The Anarchy Engine

By Ken Gratton

THE WORLD COPES WITH CASCADING ECONOMIC DISASTERS, WAR, GLOBAL PANDEMICS AND CATASTROPHIC CLIMATE CHANGE...

Now right-wing populist politicians are throwing further chaos into the mix.

The Anarchy Engine breaks down the discrete challenges faced by the Australian voting public over the past fifte

• Language: English
• Publisher: Shawline Publishing Group
• Release date: Sep 20, 2023
• ISBN: 9781922993977

Ken Gratton

Ken Gratton finished secondary school with little idea of what he wanted to do. After bumming around in clerical jobs for a few years he joined the Royal Australian Air Force to study Mandarin Chinese and then gather information concerning China for the Australian government.After leaving the RAAF he worked as a building control room operator in the unexpectedly dynamic environment of Melbourne Central Shopping Centre.Eventually he talked his way into writing automotive news, reviews and advice for carsales.com.au, and retired only recently. Ken lives in Melbourne's eastern suburbs with his wife Jenni and two adult children.

Book preview

The Anarchy Engine © 2023 Ken Gratton.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in

a review.

This is a work of non-fiction. The events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability, although some names and details may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Printed in Australia

Cover and internal design by Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

First Printing: September 2023

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au

Paperback ISBN 978-1-9229-9396-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-9229-9397-7

Distributed by Shawline Distribution and Lightning Source Global

More great Shawline titles can be found by scanning the QR code below.

New titles also available through Books@Home Pty Ltd.

Subscribe today at www.booksathome.com.au or scan the QR code below.

The Anarchy Engine © 2023 Ken Gratton.

All Rights Reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the author. The only exception is by a reviewer, who may quote short excerpts in

a review.

This is a work of non-fiction. The events and conversations in this book have been set down to the best of the author’s ability, although some names and details may have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals. Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

Printed in Australia

Cover and internal design by Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

First Printing: September 2023

Shawline Publishing Group Pty Ltd

www.shawlinepublishing.com.au

Paperback ISBN 978-1-9229-9396-0

Ebook ISBN 978-1-9229-9397-7

Distributed by Shawline Distribution and Lightning Source Global

More great Shawline titles can be found by scanning the QR code below.

New titles also available through Books@Home Pty Ltd.

Subscribe today at www.booksathome.com.au or scan the QR code below.

To my wife Jenni, who has supported me wholeheartedly,

and my kids Stephanie and Stuart

Contents

1. A political ingenue

2. Land of confusion

3. Relief without joy

4. Two tribes go to war

5. Rudd’s roller coaster ride

6. Gillard’s tribulations

7. The mad monk

8. A secular system

9. Jobs and growth

10. Climate for change

11. The sex and sin factor

12. Malcolm has left the building

13. Interference at the ABC

14. Micallef’s take on Auspol

15. The potency of people power

16. The miraculous election

17. Crisis? Which crisis?

18. Pandemic panic

19. Transition to isolation

20. The states of the nation

21. Victoria’s crisis in aged care

22. Sack Dan Andrews

23. Slippery semantics and clickbait headlines

24. Let it rip

25. Blame, distract, divide, and conquer

26. The Trump model

27. A prelude to American insurrection

28. Attack on the Capitol

29. Ripping out the weeds

30. ‘The Joker’

31. At home with Jenny

32. Russia invades Ukraine

33. Kimberley

34. The sprint begins

35. Into the final stretch

36. Robodebt

37. So easy to spread

38. Deves, China and French subs

39. But what about Labor?

40. The teal independents

41. Australia’s next prime minister…

42. 60 Minutes of dreck

43. Never the twain shall meet

44. The Jetstar party

45. Now it’s easier being Green

46. A litany of errors

47. Also sprach Albo

48. Epilogue

1. A political ingenue

Picture a young boy, not yet nine years old, watching dramatic TV footage of the largest street protests ever seen in the city of Melbourne, Australia’s second largest city. That was me, in 1970, when activists took to the streets, protesting Australia’s involvement in the Vietnam war and the conscription of young men to serve in the defence forces.

