The Best Australian Essays 2014

by Robert Manne

  Australia has escaped the worst manifestations of the global financial crisis. There is great wealth here, and unemployment levels are comparatively low. On returning to Melbourne from Athens, I found myself fulminating, in ways not too dissimilar to Eribon, at the complacency and entitlement of my nation. But my rage was tempered when I left the inner city to visit family and friends in outer suburbia.

  If many of them were now indeed ‘cashed-up bogans’, just as many were unemployed. Many were on welfare, many on drugs both illegal and prescribed. Even among the ‘cashed-up bogans’, there was a real fear about how long this period of extended prosperity was going to last. And unlike my friends in the inner city, they worked in trades and jobs that still required hard physical labour, or they worked in retail, or as domestics, or in health services, where repetitive constant movement – from scanning a barcode to stripping and making up a bed to mopping a floor – could also lead to long-term physical damage. They were fearful of a rise in interest rates and in rents and of the loss of permanent jobs to casualisation. If I complained to them about so many of us entering the private health system or sending our children to private schools, they pointed out that the nearby public schools and the public hospitals were strained and over-committed.

  Did they care about same-sex marriage? Some did, some didn’t. Did they agree with the bipartisan insistence on offshore processing for asylum seekers? Most did, some didn’t. Did they think that the media’s treatment of Julia Gillard had been misogynistic? Some did, some didn’t. Were they worried about climate change? Some were not, most keenly were. But none of these issues were central to their concerns. The cost of living, the uncertainty of employment, the erosion of public health and public education – that’s what mattered.

  *

  I think more of the little kids from a school in a little village in Niger who get teaching two hours a day, sharing one chair for three of them, and who are very keen to get an education. I have them in my mind all the time. Because I think they need even more help than the people in Athens.

  – CHRISTINE LAGARDE, managing director,

  International Monetary Fund, 2012

  *

  It was on the drive from Athens airport to my aunt’s house on the western outskirts of the city that the immense transformation wrought by the global financial crisis hit home. Along the motorway, the billboards were all bare; there was only mile after mile of skeletal scaffolding. The Greek economy had come to such a standstill that no one was bothering to advertise anymore. This was a first-world nation, part of the EU, and yet capital had drained from it. The empty billboards seemed to presage an apocalyptic future.

  The architects of austerity promise that the advertising will eventually return, that the ruthless measures introduced are necessary and will result in a more productive and economically sustainable Greece. But as anyone who has lived through unemployment understands, the social cost of this economic experiment will be paid by the present generation and the generation to come.

  It was a central component of the social democratic consensus across the Western world that parliamentary democracy, hand in hand with the welfare state, would guarantee productive and sustaining labour for working-class people. For all of our outrage and mockery when Gina Rinehart extols the cheapness of African labour compared to Australian labour, at its essence the sentiment is not so different to Christine Lagarde’s privileging of a sub-Saharan child’s poverty over that of an Athenian child. Of course, it is a matter of degree, and only a fool would deny it: the poverty in the developing world is incalculably more pernicious and inhumane. But the faith my parents placed in Hawke and Keating’s neoliberal reforms was predicated on the promise not that they would democratise poverty but that they would democratise opportunity. That too was the promise of social democratic parties of Europe. That has been the promise that has been betrayed.

  I came to claim a very different left-wing politics to the faith of my parents. My mother’s politics were forged from a personal experience of superpowers meddling in the political affairs of Greece. Her anti-imperialism grew stronger here, both from Australia’s involvement in Vietnam and watching from afar as the United States supported the military junta in Greece in the late’60s and early’70s. Subsequently, it was my parents’ experience of a migrant working-class life that determined their alliance with the party that represented labour. My politics, on the other hand, emerged from an intellectual and university-trained engagement with the identity movements of feminism, queer, anti-racism and anti-colonialism. These were forms of politics that, to put it most simply, replaced the idea of empowerment based on labour rights with principles of empowerment founded on human rights. It is neither my want nor my belief that a choice needs to be made between these two forms of political alliance, but it is clear that social democratic and labour parties have for a quarter of a century increasingly privileged the latter over the former.

