The Trough
This is where we are, but this is what we can be
It has been a grueling decade, things that chew you up slowly and push you to the extreme. We held on to the wispy threads of lucky country through Abbott and Turnbull, the last bit of sugar on our tongues from when John Howard told us to close our eyes, a sleepy legacy of denial and neglect cast against the rocks of endless wars, geopolitical apathy propped up by a mining boom that churns and hums just out of reach of the prosperity of everyday Australians.
When Morrison came, the legacy of this inaction contrasted against the very image of this man. From the NEG to nothing, if Howard put us to sleep, Morrison sought to put us in a coma. As our lungs were taking stock of the smoke inhalation, a pandemic hit, and we froze in time. In and around our isolation, from cleaner to CEO, from teacher to pupil, from Russia to the USA – we all suffered a malady of profound complexity.
When we resumed, the finite, just-in-time economies we built around us were misaligned, and the tiny hair-like components of our interconnected existence were thrown out of sync. We took stock of ourselves at the beginning decline of a new world, everyone hoping that the little cogs would click into place and take us back to the old one again. That’s Morrison’s strength. Like many of the right-wing populists that now tempt the countries of this world, he talks about the things we should have, not the things we must do to keep what we’ve got.
But the sugar is finally gone now, three floods this year will do that to people in Lismore, the fires to the people in Mallacoota, the cost of living slowly destroying families around the industrial peripheries of our major cities. All the while, the teeth are snapping off the wheels, the machinery is redundant, and the operator is one part selfish relic of the past mixed with equal parts of a despicable future.
The good people are largely not defining democracy anymore. The people that represent them make deals with the reprehensible people behind them while they themselves are frantically repairing the weakened threads that drag along on the dusty road of this battered island continent – one that could be absolutely anything if they only let it.
The mining giants run autopilot extractions across the striated rocky tissues of this monster of a country, shipping out endless consignments towards an unsustainable future, exploding the priceless and significant and shipping it off without making a single steel product, or sustainable industry, or real future. The influence of corporate-governmental synergies can be seen in the gas and minerals exploration deals into a climate crisis, and the cashless welfare cards trialed in the communities that service them, designed by the people that run them.
These mega rich seem not to care about how our society fares in the long run, only how it allows them to function. In spite of support for ICAC, climate reform, Murdoch royal commissions and the return of honor to the chambers of parliament, we watch them strap rail networks that link to the trade node of a runaway system of growth, sailing out the polluted ports, towards an endless sea of infinite-growth hopelessness.
The superannuation we are told to spend on pandemic survival and a paltry contribution to a manipulated property market, swirls around in global markets being gamed by young hedgefund jockeys, and the weak-character billionaires that crumble from depression live in front of us on Twitter. We all suffer from the same depression, but alone there is no answer to be found down the final straight of this rampant neoliberal nightmare.
The duopolies service the masses with product that comes from an increasing enemy, our largest trading partner, that has been irresponsibly allowed to be the focal source of our fears over foreign influence. The farmers work for supermarket chains owned by some of the most powerful conglomerates on the planet. The market connection of humanity was finally broken somewhere in the 90s, we kind of didn’t feel it, and we don’t know our neighbour’s name anymore as a result.
We have lost trust in our governments over this age of juxtaposition, where the people that are meant to provide us with information lead us down a garden path with the people that don’t see us, and now we fend for ourselves in a broken society. Now we don’t take well to the teacher telling us our kids have issues, or our nurses warning us to stop screaming at them, we don’t like listening to people we love – a decade of “ditch the witch” and protesters being “met with bullets”, me first and us second, led by broken politicians repealing the last vestiges of people-minded policy. People from sales and marketing, who have amassed trillion-dollar debts whilst dealing fatal blows to the conventional integrity of our government.
In a failure resulting from the endless bad faith of our leaders and their mining giants, we have been left to fend for ourselves in a narrow stream of consumerism that drops past our doorbell cameras in packages driven around by petrol powered delivery mechanisms. Our sense of community evaporates from rattling mufflers in traffic jams on ring roads and bypasses, and the uncomfortable realities, so clear and apparent in our thought processes, are convoluted on the radio drive programs and fed back to us in some enigma code -- and most of us wake up feeling the same every morning. After this election, either way, there is no reason for many to feel any different either.
That is why we must meet our neighbour, every single one of us. All the clubs, churches and markets of this modern era want us to pay on entry, we must close our blue screens more often and open up our windows to the free transit of human expression, the comfort from knowing that the gaps are not so wide between us. Australia is ready for a government who wants to work closer with its people, as should be possible for a uniquely placed island continent that has real and positive change to make with its region, and unique national aspirations to make with its people. We deserve leaders that will speak to these challenges and not pander to the populism that seeks to cleave our nation for small benefits.