These rallies were held throughout 1970 and 1971, the occasionally violent clashes with police broadcast on our local news bulletins each night. My father saw this as a symptom of imminent societal collapse. It wasn’t. It was merely an outpouring of anger from a collective of young people who had been let down by their federal government. There are parallels in Australian politics fifty years later.

The Vietnam war protest rallies were justified on multiple grounds. We now know that America’s vaunted military forces were unable to stem the tide from the north, but many more Vietnamese lives were lost than would have been the case without American intervention. And the US lost many of its own young people fighting in that war, as did Australia.

In 1973, I was in my first year of high school. The ALP (Australian Labor Party) government of Gough Whitlam had been elected just a year earlier, after very nearly 23 years of unbroken governance by the Liberal government of Sir Robert Menzies and his successors, Harold Holt, John Gorton, and William ‘Billy’ McMahon.

One of the first orders of business for the new Labor government was ending conscription (‘national service’) and announcing we would withdraw our troops from Vietnam. An entire generation of young Australian men living with anxiety that their number might come up and they would be conscripted could exhale at last. Even as an eleven-year-old, I was relieved on both accounts. Curiously, I joined the Royal Australian Air Force less than a decade later… but it was my prerogative then, as an adult.

There were other Whitlam government initiatives that were welcomed by Australians in the years that followed. I was not to know it at the time, but the Family Law Act of 1975, introducing fault-free divorce, helped me and my first wife to navigate divorce when our relationship failed sixteen years later.

In 1974 I moved to a new school, where one of my classmates was Craig Keating, a young man far more politically engaged than I was, even as a thirteen-year-old. I still remember Craig rushing up to me one day in 1975 to tell me that the government had been toppled – dismissed by the governor-general of the time, Sir John Kerr. Craig was shocked by the events of that day, Remembrance Day 1975. As a political innocent at the time, I had no words to say in reply.

But the dismissal of the Whitlam government was a betrayal of young people at the time, even private-school types like Craig and me. If you wanted free university education, universal health care or a law to combat racial discrimination, it was Gough Whitlam who delivered on that promise.

In the days leading up to 11 November 1975, the opposition – led by Liberal MP Malcolm Fraser in a coalition with the Country Party (later renamed the National Party) – had convinced the governor-general to dismiss the Whitlam government using executive powers that had never been exercised before in the history of Australian politics. Many Australians, if not most, were not even aware that these powers existed.

It was the ‘nuclear bomb’ of Aussie politics – unprecedented and undemocratic, an awful legacy for the governor-general and the Liberal opposition to leave to posterity. Governors-general to this day have steered clear of any hint they would ever exercise that power again.

The dismissal of the Whitlam government was the sort of mischief that has become one of the hallmarks of the Liberal Party, a party that enjoyed literally decades in power under the leadership of founder Sir Robert Menzies. It was Menzies and his successors’ long term in office from 1949 to 1972 that likely entrenched a ‘born to rule’ mentality in many of the party’s members. And to win an election, no bar is too low, no trick too dirty.

While there’s no doubt that Labor has also been guilty of its own tricks and duplicity, the Liberal Party is the one that has attracted more press over the years for scare campaigns, smear tactics and confected outrage to place its opponents on the back foot.

That is true even today, as I write this, just three days after the 2022 federal election. This election has been marked by claims that the Labor opposition will be ‘soft on China’ and they will be ‘poor economic managers’ in government. In the former case, a seemingly innocent trip to China some years back by Richard Marles, the deputy leader of the ALP, hints that Labor will not take a strong stand against Xi Jinping’s communist state.

