Without further ado, here’s the winner – Catherine Deveny for her column in Wednesday’s Age. I was as happy as a tenor listening to a lively sermon, until I read this:
Keating lost. He failed to capture the imagination of blue collar Australia because blue-collar Australia has no imagination. And you can put that on my headstone.
Deveny’s claim about blue collar Australia might well be true – but I can’t see how that would make blue collar Australia any different from white collar Australia in general or journalistic Australia in particular.
On second thoughts, I might just hang onto the award for myself.
Gummo and Mr Blair, as one. Well, kinda anyway.
They shall hammer their swords into ploughshares….
Blue collar voters have always, overwhelmingly, voted Labor. This was as true in 1996 as in any other year. There was a swing away from Labor amongst all sections of the population in 1996, and this was true, as well, amongst blue collar workers. But it wasn’t sufficient to change the essential class basis of Australian politics. I sit typing in St Albans in Melbourne’s West, smack bang in a sea of red in every electoral map for nearly a hundred years.
It’s remarkable in a way that blue collar workers, who had been pummelled by Keating’s neo-liberal “reforms” and the “recession we had to have” remained loyal to Labor in 1996 to the extent they did.
As for their “lack of imagination”, Orwell says it better than I can:
“The pious ones, from the Pope to the yogis of California, are great on the ‘changes of heart’, much more reassuring from their point of view than a change in the economic system. Petain attributes the fall of France to the common people’s ‘love of pleasure’. One sees this in its right perspective if one stops to wonder how much pleasure the ordinary French peasant’s or working-man’s life would contain compared with Petain’s own. The damned impertinence of these politicians, priests, literary men and what not who lecture the working-class Socialist for his ‘materialism’! All that the working man demands is what these others would consider the indispensable minimum without which human life cannot be lived at all.”
If blue collar workers were not inspired by the clock collector’s “big picture” then maybe, just maybe, it was because they were too busy trying to cope with the economic pain associated with it – an economic pain that Keating and Fairfax columnists never felt.
Oh, Bugger! Stuff intellectual integrity – it’s back to business as usual for me.
S’ils n’ont plus de pain, qu’ils mangent de la brioche.
so deveny is a dope. that must be why I don’t buy The Age.
OTOH she may write next week that criminals traditionally vote Liberal …
Purleese Brownie, why would she do that…… since when has the truth sold newspapers?
And bet you still buy The Age on Thursday.
Dumb comment in a terrible non-piece, which makes Ms Deveny an easy target. And it’s not true, either, or at least imagination or lack thereof is shared equally among people of all collar colours.
intellectual snobs?
we need more!
The feelings pretty mutual. I was a blue-collar Age reader most of my life until I finally tired of this sort of violent petty-bourgeois neo-Marxist snobbery.
I now pick my way carefully through the Australian and use the www.
Fairfax are like the Aussie equivalent of the once mighty WaPo and NYT.
They’re lumbering dinosaurs and they’re becoming extinct.
Fuck the Age, I wipe my arse with the Age.
The remark the clock collector made which had a lasting effect on me was in the early nineties, and went something along the lines of, “What the average Australian has to understand is we’re in a race against the rest of the world, and we just have to run faster and faster if we want to stay in the same spot.” My heart sank.
Now at the time I was covered in the scar tissue of – heck no, I was still bleeding – from The Recession We Had To Have. I was a blue collar contractor, with four kids at home, watching the interest rates eat up my equity. Now I’ve forgiven him to the extent that I downloaded the ringtone today from Crikey. I miss his wit, so I must have some imagination.
I wonder whether reflexively thinking of the Left and the Right obscures what seems to be a profound division between white collar professionals and the citizens who live voiceless beyond the inner leafy suburbs.
What the average Australian has to understand is we’re in a race against the rest of the world, and we just have to run faster and faster if we want to stay in the same spot.
Keating isn’t quite the raconteur everyone makes him out to be – he came out with quite a few lines like that. More examples from http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2004/02/18/1077072707998.html
I think the harbour should be viewed holistically, and all of its foreshore declared an area of state significance because it is an area of true state significance…
We should be supporting the people who want to put a ring around the public domain and lift the bar on the political system
Many of his best political insults were taken from others. “A shiver looking for a spine to go up”, anyone? Stolen! Nevertheless, he had a good memory and knew when to apply them, and was a reasonable Treasurer and PM.
“Many of his best political insults were taken from others. â??A shiver looking for a spine to go upâ??, anyone? Stolen!”
OH MY GOD.
That’s it, I’m voting Liberal.
Anyway, I thought Catherine was a comedy writer, not a political commentator. Maybe she should stick to comedy.
“Anyway, I thought Catherine was a comedy writer, not a political commentator. Maybe she should stick to comedy.”
Gawd, JohnS. that’s a big ask.
Any comedian that stays away from politics is pretty bland. Political commentary is the lifeblood of any good routine. Part of the reason that Aunty is currently so sad is because it’s tradition of the pisstake has been gagged by precious politicians who can’t stand criticism.
And Deveny’s “Don’t get me started on John Howard – I’ve got a Christmas party to get to in December” was a great comic line.
As Marcus Aurelius said in his Meditations, â??Consider for example, and thou wilt find that almost all of the transactions in the time of Vespasian differed little from those of the present day. Thou there findest marrying and giving in marriage, educating children, sickness, death, war, joyous holidays, traffic, agriculture, flatterers, insolent pride, suspicions, laying of plots, longing for the death of others, newsmongers, lovers, misers, men canvassing for the consulship and for the kingdom;â??yet all these passed away, and are nowhere.â??
Or as the Bible says, “There’s nothing new under the sun”.
Even so, I refer you to the Paul Keating Insults Archive. Say what you like about the great man – you can’t put him in the same category as the rest of them: mediocrity.
Awaiting moderation? Since when did we have to await moderation??