Some people argue that the Coalition government under Malcolm Turnbull was too left wing, and that it needed to move rightwards to the centre.
The idea that the far right, who objected to Turnbull, is more or less the centre has been a great propaganda technique, its a bit like the idea of calling Fox “fair and balanced” when its close to 90% or more right wing or neoliberal propaganda. Not only does this endlessly repeated script keep shifting the supposed centre to the right, but it enables almost all dissent and criticism to be classed as ‘far left’ so that most of the righteous no longer have to bother looking at it- they know its biased in advance, and often can support its suppression.
So what is the main difference between left and right? It’s clearly not conservatism vs radicalism, as the right is radicalising and continually destroying the “checks and balances” that have been built up over the years to contain destructive capitalism, and the left is often frantically trying to conserve things like the environment, people’s wages and working conditions, or the old checks and balances. It’s not about ‘liberty’ as the left tends to support people’s rights to do things that do not harm others and the right supports abstract moralizing, getting into people’s bedrooms, and attempting to prevent all kinds of study and behaviour, while suppressing dissent through increasing fines and jail terms for protestors, and of course media vituperation.
I’d suggest, again, the real difference is that the right is about increasing and protecting hierarchies. Usually they are concerned with the hierarchy of wealth and thus protecting and increasing plutocracy, but hierarchies of gender and sexuality and religion are also important to them, probably as these ideas can more successfully motivate the relatively not-well-off to support plutocracy. The success of this centralist propaganda is shown by events like large tax cuts for the rich, privatisation of public assets, and contracting out public services (and hiding the costs to the taxpayers of the deal behind commercial in confidence agreements) becoming seen as normal, natural and even praiseworthy, rather than right wing and destructive of society, as they might have been considered 50 years ago.
Even as recently as the Howard government (1996-2007), no government would have thought that “robodebt” (a system which systematically and inaccurately harasses people on unemployment benefits, subjecting them to threats of homelessness as money is demanded from them on false charges) was a great idea. Especially as it seems to primarily affect those who are actively seeking for work, and earn bits and pieces of income when they can (and declare it). But nowadays it goes on more or less without comment, and indeed there are supposedly discussions about extending the scheme to pensioners, presumably because the benefit in harassing the relatively poor rather than employers who rip off wages, or fraudulent financial operators, is so great.
Robert Menzies, the founder of Australia’s major modern right wing political party, once wrote things like
“The purpose of all measures of social security, is not only to provide citizens with some reasonable protection against misfortune but also to reconcile that provision with their proud independence and dignity as democratic citizens. The time has gone when social justice should even appear to take the form of social charity.”
In other words he objected to the idea that people who were unfortunate and unemployed should be humiliated, or harassed, in order to receive help.
He also wrote:
“if the individual is to have social and industrial justice and to be guarded against what might become the tyranny of the strong, private enterprise must accept its duties or even its burdens.”
Obviously, in today’s terms, he is a ravening leftist.
The same fate has befallen people who were central to Coalition at one time, like Malcolm Fraser and John Hewson who largely stuck to their guns. One being against the idea of torturing and imprisoning refugees without hope, and the other because he was committed to economic free market moderation and not destroying everything for profit. Now the right has moved on – indeed in the US, we can see that being a neo-nazi and threatening violence has become respectable in Republican eyes, and that the only really terrible racism comes from black people, and sexism from women. The supposed centre has moved rightwards.
Under Turnbull the Coalition may have taken a mild detour into not harassing gay people and having an energy policy, but that is not necessarily far left thinking. The UK’s Conservatives managed to have an energy policy and a commitment to phase out coal burning, before Johnson, although I don’t know what has happened since.
Tags: Disinformation
Climate, technology and chaos Blog 
September 11, 2019 at 12:54 am |
[…] free-speech, and then suppress awareness of the suppression, just as they suppress awareness of the general political shift rightwards. Right-wing thought has very little to do with conservative […]