As for being superior economic managers, the Liberal/National coalition of prime minister Scott Morrison and treasurer Josh Frydenberg funnelled billions of dollars to private-sector enterprises in order to keep workers employed during the COVID-19 pandemic. That has brought the nation’s unemployment figure down to 3.5 per cent, but at the expense of rising inflation and many millions wasted improving shareholder dividends for companies that remained profitable right through the pandemic.

The Morrison government’s boast is based entirely on this very low unemployment figure, ignoring everything else that threatens to derail the economy. We have been in a state of stagflation – shrinking real-world wages and rising inflation. And what the Liberal Party won’t tell the punters is this: the party has taxed higher, across the board and as a proportion of GDP, than Labor over the past three decades, snatching more money from PAYG (‘Pay as you go’) earners through bracket creep. All this is just the latest in a long tradition of tactical and strategic disinformation from the centre-right of politics in Australia.

In 2019, the Morrison government told Australians that Labor’s preoccupation with climate change and electric vehicles would end the weekend for Australians. They wouldn’t be able to drive anywhere while waiting for their vehicles to recharge. I own an EV; my weekends are unaffected.

In 2013, the federal opposition, led by Liberal leader Tony Abbott, offered Australians a number of promises, many of which were broken once they won the election that year. Not least of them the promise to leave funding untouched for the nation’s two public broadcasters, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) and the Special Broadcasting Service (SBS). The ABC, a corporation which was there to hold governments of both stripes accountable, was immediately hit with a funding freeze. Abbott claimed this was intended to reduce the debt and deficit left by the previous Labor government, but it embodied more than a touch of ‘behaviour control’, to keep journalists in line under threat of retrenchment.

If you go back to the Howard government that ran the country between 1996 and 2007, many Australians will recall the ‘Children overboard’ scandal, which attempted to paint asylum seekers on a sinking vessel as desperate criminals who would compel the Royal Australian Navy to rescue them by throwing their kids into the water. This was later discredited by the Navy itself¹. Then there was the ‘Tampa’ incident of 2001, a stand-off between the Australian government and desperate refugees who had taken control of a Norwegian-operated container vessel to demand asylum in Australia. They only took control of the vessel after being told that it would not be permitted to berth in Australia. John Howard, prime minister at the time and just recently returned from a trip to the US during which the 9/11 terrorist attack took place, saw an opportunity to present these refugees (who had been rescued from a sinking vessel in international waters) as pirates or Islamist terrorists. When Howard stridently told the public that ‘we will decide who comes to this country’², he cast himself as a strong leader in a world scarred by recent images from New York. Howard had also played the race card in 1988, telling Australians that Asian immigration needed to be wound back. This set the tone for a wave of rising racism in subsequent decades, and whereas PM Malcolm Fraser threw the gates wide open for Vietnamese refugees in the 1970s, and Labor’s Bob Hawke also expedited approval for 20,000 Chinese asylum seekers in the aftermath of the Tiananmen massacre of 1989, the Australian government has been much more reluctant to accept refugees in the years during and since John Howard’s reign.

So, all this is why I’m unashamedly a fan of this country’s centre-left political exponents, allied with the fact that I want governments to be progressive, to welcome change for the better. I don’t want things to stay as they are.

The coalition claims that Labor ran a ‘Mediscare’ campaign in 2016, but there would have been no scare if not for the coalition’s

known hostility to universal health insurance³. Labor doesn’t always get it right, and nor do the Greens, but as the recent COVID-19 global pandemic has shown, a market economy can always recover from a pandemic; the same can’t be said for immuno-compromised and elderly human lives. This book takes a look at the political battleground in Australia in the years since Howard and focuses heavily on the four-year period after Scott Morrison ascended to the role of prime minister, a period punctuated by the COVID-19 pandemic, catastrophic bushfires and floods, and a series of scandals as often as not papered-over by a conniving, partisan press.

