I was an angry young man

[I found this essay while going through some handwritten papers and notes I am transferring onto the computer. It was written in probably the second half of 1999, when I was planning on leaving Canberra. It is surprising how much of this still stacks up. It is reproduced here warts and all.]

I am thinking of moving back to Melbourne and, wide-awake, I know I will end up in cheap housing in Depreston or Unfairfield where the defeated citizens of the Northern Suburbs pack sullenly into cheerless conductorless trams. Less is more these days.

The stoic Edwardian indignant cheerfulness, larrikin Catholic charm and Mediterranean swagger of those chaotic streets has been boarded up and replaced by a lobotomised suburbanness with a stark, obsessive, authentic passionless new that only an architect could be pleased with. The streets are teeming with TV programmed drones full of predictable obsequious rebellion that is no insurrection at all – they bought it, off the rack. They trade passion for labels – and labels of labels.

Lamentations are futile. Melbourne, a huddle of windswept memories, is littered with its own unburied dead. The Fitzroy Club Hotel is now a dialasyis [sic] centre.

The pernicious fascism of opinion whines against the sad view we could all use in a fleeting vision of what constructs us. No one wants to know more than the façade reveals. No one wants anything to be behind it. What point of sacrifice when the fields of battle at Arden Street, Glenferrie, Victoria Park, Lakeside, Junction Oval and Brunswick Street are little pathetic venues for the second rate, A [sic] place for weeds to grow? A place for myths to dissolve and several generations of passion to evaporate. The past may as well not have happened.

But it did happen.

Hungry men in hewn army coats dyed black. Their hair lank from worry, neglect and the weather huddled by the Yarra and the Maribyrnong. Fat whores and tribes of children. Angry bicycles. Sad horses that has always been old, like the men bent over the reins. Perplexed immigrants looking both ways quickly without taking a step. The way Ice Cream melts.

It is more than melancholic nostalgia. It is rude defiance of collective effort. John Batman and William Faulkner didn’t lay every brick. Anonymous and underpaid millions created this space, and if we mask their ills it only cheapens their good.

It is not that that time (the past) will ever be again – it is the stupendous denial that it ever was. How can a person reflect on the travails of their predecessors and then profit using the same mentality of past tyrants!

By identifying bastadry it is then no solution to go off and be a bastard yourself. My name has no station in Melbourne, no place. I never grew up there, none of my family did. I witnessed it as a stranger witnesses a fatality – with ineffectual [sic] remorse. I loved Melbourne from afar. She is dying from the disease that took away my own town, Sydney – the disease of greed.

Sydney is now a shiny laquered [sic] over cesspool. A swamp of indignity – with no respect for anything that is permanent. It eats it’s [sic] own excrement for want of anything better to do. Melbourne has become little better.

Now I live in exile and always will. It matters little where I go so out of respect for their faltering memory I have sat down amidst my most ancient of ancestors within my grasp. And they have little to offer for their place has been swept under the tide of the supreme insidiousness of what laughably passes as the nations [sic] capital. A place that all too well shows the braggart hollowness of this failed European outpost.

Their intentions are so shallow they may as well build their monuments of plaster + cardboard as no policy favours anything beyond one lifespan – and life is short.

It is hard to find goodness when things subjective have been flailed by the whip of post-modernism. So goodness be buggered, I will throw my lot in with the art of paying attention.

It very well may be that I will go to Melbourne to learn how to make a quid out of writing bullshit. Or I might just as well go and live in Bermagui or Adaminaby or some such place and wait to die – fixing my mind on such simple and obnoxious pleasures as watching the seasons change, accepting mortality, remembering and learning of the past, and…paying attention.

I have already learnt that there is no capacity to human foolishness – a million tales in a thousand languages have already told us this. I will now leave the fools to admire the emporer’s [sic] new clothes. I have nothing to offer profit, except my dead body – and they won’t get that for a whiles yet. In the meantime those flint eyed pultroon’s [sic] with their commerce and real estate can KISS MY ARSE. I will spite the living by remembering the dead, a club we will all join sooner or later.

The Emperor Has No Lights On

Damn hippies all warning about global warming but I ain’t going nowhere
Cause I believe what I’m told, that the levees’ll hold and that the President really cares

“Deep Deep River” – Fred Smith (From the CD Texas)

Earth Hour drifted past last night, all candle lit and quaffing champagne.

As far as tokenism goes, it is hard to beat.

