Voting is obligatory in Australia, which is just as well. Because the policies offered by the two main parties are so weak and illogical that I’d wager that most people wouldn’t bother voting if they didn’t have to.
I’ve heard the parties here being described as being similar to two big department stores (Myer and David Jones in the Australian context). The both sell the same things and constantly have a sale on. To labour a simile, I’d say they both package things up that are a disappointment when you get them home.
On one side you have the Liberals who aren’t really liberal at all. They are somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun and the rantings of their lug eared leader make Margaret Thatcher look like Mother Theresa. The highlight of their campaign was to “Stop the Boats” as though a Spanish Armada was en route to the Australian coast rather than the occasional rickety fishing boat filled with desperate Afghanis. Australia is willing to spend billions on an unwinnable war in Afghanistan but is not willing to spend a fraction of this amount helping the unfortunate victims of that conflict.
However, their opponents in the Labor Party are not able to make capital out of this issue as the only difference between them and the Liberals is that Labor wants to send the boat people to East Timor, whereas the Liberals chosen destination is Nauru. East Timor is an expert on refugees of course, although mainly in the export of them. The Liberals have chosen Nauru because it’s one of the few countries in the world that has not signed the United Nations convention on refugees. Thus Australia, which is a signatory, would be able to sidestep its legal and moral responsibilities.
And the very fact that hardly anyone has mentioned this moral bankruptcy in the course of the election campaign is as good an indication as any of the hollowness of current Australian politics.
Labor, as I mention above, don’t have the moral high ground. They have also betrayed their working class roots and are now a party focused on protecting powerful interest groups. They even spell their name in the American way and not the traditional British/Irish way of “Labour”. They say this is because of their roots in the Victorian mining boom of the 19th Century. Californian immigrants brought an American tradition of Trade Unionism and the Labor Party was born.
Yet I’m inclined to think that they owe their spelling to their devotion to American politics with its concentration on Presidential figures and policies aimed at their biggest donors. I have lived under a Labor/Labour government for the first time in my life these past three years, but I have to say it has been a disappointment. They kept the country out of the global recession and made some symbolic gestures rather than addressing endemic poverty of the indigenous people. But in getting rid of their leader three months ago, they showed that they are as power hungry as their opponents. Government for the sake of it, rather than Government for the people seems to be their motto.
As I can’t vote in elections here, I’ve taken it upon myself to question those who can about the intricacies of the Australian voting system. Sadly I haven’t found anyone who is up to this task. While voting is obligatory, understanding the process isn’t.
As a result, people stand outside election booths handing out “how to vote cards” which sounds like the sort of thing that Stalin used to do. The reason for this is that Australians are obliged to complete a preference for every candidate, even when 30 or so are standing. This adds nothing to the election result but allows election nerds (of which I confess to being a paid up member) to calculate a “two party preferred” vote. God help them if the Greens ever make the breakthrough and become a viable third party. Australia may have to come up with the world’s first three dimensional voting card.
The senate election is particularly strange, as people vote for it on the same day. It makes you wonder why they don’t just have one house. It should be said in their defence that at least they allow people to vote in this election, unlike in Britain where the practice is typically to inherit a seat in the House of Lords, passed down from your ancestor who acted as muscle for Oliver Cromwell. Alternatively, you are gifted a seat by the Prime Minister or you happen to be a Protestant Bishop. This in a country that pretends to be multi cultural and lectures Ireland on its Priest influenced culture.
We Irish aren’t much better mind you. We have an Upper House or Senate which performs a function that is about as clear to the public as the monthly management meetings at Al Qaeda. The election process to this house was determined in the 1930s when the world, it is fair to say, had a casual attitude towards democracy. The founding fathers wanted a virtuous assembly of artists and professors who would sit in patrician judgement over the foolish and uneducated laws passed by the lower house.
We Irish must be the only people in the world who elect artists to our parliament as a matter of constitutional law and allow University graduates to vote in Senate elections, but not factory workers. Democracy, as Winston Churchill said is the least bad form of Government.
After all the votes have been counted in Australia, the result is unclear. The two main parties have finished with exactly the same number of seats, which is sweetly ironic given their identical policies and campaign strategies. Thus, they are both now engaged in that strange courtship ritual peculiar to hung parliaments. Both parties are busy trying to charm the same Greens and Independents that they spent the last six weeks attacking in the campaign.
Soon it will all be settled and we can return to having the civil servants run the country. Nauru or East Timor will get richer but pretty much everything else will stay the same.
Tuesday 24 August 2010
Monday 2 August 2010
In Memory of my Mother
Dear Mam,
You’re at rest now and the memory thief can no longer burgle your thoughts. I’d like to think that you are in a better place but to be honest, the hand of fate that God dealt you these past few years has tested my faith. All your obituaries spoke about your daily Mass attendance and unquestioning devotion. I’m not so sure about the unquestioning bit, but you weren’t rewarded for making that daily pilgrimage to St. Malacys.
You would tell me of course that your reward will be in heaven and no doubt you’re up there now telling the big fellow that he’s sitting in your chair. What those obituaries don’t say of course is that you always had questions about the doctrine we were forced to ingest in the old Ireland of Police and Priests.
You never accepted any of it at face value and had a healthy disrespect for the aristocracy of the church. We were the first family to leave the Papal Mass in Drogheda in 1979 because you were annoyed that the Pope was getting carried around in a chair while you had to sit in a field.
And every time that Pope would issue a pompous missive on the subject of divorce or abortion, you would throw your eyes to heaven and say, “What would a man know about those things”? When I’d point out that Jesus was a man, you’d say “Sure he lived at home with his Mother until he was thirty. Where do you think he learned everything he knew”?
At least I got to say goodbye before you went. I don’t think you’d have forgiven me if I didn’t. The first time we said goodbye was when I left home to move to London. You kept your emotions in check until I was about to pass through the departure gate. