Mungo - Do Gooder

do gooder

The most interesting political story of the holiday break came not from the news pages, where the election and its aftermath had finally succumbed to the demands of sport, but from the letters column of the Sydney Morning Herald.
Last week a social worker from St Johns Church in Canberra revealed that on the morning of Boxing Day the Prime Minister, unannounced and accompanied only by a security guard, had arrived to help serve breakfast to the homeless of the national capital, of whom there are rather more than is generally supposed. Kevin Rudd talked to both workers and clients at some length, and then announced as the most serious of his new year resolutions his intention to do something about the plight of the homeless generally.

A cynic commented that this would all have been more convincing if he had been engaged in similar activities before becoming Prime Minister – but he had. During the hectic campaign, after the exhausted media retired for the weekend, Rudd regularly visited homeless centres in whichever city he found himself.

As with St Johns the visits took place without any kind of publicity, and the fact that they had taken place only came out after polling day. They were acts of private charity and compassion which some observers have clearly found surprising and disconcerting in a man who has been seen as a ruthlessly efficient and single minded politician.

Modern politicians, after all, are expected to be tough guys whose ambition has made genuine empathy with the victims of society a luxury they simply cannot afford. They need to be able to take the hard decisions, unmoved by pity or remorse; they must tackle issues across the board and ignore unfortunate consequences and collateral damage. They don’t look backwards and of course they never apologise.

As John Howard pointed out, what is needed is ticker – by which he meant not heart, but guts. A heart can be a weakness: indeed, for Howard “bleeding heart” was a term of contempt and abuse. Another favourite insult was “do-gooder.” Taken literally, Howard’s ideal was a tyrant with a heart of stone and a determination to do evil.

He was certainly not one to follow the gospel teaching of feeding the hungry, clothing the naked and visiting the lonely. This namby-pamby stuff might be all right for those with nothing better to do, and of course it never hurt to be photographed hugging a war widow during an election camping, but a real leader is simply above such trivial human concerns.
And so, of course, is the government he heads. When there is a deliberate lack of humanity at the top, it trickles all the way down through the administration.

The Australian immigration system has always prided itself on being tough-minded, but during the Howard years it attained unheard of depths of brutality. Occasionally they surfaced, as in the persecution of Cornelia Rau and Vivien Solon, or of the stories that leaked out of the detention centres about madness and mutilation, even among children. But mainly it was simply taken for granted: the job of the officials was not to facilitate entry to Australia, but to keep as many people as possible out.

Asylum seekers were treated as criminals because that was the way the politicians wanted the public to see them. Long time residents were deported on a whim and visas refused without explanation. Compassion was a nonsense; what was required was ever tighter security. And if this meant increased pain for the victims, that wasn’t a bad thing: it would send a message to other potential invaders.

Down the road at Centrelink similar lessons were being learnt: the job was not to provide benefits, but to deny them wherever possible and police them ferociously when they were grudgingly given. No latitude, no mercy: even if Centrelink made a mistake, it was deemed to be the client’s fault. Better that a thousand innocent victims suffer than one guilty wretch escape.

This savage doctrine prevailed across the board; just how deeply engrained it has become is illustrated by the fact that we now feel slightly uneasy about a leader who openly sides with the marginalised and the oppressed and who believes that private morality is inseparable from public duty.

But it would be great to get used to it, to feel happy, and even proud about it. In this sense Rudd’s visit to St Johns should be seen not as an aberration, but as the first step in the long overdue normalisation of Australia.

But having said that, let’s not get too warm and fuzzy. You can take the turning-the-other-cheek thing too far.
The unions, and indeed Labor supporters across the board, were disappointed to hear Julia Gillard say that it might take more than two years to dismantle the uglier features of WorkChoices and to restore unfair dismissal laws; there has since been some qualification, but it appears that many objectionable aspects of Howard’s obsession will be with us for a while yet.

Among them is the Workplace Authority, which will continue until its replacement, Fair Work Australia, is ready to roll. This delay may be understandable, but leaving its present head in charge over the interim period is surely over the top. In the lead up to the election Barbara Bennett appeared in a series of government ads blatantly plugging WorkChoices. The ads were clearly political, and no-one really tried to pretend otherwise.

By her actions Bennett declared herself a government partisan, vigorously defending the system Labor is pledged to abolish. Her continued presence in such a sensitive post is totally unacceptable. Rudd should look to the militant side of his Christianity and get rid of her. After all, even Jesus threw the moneychangers out of the temple when he got the chance.

richard farmer

Writes in Crikey.

It is not often that the mental processes of lemmings are exposed in such detail.

The story is essentially simple. Back in October, with world leaders gathered in Sydney for the APEC Conference, John Howard realised his government would not win and that he would lose his own seat of Bennelong. The Foreign Minister Alexander Downer, his good and loyal friend, agreed. Mr Downer went and talked with Cabinet members and found their assessment to be the same.

With Cabinet agreeing on the problem there remained the question of finding a solution.

All the talk by Mr Howard over many years that Treasurer Peter Costello was the heir apparent meant he was the only possible alternative leader. If Mr Costello was thrust forward at this last minute would the Coalition do better or worse?

The colleagues, when approached by Mr Downer with Mr Howard's full knowledge, were somewhat divided about the answer but a majority seemed to agree with Mr Downer who Kelly quotes as telling Mr Howard "a change must at least give us a chance" and "perhaps we have to give Costello the opportunity".

This is the point where our simple story gets a little harder to understand. Mr Howard was apparently only prepared to step down if formally instructed by his Cabinet colleagues to do so. Howard, wrote Kelly, told Downer:

If my senior cabinet colleagues publicly own a request for my resignation, then I will resign. In this situation I won't put the party through a leadership ballot. But it needs to be understood that I won't resign in a voluntary decision. I am not prepared to walk away of my own accord. That would be an act of cowardice and it would be seen as an act of cowardice.