Mr LATHAM (Werriwa) (5.03 p.m.)—I grieve for
the rise of the new political correctness—the hypocritical
demand of the conservative establishment in
this country for civility in political debate. Imagine
the hide of these people—the old money interests, the
conservative think tanks, the Tory MPs and their fellow
travellers in the commercial media. They have
spent the last 20 years hopping into the unemployed,
Aboriginal communities, newly arrived migrants and
anyone else at the bottom of the social ladder, and
now they want civility. This is the height of hypocrisy.
They want civility on just one side of the political
fence: the sort of civility by which George Pell is
automatically declared innocent, while Justice Michael
Kirby and other social reformers are slandered
in the Senate; the sort of civility whereby big business
is allowed to regulate itself, while the rest of
society receives a truckload of mutual obligation; the
sort of civility where the work ethic of the royal family
is beyond question, while the member for Warringah
can call young unemployed Australians ‘job
snobs’. For the establishment, civility is a way of
preserving the social pecking order. It helps the ruling
class to avoid public scrutiny and accountability. It
tells working people to accept their lot in life, without
challenging the power and privilege of the Tory
elite.This is a new political correctness, where sameness
is embraced and rebellion is written off as rude.
The old political correctness, with its unspoken truths
and protection of special interests, was bad enough;
the new one is twice as bad. It threatens to turn us
into a nation of robots, without the irreverence and
daring that have always defined our national character.
Bit by bit, it is chipping away at our cultural
identity, eroding the great Australian traditions of
larrikinism and mateship.
For the Tories, civility is important for another reason:
it is code for the re-election of the Howard government.
The conservative establishment is trying to
turn this government into a protected species, beyond
criticism and beyond condemnation. No matter how
many times the Prime Minister hugs the Americans
or tugs his forelock to the royal family, the establishment
will defend him and then have the hide to
claim that the Howard government is protecting
Australia’s national sovereignty. This is the defining
characteristic of Tory politics: double standards—led
by the member for Warringah. He says that he supports
community based politics, yet he has an obsessive
hatred of Australia’s largest community based
organisation, the trade union movement. He claims
that the ALP is no longer a working-class party, yet
he had kittens when I used a great working-class term
to describe the Prime Minister’s sycophancy toward
the United States.
Indeed, the establishment was out in force on that
issue. In the Daily Telegraph, Michael Duffy said:
No matter how they try to justify the language they use,
Crean and Latham are basically just letting the public see
how blokes in the Labor Party and the unions talk all the
time.
In the Sydney Morning Herald, Paddy McGuinness
called it, ‘a vulgar attack on the Prime Minister’.
Piers Akerman called it a, ‘linguistic shortcoming’.
Michael Duffy, Paddy McGuinness and Paddington
Piers are the same people who have been claiming for
a decade that Labor no longer represents the values
and language of working-class Australians. They are
the same people who complain about the chattering
classes and other elites, yet they cannot stand the
sound of Australian slang. This simply exposes their
cant and hypocrisy.
Civility is the new establishment catchcry. Writing
in the Australian newspaper, Janet Albrechtsen said
that she found parents barracking for their children at
Saturday morning sport, ‘having a go at the ref, yelling
abuse’ to be morally offensive. The Minister for
Education, Science and Training piously repeated this
view in parliament last week. This is typical of the
Tories, trying to take the passion and commitment out
of life, reducing us to a culture of conformity where
we no longer challenge authority figures. They want
to take the irreverence and spark out of the Australian
character and turn us into a nation of conservative
clones. According to their world view, people should
be one dimensional, passively accepting their place in
society.
On the Labor side of politics, we believe in the
richness of human nature—that social stability need
not be incompatible with the values of compassion
and creativity. Albrechtsen and Dr Nelson fail to understand
that the parents who take their children to
sport and passionately support them are the good parents,
the ones who care, the ones who are most likely
to look out for and assist the kids in need. The minister
for education may be a bland and passionless
character himself—in most respects, un-Australian—
but he should not expect other people to lead their
lives this way. What sort of society would we be if
parents did not feel emotional about their children?
People are not one dimensional. Social cohesion,
compassion and creativity can coexist.
Albrechtsen is another filthy hypocrite. Who is she
to lecture people on civility? She is someone who
hates feminism, describing other women as ‘totalitarian’
and ‘self-obsessed’ just because they support
paid maternity leave. She is someone who uses terms
such as ‘F...wittage’ in her columns. So much for civility.
