Russell Marks theguardian.com, Friday 27 June 2014
In an age where Australian politicians lack the gift of the gab, nostalgia for the Paul Keating of the Redfern speech and the republic is more excusable than ever
'Oh, for someone who can debate, persuade, convince.' Photograph: flickr
After years of prime ministers who lack flair and political instinct, many Australians are searching their memories for a leader who looked like he knew what he was doing. This side of the Howard, Rudd and Gillard governments, social democrats look into the mists of time and see the hero of Casey Bennetto’s successful 2005 cabaret show, Keating! The Musical, the heroic PJK, cast against a Napoleonic John Howard determined to stop niceness and take over the world.
This is the Paul Keating of our dreams; the man who delivered the Redfern speech, and acknowledged that “it was we who did the dispossessing”; of Mabo and native title; of the commitment to a republic. The Howard years were harder for the dreamers; the nation became a "Brutopia", as Kevin Rudd wrote in 2006.
Now, after the troubled Rudd-Gillard years, Howard's Brutopia has become Abbott’s. Refugees, pensioners, Indigenous Australians, single parents, students, low-income earners and plenty more are set to bear the full brunt of one of the most divisive budgets in living memory. If only a new Keating would spring from the legacy of Irish oppression to champion the rights of the underprivileged!
First as treasurer and then as PM, the boy from Bankstown was drier than anyone Labor had ever offered up. He steered much of the neoliberal policy agenda through the institutions of Australian government. At least in his own mind, he balanced the deregulation with a reasonable welfare safety net. Wistful progressives might recall that the Keating of Redfern Park was also the Keating of “the recession we had to have”, who told one student protester in 1995 to “get a job”.
Now we have a prime minister who promised “no surprises, no excuses government”; who said the worst thing was to break promises; who promised no new taxes but now says they’re necessary to fix the budget, which he can’t seem to demonstrate is broken; who promised he wouldn’t use the budget as an excuse to break promises and who won’t use any of the GP tax revenue to actually fix the budget.
The sheer hypocrisy of it all! Keating's policy lessons, with his graphs and his J-curves, seem like the good old days. When was the last time a political leader set about explaining even the most basic policy advancement to us in a way that respected our intelligence?
Oh, for someone who can debate, persuade, convince. Hell, for someone who can deliver a decent line! In an era when politicians strangely lack the skill of rhetoric, that art most essential to their vocation, Keating nostalgia is perhaps more excusable than ever.
“I want to do you slowly,” he said in parliament, in response to John Hewson’s request for an early election in 1993. “Does a soufflé rise twice?” he asked earlier of Andrew Peacock. "I am not like [John Howard]," he once remarked. "I did not slither out of the Cabinet room like a mangy maggot."
Years later, in 2007, he was asked by the ABC’s Eleanor Hall for a response to revelations Kevin Rudd may have met with a disgraced former WA premier. “Look, Kevin has done something, he’s met Brian Burke,” Keating said.
“But I’ll tell you what he hasn’t done. He hasn’t lied to his nation about reasons for committing Australia to a non-UN sponsored invasion and war. He hasn’t turned his head from the plight of a boat full of wretched individuals looking for shelter, and then adding insult to injury by saying they threw their kids overboard first.”
Imagine a member of the 44th parliament reframing a situation like Keating could, with wit, confidence and more than occasional invective. Whereas Tony Speaks: The Wisdom of the Abbott – an earlier book of quotations I put together – is mostly gaffes, backflips and hypocrisies, The Book of Paul is a mixture of sharp retorts and light-on-the-hill vision. No wonder so many of us are a little too fond of the self-described Placido Domingo of Australian politics.
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