The title of the book reflects my interest in things automotive and my previous role as technical editor at carsales.com.au. The anarchy engine of parliament is fed fuel by lobbyists and the press, subjected to the pressure of debate within the House of Representatives and ignited in the Senate to produce much noise and heat, but not always much actual progress. Far from a smooth-running, high-performance democracy, Australians have endured stalling anarchy for most of a decade.

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1 David Marr, ‘Burnt hands, children overboard, it all seems the same to Peter Reith,’ The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/feb/11/peter-reith-abc-children-overboard-david-marr

2 David Marr & Ben Doherty, ‘We will decide who comes to this country,’ Sydney Morning Herald, https://www.smh.com.au/national/we-will-decide-who-comes-to-this-country-20110819-1j2cj.html

3 Jim Gillespie, ‘Labor’s ‘Mediscare’ campaign capitalised on Coalition history of hostility towards Medicare’, The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/labors-mediscare-campaign-capitalised-on-coalition-history-of-hostility-towards-medicare-61976

2. Land of confusion

Few Australians take great interest in federal politics. We’re not alone in that. In America and the UK, the voter turn-out is often around 50 per cent of the voting population. That’s in a good year.

We’re actually well ahead of that figure, due to our compulsory voting, which demands that every eligible adult residing in Australia attend a nearby polling booth to have their name crossed off a list. Whether they choose to register a vote after that is entirely up to them. If not for the compulsory attendance, our voting participation rate would probably be as low as America’s and Britain’s, if not lower.

Once we’ve arrived at the polling booth, we figure: ‘well, we’re here now, might as well vote that bastard out.’ This ‘bastard’ is usually the country’s prime minister at federal level or a premier at state level.

Australia comprises six states, two territories and the commonwealth – the federal government that is notionally more powerful than the states, although the COVID-19 pandemic has put that theory to the test.

On the whole, voters in Australia are only interested in politics if there’s some particular reason to be, whether it’s an election that’s also a referendum on an issue or an expression of dissatisfaction with the leader of a party or the government as a whole. One example of both factors in effect was the Whitlam government of 1972.

After 23 years of socially conservative government ultimately led by Liberal Party prime minister Sir William ‘Billy’ McMahon, voters were heavily invested in the Australian Labor Party campaign led by Gough Whitlam. In 1972, the Whitlam government won power in a landslide, and then lost it again barely three years later, after confusion, poor governance, scandal, changing economic fortunes and a full-blown constitutional crisis. Voters were charmed by Whitlam and also accepted the need for change. Labor’s advertising campaign at the time relied on a simple but killer slogan, ‘It’s Time’.

Many Australians don’t watch the news on TV – and they’re arguably misled when they do – and nor do they read newspapers. A political correspondent explaining why a government is remiss or has excelled will barely get three words out before the viewer at home is changing the channel, looking for reruns of The Simpsons. Much of what we know about politics, politicians, and current events, then, is gleaned from those around us: our families, friends, and colleagues.

Australia’s capital city is Canberra, which is located in the Australian Capital Territory. It’s our federal politicians’ remoteness from the country’s two largest cities, Sydney and Melbourne, let alone the rest of the nation, that leads politicians and journalists to speak of the ‘Canberra bubble’. Of course, like the cone of silence in American sitcom Get Smart, the Canberra bubble isolates those within just as much as those without.

It’s our isolation from the so-called ‘Canberra bubble’ that leads us to believe eternal ‘verities’, such as the better economic management and lower taxes of the centre/right Liberal Party, for instance. Far from being better economic managers than the Labor Party, the Liberal and National coalition has seen debt and deficit skyrocket since assuming government in 2013⁴. This country, furthermore, was well and truly on the path to recession – for the first time in 29 years – before the arrival of the COVID-19 virus in 2020.Another ‘verity’ is that the centre/left Labor Party is the party of social welfare and equality for all. But it wasn’t Labor that took suffrage for indigenous people to a referendum as recently as 1967. Nor was Labor in power when marriage equality passed through parliament, the party missing the opportunity to introduce that legislation during the final years of the Gillard government between 2010 and 2013. It was, however, Labor that first interned refugees in detention centres. Neither of the two major parties in Australia – Labor on the centre left and Liberal on the centre right – is quite as true to their respective policy platforms as they would have you believe.