Folk will be familiar with the concept. For those who came in late, the idea is that lights are turned off for an hour to symbolise reducing our energy use, with the idea that it will encourage businesses and households to use less electricity.

Despite the onanistic self-congratulation that surrounds this spectacle - especially from the major sponsor, the Fairfax news group – it has a miniscule impact on consumption and an even more tenuous educational benefit.

Its primary function seems to be to provide absolution from guilt for shiny middle class types and a platform for self-absorbed public figures to make unctuous statements about the importance of ‘battling’ climate change.

The defence flung out by the event’s marketing arm (what am I writing, it is all marketing) is that Earth Hour ‘raises consciousness’ about energy use.

Well that has been a miserable failure. The Australian Energy Market Operator in its latest Statement of Opportunities is forecasting a steady increase in energy consumption across all Australian states for the next decade.

No government is taking demand management, which was used so successfully with water consumption in capital cities, seriously.

NSW is spending $17,000,000,000.00 on locking in the electricity network to existing coal-fired power stations, with electricity users being left to foot the bill. If that dosh was spent on creating publicly owned community based renewable energy infrastructure we just may have a chance of getting out of this mess with most of the furniture intact.

The problem is that there was no Earth Hour at Wallerawang Power Station. There was no earth Hour at the Tomago Aluminium Smelter, which chews up about ten percent of NSW’s electricity and pays a peppercorn tariff for the pleasure. Earth Hour hasn’t made an impression on the Australian Bureau of Agricultural and Resource Economics who, along with Federal Energy Minister and serial idiot Martin Ferguson, have predicted that coal will continue to be our dominant source of electricity generation for the foreseeable future, regardless of what it will do to the climate.

They are almost certainly right.

Despite these rather salient issues the event has been a hit worldwide with scores of cities and jurisdictions jumping on board. Why is this?

The bottom line, which runs everything in these halcyon days, means people across the western world will demand reliable electricity supply to their houses

Australian society revolves around 240-volt electricity and the motorcar. These two functions are sacrosanct. Only losers catch the bus and, well, we “need” air conditioning and, somehow, a plasma screen TV the size of a small African country is important to have.

Consumption is about status; people acquire things to impress other people. People define themselves by the car they drive, the house they live in, the clothes they wear, the music they listen to; you are what you eat.

At its most extreme, status is marked by conspicuous consumption. Now that is a defining point of status, the ability to throw things away. It shows how rich and ergo, how powerful a person is.

With status wrapped up in the symbolism of what we consume (or don’t consume) it is going to be a hard shit to shift.

Symbolism can be powerful: the guy in front of the tank in Beijing, the fall of the Berlin Wall, burning draft papers. Earth Hour is not one of them.

In the end Earth Hour will go the way of solariums and Second Life. Status trumps Change. People just want to get on with the important stuff, like watching Australia’s Biggest Loser on a wide screen plasma TV, upgrading to this year’s Prada or getting a mortgage on a McMansion in the newest estate.

You can turn off all the lights you like, catch the bus forever or live in a solar powered shack in the bush, like I am, but the rest of the world is going to keep on chewing up fossil fuels and spewing out carbon dioxide like there is, literally, no tomorrow.

Lousy value for money

Dean Mighell was in the news. The Victorian Secretary of the Electrical Trades Union upstaged no lesser personage than Kevin Rudd, on talkback radio in Melbourne.

Those that care about such things will no doubt know the story. For those that came in late, a woman caller to (I think) the Neil Mitchell show was in tears with fear about what could happen to her.

She had insulation installed in her roof and was worried the whole place could go up in flames.

Rudd proffered an emergency response number. She said she’d tried that and it was unhelpful (fancy that, an unhelpful call centre. Who could have thought there’d be such a thing). In fact, they were more concerned about whether she owed them money.

Rudd is promising everything except going around there himself, when it emerges that the good Mister Mighell, a licensed electrician, had arranged to check to see if her insulation was safe. Militant unionist 1. Technocrat hack 0.

Mighell popped up in the Fairfax papers around the same time with an op-ed piece about whether the union movement should keep its links to the ALP. It’s an interesting point, but first some clarification.

One; the ALP was founded by the union movement around 120 years ago after a period of rapid growth in unionism hit a brick wall in the early 1890s when the Victorian land price bubble burst and the floor price of labour collapsed.

Two, not all unions thought tying themselves to a political party was a good idea, and even today most unions aren’t affiliated to the ALP.

Three, from the get-go the parliamentary ALP has tended to pretty much ignore the agenda of the organised labour movement. The primary relationship has been one of personnel. The union movement has employed most ALP politicians at some stage.

