Just a short post for my first one here...
There's been a lot of chat lately about the importation of American political tactics. The first time we've seen these "Tea-Party" style tactics deployed in Australia in any large scale, systematic way has been over the Carbon Tax. Days of vitriol from the usual suspects (we call the main ones "Shock-jocks" - even the term itself was invented in the US to characterise their hysteria) resulted in death threats for Tony Windsor, MP. I may not always agree with Tony, but he seems like a nice, honest man. Seriously, isn't this like making death threats to your grand-dad?
This has been followed by Tony Abbott's continued focus on "big government, wasteful government, high taxes, massive debt", and his suggestion that there would be a "People's Revolt". This is standard language of the USA's Republican party and their Tea-Party movement - an apparent groundswell of anger amongst apparently normal people, who just all turn out to be almost exclusively white, and at least upper-middle class, all of it being bankrolled by several billionaires. Real salt of the earth stuff.
The other important attribute imported by these American-idolisers has been a distinct lack of facts in anything they say. Sure, anyone can be guilty of this from time to time, but these guys seems to specialise in it.
Just yesterday we saw a protest outside pariliament house of people expressing "their" rage over a Carbon Tax. I use inverted commas for "their" because it is obvious from some of the placards that they are quoting Alan Jones, amongst others, with the use of his purile meme "JuLIAR". Perusing the pictures of the ground, I noticed one sign that said "My Mom (sic) is COLD". So who wrote this placard? There aren't many options - either the person who wrote it is (a) American or (b) so poorly educated and ignorant that they really don't know how to spell this fairly basic word (c'mon - 3 letters. It's not that hard to get right!), or (c) they got the placards cheap direct from the US.
OK, so they spell Mum in the American way. Big deal, right? It's just funny to me to see so much about this rally be so American, in style, in words, in hysteria and now in spelling. Anyone outside Australia watching videos of this kind of rally would possibly be hard-pressed to guess that is was NOT held in America.
There are lots of components to worry about with the carbon tax idea. To my mind, it's mainly the question of whether we will add a tariff on imports to offset this extra cost to local industries. In fact, even if we can get some political will out of our neo-liberal economic policy subordinate politicians, would it even be possible to add tariffs, considering all the strict free-trade agreements we've been signing up to over the last 20 years?
There's a good chance that all this will do is force more manufacturing overseas, of what little there is left...
