UK writer Hugh Rifkind once referred to politics as the only kind of fame which, once it’s over, is a relief. It’s the only form of fame that isn’t accompanied by adulation, he posited.
For many in professions other than politics, when their brilliant career is over and constantly being told how awesome they are is no more, it is hard to adjust. Suicide rates can be high.
However, if told every day you’re rubbish, and a moron, and a back-stabbing, self-enriching, egotistical fraud, then the eventual silence comes as a blessed relief. Suicide rates in politics are much lower than in other fame professions.
So we need not feel too sorry for all those MPs who lost their seats a fortnight ago.
As for the incoming government, boy have they got a hard row to hoe. I’m sure in their more reflective moments the Liberals are not entirely sorry they lost this one. They were going to lose eventually, and this was a good one to lose.
The next three years will be gruelling, and it is extremely doubtful that Labor and a Greens-dominated Senate will have what it takes.
There’s an old joke, ‘Optimists learn English, pessimists learn Chinese, and realists learn how to use an AK47.’
Labor and the Greens are none of the above.
As the English poet WB Yeats wrote:
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold …
… anarchy is loosed upon the world …
… and everywhere the ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.”
In the hundred years since Yeats wrote those words, little has changed.
Written just after the end of the 1st World War and during the tumultuous Russian Revolution, Yeats’ poem has been referenced in books, films, and world events from the apartheid struggle in South Africa to the Iraq war to the mass shooting in Texas last week.
“The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity”.
If that line doesn’t sum up what’s wrong with the world at the moment, I don’t know what does.
There are the rare few who, according to American author and pastor Louis Albert Banks, “… have sailed through rough seas, carrying cargo and burdens as servants of God, and as helpers of others”, but so many of our best and brightest ‘lack all conviction’ and use their gifts to pursue self-indulgent lives, whilst the ambitious and power-hungry relentlessly pursue political power.
Speaking of which, when Kevin Rudd swept into office in 2007, people were saying this spelled the end of the Liberal Party and Labor would be in power for the next 20 years! A number of Liberals subsequently resigned from parliament not wishing to be in Opposition for years on end.
But Rudd so comprehensively stuffed things up, that within two years he was dumped by his own party and his successor had to rely on two disgruntled former National Party members to form minority government.
The next three years will be much, much harder for Albanese than it was for Rudd.
For a start, Rudd inherited from Prime Minister John Howard, Treasurer Peter Costello and Finance Minister Nick Minchin – the Treasurer controls the revenue, the Finance Minister controls the spending, and the Prime Minister gets the credit (for appointing them, and rightly so) – a budget surplus and zero government debt.
To quote Welsh singer Mary Hopkin, “Those were the days, my friend …”.
By contrast, Albanese has inherited a one hundred billion dollar deficit and a one thousand billion dollar debt.
Not only that, Rudd had only five Greens Senators to contend with. Albanese has 12.
Tackling government spending (childcare, aged care, housing, NDIS), labour shortages, rising interest (mortgage) rates, the highest inflation in most people’s lifetime, food prices, power prices, petrol prices and rent prices all going up, a mental health crisis among young people, volatile global events, and of course energy policy, will be virtually impossible.
To repeat those lines from Yeats’ poem:
“Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold …
… anarchy is loosed upon the world …”
I predict that the Liberals will secure a comfortable victory at the next election.