This is the great fraud of Australian politics. When
Pauline Hanson gave her maiden speech in this place,
heaping abuse on Asians, Aborigines and anyone else
different to her, the Prime Minister said that the era of
political censorship had ended. Now the Tories are
trying to impose their own form of censorship—a
new political correctness that defends the political
interests of the Howard government. There is, of
course, nothing civil about the government’s electoral
strategy. It aims to turn Australians against each other
through the politics of division. This is a replica of
the culture war in the United States, the type of strategy
that inspired Pat Buchanan to write the following
memo to Richard Nixon in the late 1960s: ‘We
should tear the country in two and then pick up the
bigger piece politically.’ A similar piece of thinking is
now on the public record in this country. Last month
Paul Kelly interviewed the Prime Minister on his
63rd birthday and subsequently wrote:
Howard is going to focus on social policy this term and set
out to smash the post-Whitlam political alliance between
the working class and the tertiary-educated Left that defines
modern Labor. The refugee issue severed this alliance
at the 2001 poll and Howard will follow up with new campaigns.
In fact, the progressive consensus in Australian politics
is holding up remarkably well. Whether people
live in the inner city or the outer suburbs, they want
greater social investment in education and health. So,
too, they want a more sustainable urban environment,
with less congestion and pollution. On social policy,
even the member for Warringah has conceded there
is little public support for winding back Australia’s
abortion and divorce laws or reversing the many progressive
gains achieved by women in recent decades.
If the Prime Minister is to smash the progressive
consensus in this country, he will target questions of
race and responsibility. Twelve months ago today,
when they came together on the Tampa, they divided
the nation. As the Prime Minister demonstrated in the
1980s, racism is always lurking just below the surface
of conservative politics. It is a feature of the
Tory newspaper columnists: examples include Akerman’s
current campaign against Australian Muslims
and attempts by the little bigot, Mike Gibson, to slag
Asian and negro athletes. I have no doubt that the
establishment is gearing up for further campaigns
based on race and responsibility. Indeed, the Tory
dogs of war are mobilising against multiculturalism.
They see this as a spin-off from Tampa and September
11.
When Australia’s leading neoconservative think
tank, the Centre for Independent Studies, focuses on
an issue, it is a sign that the Howard government will
soon follow. Last year the CIS sponsored lectures by
Vaclav Klaus in which he attacked the European
ideal. Such was the intensity of his ultranationalism,
it was like an echo from 1914 or 1939. In the November
issue of Quadrant, the CIS Senior Fellow,
Wolfgang Kasper, advocated a return to racially
based immigration policies under the banner of ‘cultural
transaction costs’. Earlier this year the CIS
hosted a speaking tour by Daniel Pipes, the American
anti-Islamic campaigner who equates Islamic law
with Stalinism. The policy direction is clear, but so
too is the hypocrisy. Ironically enough, the CIS has
joined the civility campaign. It is a terrible shame,
however, that this civility does not extend to European
internationalists, Muslims or people who are
culturally different to Wolfgang Kasper.
The government is also engaged in a double standard.
At the last election it said, ‘We decide who
comes into this country and under what conditions.’
Yet in other areas of public policy it allows foreigners
to call the shots. It allows Australia’s foreign policy
to be determined in Washington. When the Americans
say jump, the Prime Minister asks: ‘How high?’
On constitutional reform, its stance is determined in
London. The member for Warringah was born in
Britain and always puts British interests first. Recently
he also spoke of the Catholicisation of the Liberal
Party. Some people thought this was a reference
to the way in which Piers Akerman, Nancy Boy Bolt
and Christopher Pearson act as press secretaries for
both the Howard government and George Pell. In
fact, the member for Warringah outlined a new and
more significant trend in Liberal policy making.
Catholicisation means that the Liberal Party’s social
policies are being determined in Rome. This is the
ultimate hypocrisy. The government may decide who
comes into the country but, increasingly, its other
policies are being decided in Washington, London
and Rome.
By contrast, Labor is anti-establishment. We aim
to help the outsiders, those disenfranchised by the
Tory network of businessmen, think tanks, media
lackeys and coalition MPs. As far as I am concerned,
if you want civility in Canberra, buy a parrot.
