I expected coal in my Xmas stocking from Scomo, but not from Albo

Content to play a small target through opposition into government, Labor has left the same taste in the mouth as its predecessor.

Albanese promotes the ‘K-Mart Wishing Tree’, while neglecting to adequately address the nations poverty. (Source: Twitter/X)

Bluey’s in the Myer windows, the shops have this year’s new item in stock, but something feels a bit different in the Christmas rush this year. For many, the Christmas grocery bill takes a week’s paycheck to absorb, shopping for presents encroaches on the emergency funds, and the home hosting the family is under mortgage stress. A family member living on the poverty line has fallen through the cracks, and over 20,000 civilians, mostly women and children, have been killed in Gaza as a result of the highest velocity of innocent death in such a short period than any conflict in recorded history.

While it dawns on us that record corporate profits will continue, and average households will suffer under yet another conservative neoliberal government, a years’ worth of budgets have shown no bold measures to address the Henderson poverty line and help the one-in-six children in poverty that live below it. Entrenched economic disadvantage is a preferred bipartisan approach to Australian society, and feeds hopelessness for people who may have been hoping for something – anything – different. Albanese took pictures under the Kmart wishing tree and later signalled that the stage three tax cuts were clad in iron, making it clear that any ingenious lateral economic thinking was well and truly off the table and that corporate altruism is all we could hope for this Christmas.

As families tried to keep their Christmas budgets in place, Jim Chalmers relinquished his captains call to overrule the RBA on rate calls, washing treasury’s hands of the grim period ahead, as the RBA would rather promote unemployment and everyday mortgage stress to curb inflation, rather than call for higher wages and demand an urgent curb to corporate profits and price gouging causing inflation. The duopolistic major retailers posted another handful of end-of-year profits, and the government did its best to show it still is on the side of the people by demanding the big supermarkets keep the price of Christmas ham at bay. But no super profits tax, not even fixed prices on any other more essential items, no bold announcements that next Christmas will be any different from the last, just another feeling in the stomach of many Australians that its only going to get worse.

El Niño made its presence presents enough as it finally blew La Niña away for a six-year stay, letting itself be known in the record temperatures set in Western Australia, including the landfall near newly approved carbon mega-bomb at Burrup Hub. Sweeping across the continent to unseasonal bushfire risks and unprecedented flooding, the rapidly changing landscape and distressed people living off it are drowned out by the cacophony of industry lobby groups that pound bipartisan government into a servant working against the interest of the people. Our representatives are no longer able to escape the grasp of the corporate leviathans to whom most have some form of career allegiance owed or aspirationally pending. The government offered nothing visibly different on climate once it got its piecemeal 43% emissions targets over the line a few months into its tenure. In fact, it did everything to demonstrate to the powerful mining classes that it could be the partner of choice for those looking to secure offshore gas exploration licences, sea dumping rights, and new coal and gas projects.

On the eve of the Christian holiday celebrating new life, Human Rights Watch, one of the most trusted humanitarian organisations on the planet, reported that Israel has been using starvation as a weapon on the devastated civilian population of Gaza. Well into the journey of her promising career at the ABC, after having the exciting and hard-earned opportunity to fill in the summer slot on ABC Radio, journalist Antoinette Lattouf was fired by the National Broadcaster for sharing this information on her social media. A dangerous precedent for an unrecognmisable treasured public institution like the ABC.

More journalists have been killed in less than three months than any war recorded in history, and ABC chief David Anderson can somehow ethically get together with senior staff at the ABC to silence employees and sack journalists who are doing their job to scribe the horrors as they objectively lay in the rubble surrounding the conflict in Gaza. Instead of supporting bold journalism and protecting their journalists (as is in the PD), many of whom have signed a letter of concern at the editorial direction at the ABC, the media executive now protects the interests of the elite and is prepared to do many things to see that their interest is met. 

For all the jostling and running around, the compromise and compassion of the season we try to demonstrate amongst family and friends, in the lead up to Christmas, our government has joined a global minority abstaining on votes in the UN general assembly to demand a ceasefire in Gaza and to recognise the Palestinian homeland. As we greet our families and navigate strategies to manage the drunk uncle in the spirit of forgiveness at Christmas, we do so know that our government has voted against the grain of the world to end this horror in the lands that Christmas was born.

We leave 2023 under a government that has run out of honeymoon, failed to deliver the Voice, and we have seen how it moves in alarmingly similar ways to its predecessor. We all go to the holidays felling that little more uncertain, looking a bit less able to guess what will happen in 2024, with Scott Morrison’s murky AUKUS security deal still on the table, his tax cuts for the rich still scheduled (inflation be damned), his former government’s approach to new coal and gas ventures firmly entrenched, and his level of acquiescence to rapacious private interests become bequeathed canon for a Labor party that is desperate to run a small target all the way to another election.

Amongst a swirl of organised human degradation: the climate conferences chaired by petro-Shieks who laugh at the circumstance, the ongoing unprecedented brutality of Israel’s actions in Gaza, the global extortion via profiteering of god-like multinationals, and the industry lobby groups that have captured democratic structures around the world – the Albanese government, with its small target mindset, is happy to wallow between the narrow lines offered to it by the hostile corporate press, doing the bidding of an increasingly demanding major security partner in the United States, and submitting to the private interest corporate giants who have their hands firmly on the levers of control.

The ham may not be as expensive as everything else this Xmas, but alone it may prove not to be enough. There is a serious decline in Australian society, felt consciously in real time by millions who fret at the situation in this country, many becoming politically engaged in the vacuums left behind by our corporate facing, duopolistic major party government. This Christmas we urgently wanted things from the government that we didn’t get — next Christmas we’ll be wanting high quality independents.