  There is a reasonable logic to that privileging: there has been the collapse of Communism and with it the collapse of faith in state control over economies, the inexorable pace of globalisation, the obduracy of sections of the union movement (best exemplified by the suicidal lunacies of the UK unions in the 1960s and’70s, which laid the ground for Thatcherism to emerge and smash them). And yes, the success of social democracies in educating and professionalising the children of workers has led to substantially increased mobility in terms of aspiration and identity. But a politics of rights, classically liberal and universalist, has never been adequate in addressing the conflicts between labour and capital. I might have a right to work, but what is the nature of the work available to me? Have I a right to a minimum wage? Then how and by whom is that minimum to be decided? The EU has a Charter of Fundamental Rights, including industrial rights, given force by the Treaty of Lisbon in December 2007. One can read through this document and applaud the language of dignity that suffuses it. But as my friends and family in Greece have discovered, including those who are still working though their wages are only intermittently paid, the document, for all its splendid rhetoric, is chicken shit.

  In Returning to Reims, Eribon can’t answer the question he poses at the beginning of his book: Why has his traditional working-class family turned from the left, instead supporting Marine Le Pen? In part, he can’t answer it because he refuses to hold himself accountable for the thirty years he spent rejecting his roots. Still wedded to his allegiance to the sexual politics of identity, he wants his family to ‘return’ to him, to reconstruct themselves as feminist, queer-friendly, Green and anti-racist. But surely there was a possibility beyond estrangement?

  Maybe a clue to the paralysis of contemporary social democracy lies in our very use of the word ‘traditional’ to describe people whose life choices and experiences are defined by labour and by familial and communal kinship rather than by professionalism, tertiary education and cosmopolitanism. Tradition assumes conservatism, and that is the preserve of the Right, whereas we progressives claim a politics of consistent change. That this change has seen a possibility for greater mobility and opportunity is undeniable, but so is the fact – made clear by the financial crisis – that this mobility and these opportunities are not evenly shared.

  The austerity measures in Greece may well result in greater future economic productivity, but the fear that animates many of my friends and family there is the suspicion that it will also destroy aspects of their ‘Greekness’ that may not be quantifiable but are just as important to them: family obligation taking precedence over work, a notion of time that isn’t held hostage to the twenty-four-hour clock of globalisation, and a pride in the historic and cultural specificity of their national identity.

  For too long, like Didier Eribon, I didn’t listen to the questions and fears my parents and their generation of the working class were expressing. I pounced on any yearning for traditional values as being inherently right-wing, as counter to progress. But I now consider the silencing of such voices to be a
disastrous mistake. It has meant that as far as working-class people are concerned, the mainstream parties – whether of the left, right or centre – are all advocates for markets first. Real fears for job security and unemployment are dismissed or papered over by talk of ‘green jobs’ or ‘service jobs’ as if such euphemisms need no further explanation. But what skills will be required in these new jobs? What opportunities exist? For whom do they exist? Are these jobs permanent or casual?

  Working-class people are repeatedly being told that the welfare state can no longer function as it has, that the age of entitlement is over, but what is ignored is that this questioning of its efficacy has been occurring in working-class communities for decades now. If we had been listening, we’d have realised that the talk isn’t of cutting the dole or pensions but of how to reverse the penalties built into welfare for those who depend on casual or intermittent work or for single mothers who enter relationships.

  As Noel Pearson has most eloquently expressed about the indigenous community, the conversation about welfare dependency, its dangers and tragedies has been occurring for years. The answer is not abolishing welfare but tackling the cycle of dependency. And if we had been listening, we’d have heard that people do want better schools but they know that it takes more than increased funding or increased teacher salaries to halt the deterioration of public schools, that we also must take seriously people’s concerns over discipline, curriculum and streaming. The knee-jerk reaction to such questions – as conservative or right-wing or traditionalist – is an indictment of the Left. Why has the traditional working class here and in Europe turned against social democratic parties? Maybe because we haven’t been listening.

