I’m writing this the day after election night, where Labor (centre-left party) has claimed victory, and the Liberals (right-leaning, conservative) have suffered a huge defeat, with the leader losing his own seat in his own electorate.
Given that I’m personally left-leaning with progressive & humanist ideals, at best I’m happy that Australia isn’t going backwards. But as I try to process what I think about politics I still have a lot of mixed feelings at the current climate of politics.
At heart I’m a pragmatic person. It’s easy for me to hold ideals, but it would be remiss for me to not acknowledge or try to support those that might get left behind by said ideals. A very basic example would be, say, if I was to try and move away from coal power, I’d need to think about:
- ensuring that power can still be supplied/mitigated through other means. Are renewables enough? My understanding is that they currently aren’t, which is why some countries have already started developing nuclear power, something that Australia has yet to even get a start on and is about ~10-15 years too late. Still not too late to get the ball rolling, at least! Better late than never, is my current opinion.
- supporting people with jobs in coal power, as well as their relocation and retraining.
Even though Mazlow’s Hierarchy of Needs is not perfect it’s a pretty solid indication of what people will care about first, but personally I don’t know enough to know how on a government level the rise in cost of living can be mitigated. Some part of me wants to be critical towards those complaining about cost-of-living, mostly in the sense of “I want to scrutinise every financial decision you made and point out what you could’ve done differently” but that’s not helpful.
Is enough being done by Labor? Personally I don’t think so. But it’s easy to keep demanding more and not acknowledge what they’ve done.
If there’s one thing I better understand as an adult, even now as a mature-age PhD student navigating various parts of academia, it’s why some things move so slowly. As much as I dislike it, I’m getting better at understanding and figuring out how to accommodate it.
While Labor obviously isn’t perfect I don’t think it’s unreasonable to keep some pressure on them to keep doing more. But I do wish I had a better understanding of the wider scope of things.
One example that comes to mind is their still continuing to approve coal mining. As much as I see people keep pointing it out and griping about it, Labor is still doing it. The only conclusion I can come to (barring any kind of bad faith judgment) is that approving additional coal mines and the likes is meant that they’re supplying or upholding something that is needed for the country. Yet (admittedly in my bubbles) I haven’t seen anything discussing that specifically, nor do I necessarily know where to look, short of going on multiple fruitless google searches.
EDIT: A friend has pointed out I didn’t consider coal mining for export trade, and upon reflection I had only assumed coal mine approvals in the context of Australia’s power needs. Safe to say I’m not well versed on Australia’s import/export trades.
The other example where I’m definitely on Labor’s side, or much rather, Penny Wong’s side, is the amount of crap she’s been getting for her lack of strong stance on the Israel/Palestine situation. If it’s not obvious, Penny Wong is Asian, of a Malaysian-Chinese background like my mother, and anybody who understands how Asians work, think and function will completely understand Penny’s non-committal attitude and behaviour towards what is obviously an international relations topic very much outside of her wheelhouse (despite literally being in the International Relations portfolio). The pressure heaped on her to outwardly take a stance is very much a white people culture thing and if Penny ever writes a memoir about it I’d love to know what she thought about the whole ordeal. In the meantime, I’m happy to trust Penny Wong unless given reason to otherwise.
I also feel the people yelling out for leaders to take a stance is also indicative of a lack of education, mindfulness, and ability to think beyond second-and-further-order effects.
I definitely wish the general populace were better educated and more in tune.
Education in Australia from my perspective has been slowly getting worse and it’s been painful for me to observe over the years, especially as someone from an Asian background & culture where education is obviously much more highly valued. Occasionally I read of stories where hard-working parents in third-world countries send their child overseas because they know the importance of their having a good education combined with an overseas experience – my best guess is that those hard-working parents are somehow aware of how limited their opportunities are given their current education, so obviously they would want better for their children.
In comparison, my landlady dropped out of school after Year 10, has run a successful embroidering company for 20+ years, overall is a lovely person, but it’s really obvious to me where the lack of higher education is showing up in various facets of her life. But not necessarily in a directly life-threatening way (although I can see many indirect paths leading that way), so it would be fair for one to question whether the additional education would’ve helped her or not.
But investing in education is somewhat of a long-term thing that can be hard to justify to most people, especially when common public opinion of the reasonably uneducated (at least, that I read on the internet) is that all learning should only happen at school. I’ve seen enough people saying “Why don’t they teach the kids how to do taxes at school?!” or the like and I’d posit in the same way that most jobs are compartmentalised in a way that ideally optimises for the right people to do them, society as a whole also compartmentalises school/colleges/universities to be the only place for learning in one’s life.
What other long term “things” seem to be missing investment?
Climate change is probably the biggest and most obvious one, and obviously as implied above I think education is pretty important. Those familiar with me and my academic background will not be surprised that I do wish more was spent on funding research.
The conclusion I’ve arrived at with respect to the coal mining discussion above is that they’re still being approved because they’re our only source of power, and that renewables are currently not sufficient for powering most of what Australia needs. The push for nuclear that happened in various European countries are a result of their recognising the need for more power to be supplied across their countries, so my suspicions is that we’re in need for a similarly sufficient energy source. However my current understanding is that nuclear takes a good 15-20 years of ongoing investment to get going, and that’s an awfully long time for most people, and no doubt many people will aim to poke holes along the way (the Suburban Rail Link back in Victoria is probably the most significant example of something long term that always seems to be in danger of being sabotaged or cancelled).
(Of course, I welcome any reasonable discussion and correction of my current understanding in the comments!)
I know nothing about military stuff and international relations, nor how to think about them. As I’m sure that there are other blind spots that me in my progressive academic bubble will not be aware of. I only wish I knew where and how to start reading about and understanding them.
In the end…
I hope Labor doesn’t become too comfortable and therefore complacent. And I do hope whoever rises up to lead the LNP can provide a much more competent opposition, moreso in terms of debating ideas, strategising more on how to move human society forward, and long-term preservation rather than unnecessarily pitting groups of people against each other.
While I can accept that it’s a normal part of the human condition for people to pit themselves against others (goodness knows the amount of hate I’ve seen expressed towards Dutton on social media), I do genuinely hope that people in general can also be respectful to others when it matters and put their differences aside and work together when the going gets tough.
There’s a saying that’s been ringing in my head for the past couple of months, and I’ve only just looked it up. Interestingly enough it seems to be misattributed to Thomas Jefferson:
“The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.”
And I’m happy that it seems like people were willing to at least uphold Australian democracy in a similar fashion.
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