In a Westminster system, such as Australia’s, and practically any credible democracy, politics is partisan and confrontational. An opposition that agrees with everything a government does is no opposition at all. There are times when the country is in crisis that an opposition will support the government in an act of bipartisanship, but these times are few and far between, thankfully.

The rest of the time, politicians on both sides of the house see the other side as the enemy in waiting – to win government or to lose it. With Australian backbenchers being paid over $200,000 a year, the money’s good, so it attracts a few ‘chancers’ (colloquially known in Australia as ‘bludgers’), as well as those genuinely committed to improving quality of life for the nation’s families, workers, and businesses. That, unfortunately, is the nature of politics. It’s an imperfect system run by flawed human beings.

And we, voters and taxpayers, also contribute to the flaws and imperfections of the system. We don’t ask questions, we don’t wait for answers, and we make little attempt to understand why a reporter or columnist may take a particular position on a specific political development.

It’s because Australians are so apathetic that we vote conservatively. We may indeed recognise we don’t know enough about the prevailing political situation to make an informed decision. That in turn makes us reluctant to vote a government out of office unless desperate times call for desperate measures. The opposition has to appear ethically pure while also being efficiently ruthless to be considered for elevation to government. If there’s even the slightest doubt, as in the case of an unlikeable leader or a policy that might favour some over others, we will reject that alternative to the government, even though the case against the opposition may be based on disinformation or misconception, while the government itself may be a proven pack of self-absorbed ditherers, only in it for the money and the glory.

It results in governments and oppositions that stay with the tried and proven techniques, the uncontroversial policies and the ‘small target’ tactics. A reform agenda will only be pushed through by an opposition party after many years out of government. And first, the government has to wither and decay to the point where it embodies all the freshness of a corpse lying in a shallow grave for six months.

We’re resistant to change in one other important way too. If we grew up voting for one party, the party our parents always supported, that’s likely the party that will continue to receive our support at the polling booth, well into our old age. In Australia, the primary vote – the rolled-gold voters who never transfer their electoral support to any other party – is around 30 to 35 per cent for each of the major parties, Labor and Liberal. The remaining 60 or 70 per cent vote for minor parties and independents. It can take a swing less than 5 per cent across the nation to change government, and that’s a fairly fine balance.

There was a time when swing voting was a smart move. Keep the bastards honest, keep them guessing how you would vote. Partisan voters may have solid reasons to vote for the same party at every election, but their vote is usually offset by partisan voting for the other side of politics. Swing voters are the citizens who make or break governments.

But swing-voting Australians can be just as disengaged from politics as everyone else. More so, in fact. When it comes time to vote, their ignorance and apathy leaves them vulnerable to manipulation by mainstream media running an agenda that might suit newspaper proprietors better than the mug punters. If swing voters cast their vote based on the recommendation from their favourite newspaper or a talking head on the TV, they may be wasting their vote on a party that isn’t acting in their best interests or even the best interests of the country at large.

This is how swing voters gave us the Abbott government in 2013. That government is now recognised by many Australians as one lacking any sort of vision, a government led by a prime minister without substantive approval from Australians even in the ‘honeymoon period’ after the election – compelling his own party to tip him out of the leadership chair after about two years.

So, swing voters do not always get it right, which is not to say that they were wrong to boot out the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd government in 2013. This was a government so anarchic, so chaotic and so dysfunctional, that it had to go. Unfortunately, it was replaced by a government that was even more anarchic, chaotic, and dysfunctional.

Swing voters can be tuned in and wide awake to the political scene, of course. In the 2022 federal election, voters in Kooyong, a formerly blue-ribbon Liberal seat