  Listening cuts both ways, and in contrast to Eribon’s experiences, I found a way to speak about my politics to my parents, to have them listen to me. They initially had little sympathy for the identity politics that are part of my leftist heritage. But in time they came to understand my commitments to anti-racism, to feminism and sexual identity. They might not have agreed with all of my positions, but nor did I agree with all of theirs. I describe my politics as socialist but equally as libertarian, and the latter doesn’t always find favour with many of my own peers.

  I believe the challenges facing the parties of the Left and social democracy are serious, potentially terminal, and that smugness, obstinacy and purity when it comes to political beliefs are harmful. I think that multiculturalism has been one of the continuing strengths of Australian society. I also know I have to defend this position, including to the people who challenge me on it. Especially to the people who challenge me on it.

  It was a truly frightening moment when the bright young student in Athens told me that he had voted for the party of fascism. At that moment I also came up against the futility of a politics of ‘listening to’ that I have tentatively sketched above. There are principles and issues that are lines in the sand and that divide us. The party he voted for wants the forced repatriation of immigrants, and its leader denies the Holocaust. Golden Dawn members have attacked refugees and murdered left-wing activists. Sometimes there can be no common ground.

  My voice trembling, I explained that I was a son of immigrants, that whatever my complaints about my nation, and I had plenty, I was proud of its multiculturalism. I told him that I abhorred, absolutely detested, the party he had voted for.

  Dimitri went quiet, and when he spoke again he sounded chastened. He explained how he feared that he would be unemployed his whole adult life, how his mother worked three shifts a day as a cleaner, rising at dawn and returning late at night, how his father’s pension had been cut by thirty-five per cent, and how his parents were supporting Dimitri and his unemployed sister. He wondered if he could ever afford to marry, to raise a family. He told me how he wished his grandparents had moved to Australia as my parents had done. He spoke of friends who were applying for visas to Canada, the US, Australia, but these rich countries were no longer taking in Greek immigrants. He spoke of a friend who had found work in construction in the Emirates, that maybe he could go there, maybe he could find work as a builder in Dubai or Abu Dhabi. ‘I just want a job,’ he kept repeating. ‘I just want to work.’

  We shared cigarettes under the English no-smoking sign. We smoked in silence because neither of us had any answers.

  The Monthly

  The Dream Boat

  Luke Mogelson

  It’s about a two-and-a-half-hour drive, normally, from Indonesia’s capital city, Jakarta, to the southern coast of Java. In one of the many trucks that make the trip each month, loaded with asylum seekers from the Middle East and Central Asia, it takes a little longer. From the bed of the truck, the view is limited to a night sky punctuated by fleeting glimpses of high-rise buildings, overpasses, traffic signs and tollbooths. It is difficult to make out, among the human cargo, much more than the vague shapes of bodies, the floating tips of cigarettes. When you pass beneath a street lamp, though, or an illuminated billboard, the faces thrown into relief are all alive with expectation. Eventually, the urban pulse subsides; the commotion of the freeway fades. The drooping wires give way to darkly looming palms. You begin to notice birds, and you can smell the sea.

  In September, in one of these trucks, I sat across from a recently married couple in their twenties, from Tehran. The wife, who was seven months pregnant, wore a red blouse stretched over her stomach; the husband a tank top, thick-rimmed glasses and a faux hawk that revealed a jagged scar (courtesy, he said, of the Iranian police). Two months had passed since they flew to Jakarta; this was their fourth attempt to leave. Twice, en route to the boat that would bring them to Australia, they were intercepted, detained and paid bribes for their release. Another time, the boat foundered shortly after starting out. All the same, they were confident this trip would be different. Like everyone else’s in the truck, theirs was a desperate kind of faith. ‘Tonight we will succeed,’ the husband assured me. They were determined that the child be born ‘there’.