This is not to say that those politicians have ever been particularly attached to the principles of the union movement, it’s just that there is a strong history of partiality around unions when it comes to their employment selection practices.

That said, the links between the ALP and trade unions are pretty strong, in a networking rather than policy sense.

Which is why most of the leadership of the ACTU have been largely silent while Julia Gillard is, in reality, cutting wages for hospitality and care workers (amongst others) under the banner of Award Simplification.

Gillard, as she is good at, plays the clever lawyer and argues that it is possible for employees to negotiate their way out of a pay cut. But wasn’t that the whole point about why WorkChoices was bad? That people were expected to have to negotiate a solution rather than having the protection of an Industrial Award?

But the ACTU wants to be seen as a ‘team player’ in the eyes of their ‘friends’ in Canberra. The wooden Jeff Lawrence had a minor whine about it, Sharon Burrow doesn’t want to criticise her buddy Julia. So the whole situation has been largely ignored.

The problem is probably a lot bigger than the few news articles that have covered it would suggest. After all, these are people at the bottom of the labour market, so who really gives a shit?

I am meeting people caught up in it. Anecdotally, the vast majority are un-unionised casuals, so they just suck it up and wonder why Kevin Rudd is doing what John Howard did.

Unions that aren’t affected by it seem to be rather indifferent to the plight of these workers. The ‘I’m all right Jack’ principle is ascendant in the modern labour movement.

But most union officials must be, at the very least, slightly uneasy about how things have panned out. Wasn’t the Your Rights At Work campaign supposed to do away with the assault on working conditions at the perennially soft bottom end of the labour market?

A few things have improved, but there are also a large number of people who are still missing out. This is especially true of the unskilled, the casual and young people – the people who were at the pointy end of WorkChoices. The same people who got screwed under the Keating/Hawke reforms.

After the disaster of the Latham campaign, the Union movement knew it needed to get rid of Howard. So they brought in a PR firm, Essential Media Communications, to advise on creating a grass roots campaign. It’s called astroturfing, and it worked a treat.

Your Rights At Work got rid of John Howard, so after November 2007 it was allowed to fizzle, splutter and die.

Sure, there were a few half-arsed campaigns with little or no follow through at the local level and the odd mass email just to keep up appearances, but the union movement was never really serious about creating an ongoing community campaign.

The reality is that the union movement couldn’t organise its way to the shops, which is why they brought in the consultants.

How do I know this? I worked on the Your Rights At Work campaign.

This pattern is continuing with some unions now getting a contractor to do core union work – signing up new members.

In terms of creating a solid protection for working conditions the Your Rights At Work campaign failed. All it did was elect Rudd. Forget all the dribble about Kevin 07 and climate change, the only game in town in November 2007 was Your Rights At Work – it shifted tens of thousands of votes to the ALP where it mattered.

But it didn’t protect Award conditions – Julia Gillard’s Award ‘simplification’ is taking working conditions away. People that were screwed under WorkChoices will be screwed under Fair Work Australia.

Mighell is right; the union movement would be better off if it wasn’t just a work-experience factory for ALP staffers and would-be politicians.

The Liberal Party likes to foam at the mouth about the amount of money the union movement gives to the ALP, but they miss the point.

Most of this money is simply club membership to keep the union movement inside the tent pissing out. The politicians always end up playing the ACTU and their affiliates like a violin.

Club-busters like Mighell will go nowhere in the union movement, which is built on a scared rabbit inward, defensive, almost paranoid, consensus that totally misunderstands the nature of modern society.

In the meantime the money the union movement gives to the ALP, so that the Rudd government can keep kicking working stiffs like you and I, is pretty obviously lousy value. That is if the union movement’s core mission is to protect working rights, as opposed to getting on in politics.

Don’t get me wrong; this is far from an endorsement of the Liberals – especially under Abbott. It is merely pointing out that neither of the major parties are seriously interested in the lot of working stiffs as anything more than ballot fodder, and as consuming machines to keep the big mortgage holding banks and retailers happy.

Outside of that the government, whoever is in power, is hell bent on crunching down the price of labour. In a service-based economy where you don’t need anyone with too many brains or skills it spells bad news for future living standards for the majority of us.

Now, if we had a union movement that was prepared to oppose this economic ‘consensus’ - as Mighell suggests - the prospects for my friends working bar, waiting table and wiping old folks arses would be brighter.

As it stands, they are screwed whoever wins this election.