and Quebec with NSW and Victoria, and the story still makes sense. If anything, it makes you realise the world is a lot more interconnected now than it ever was before.

I'm a couple days late, but Friday the 13th just past (what an inauspicious date) was my one year anniversary of arriving in the US of A. I look back now and realise how much time has passed, and how much I've been through -- adjusting to a new culture, making new friends, coming to terms with the breakup of an LTR (an ongoing process really)... oh and learning to become a good Microsoftie. (Note that, for better or worse, the latter is not quite the same as becoming a good developer!)

Looking back, I realise my negative preconceptions coloured my initial outlook: I zeroed in on things like income disparity and homelessness, gross obesity, a sense of insecurity walking in parts of downtown at night (a feeling I never experienced on the streets of Sydney or Melbourne no matter what time of night), the culture of the automobile, the isolation of the 'burbs, the excessive religiosity, the rampant consumerism (is the remembrance of every public holiday marked by a sale of some sort?), the fact that shopping in mom 'n' pop stores rather than a chain or franchise is the exception rather than the rule...

Over time, though, this negativity seems to have been tempered by an acknowledgment on my part that each of those issues demands far more complex answers than I, an outsider, could hope to come up with, not to mention that there are plenty of things to admire about America. The system here is relatively brutal compared to 'fair go' Australia, so Americans on the whole are very driven to succeed. And the system's excesses are kept in check by the feedback mechanism of Joe Public -- the free press, elections and consumer activism. In short, people give a crap. What's more, even if you start out with nothing, there is very little to stop you from rising to the top given the will and the ability. Contrast this with Australia's Tall Poppy Syndrome.

Make no mistake, I love Australia and I still believe the quality of life there is unparalleled. But the more I live in this country, the more I see beyond the stereotypes and the more I see the shades of grey; in such a large and diverse country, one size definitely does not fit all. I just hope that when I come back to Oz to visit, that my rose-coloured vision of Australia survives in tact, and that my memories of the Lucky Country weren't an illusion!

I was asked my name for my coffee order at Borders the other day, and I said "Alec".

Can you spell that please?

"A-l-e-c".

Apparently this sounded just like "i-l-i-c". I began to correct her: I said "No, a as in apple."

"Oh, a-l-i-c?".

No, "Alec, as in Alec Baldwin."

Ooooooh *giggles*. Click, whirr, crunch, ding ding ding, give the girl a prize! It's been awhile since someone got so confused by my pronunciation, it makes me wonder how much of my regular speech is misunderstood but people are too polite to say so!

Another thing Americans tend to ask me is, Don't I find their accents sound funny? In fact, no they don't -- thanks to Australians' healthy diet of American television! Southern, California, New York (or is that Noo Yawk), Boston -- I reckon I stand a good chance of distinguishing at least the broad region of origin of certain American accents. Maybe even emulate one or two if pushed, but I need some work on that since I'm trying my hardest to keep my Aussie accent, not lose it.

Speaking of TV, some favourite shows have ended recently either for the season or entirely: Battlestar Galactica, Top Gear, Rome... What's left for me to watch now? I think I may have complained about this before. Oh well it's worth complaining about again :). Maybe I should start watching American Idol and see what the fuss is all about over this Sanjaya Malakar guy -- the Seattle-ite who is defying the odds by seemingly advancing toward the final based on his wacky hairstyles rather than his talent (thanks to the votes of all the "Fanjayas"). Maybe it's best if you just decide for yourself:

Nice piece from Ariana Huffington on The Conventional Wisdumb on Barack Obama. I see her point about the need for leadership versus demanding detailed white papers on every single issue. I am also heartened to know, however, that Senator Obama has plenty of policy on his website. Speaking of which, it's evident he's been planning his campaign for quite some time -- you can't whip up a very hip, Web 2.0, social networking-aware web infrastructure like he has overnight.

On a related note, Australia is for once in the news here (the last occasion was when Steve Irwin died). And it's all thanks to our Prime Minister John Howard's rather ill-judged comments on Senator Obama's candidacy. For a PM who's widely admired for his political instincts (versus his principles), he got much more of a smackdown than even he expected I'm sure. He seems to be digging in his heels though.

What annoys me most though is his transparent flip-flopping on a variety of issues based on how the political winds are blowing: climate change and David Hicks in particular. For some reason in this election year (oh! there's a reason!) he's decided to be concerned about the environment and the welfare of an Australian citizen stuck in Gitmo for the last 5 years without trial. I just wish our PM had a more optimistic forward-looking vision for the country and demonstrated some leadership rather than promoting FUD for the sake of staying on as PM.

Update: John Howard just received a Wag of the Finger on tonight's Colbert Report! "Leave the ad hominem attacks on Senator Obama to us!" Touche.