  Our drive coincided with a violent tropical downpour that seemed to surge, under pressure, more than fall. Each asylum seeker had brought a small bag with spare clothes and provisions. Those who packed slickers dug them out. The storm was amusing at first, then just cold and miserable. The children, who earlier delighted in our clandestine exit from the city, now clung to their parents. An old man, sitting cross-legged beside me with a plastic garbage bag on his head, shivered uncontrollably, muttering prayers.

  Around three in the morning, the truck braked and reversed down a rutted dirt road. The rain had stopped as abruptly as it started. No one spoke. We knew we had arrived. The rear hatch swung open, and we piled out. A second truck was parked behind us; people were emerging from it as well. We were in a dense jungle whose tangled canopy obstructed the moon. Several Indonesians corralled the crowd and whispered fiercely to keep moving. ‘Go! Go!’ they urged in English. The road led down a steep hill and ended at a narrow footpath. As people stumbled in the dark, the Indonesians prodded them along. At the bottom of the footpath was a beach. It appeared as a pale hue through the trees, its white sand giving off a glow. The asylum seekers, fifty-seven of them, huddled at the jungle’s edge.

  We were in the shelter of a wide bay, its arcing headlands, dotted with lights, repulsing the windward waves. Two open-hull skiffs with outboard motors idled offshore, bobbing gently in the swells. Behind us, the clamour of the truck grew distant and was gone. Suddenly, the Indonesians began pushing people toward the sea.

  ‘You, you. Go!’

  Two at a time, the asylum seekers raised their bags above their heads and waded out. The cool water rose to waists and armpits. It was a struggle to climb aboard. Whenever someone had to be hauled up, the skiff pitched steeply, threatening to tip.

  We were ferried to a wooden fishing boat: a more substantial vessel than the skiffs, though not much. About thirty feet long, with open decks, a covered bow, a one-man cockpit and a bamboo tiller, it was clearly not designed for passengers. Noting t
he absence of cabin, bridge, bulkheads and benches, I wondered whether anyone else shared my deluded hope: that there was another, larger ship anchored somewhere farther out, and that this sad boat was merely to convey us there.

  With frantic miming, the two-man Indonesian crew directed us to crowd together on the deck and crouch beneath the bulwarks. They stretched a tarp above our heads and nailed its edges to the gunwales. Packed close in the ripe air beneath the tarp, hugging knees to chests, we heard the engine start and felt the boat begin to dip and rise.

  *

  Our destination was an Australian territory, more than 200 miles across the Indian Ocean, called Christmas Island. If the weather is amenable, if the boat holds up, the trip typically lasts three days. Often, however, the weather is tempestuous, and the boat sinks. Over the past decade, it is believed that more than a thousand asylum seekers have drowned. The unseaworthy vessels are swamped through leaky hulls, capsize in heavy swells, splinter on the rocks. Survivors sometimes drift for days. Children have watched their parents drown, and parents their children. Entire families have been lost. Since June, several boats went down, claiming the lives of more than a hundred people.

  I first heard about the passage from Indonesia to Australia in Afghanistan, where I live and where one litmus test for the success of the US-led war now drawing to a close is the current exodus of civilians from the country. (The first ‘boat people’ to seek asylum in Australia were Vietnamese, in the mid-1970s, driven to the ocean by the fallout from that American withdrawal.) Last year, nearly 37,000 Afghans applied for asylum abroad, the most since 2001. Afghans who can afford to will pay as much as $24,000 for European travel documents and up to $40,000 for Canadian. (Visas to the United States, generally, cannot be bought.) Others employ smugglers for arduous overland treks from Iran to Turkey to Greece, or from Russia to Belarus to Poland.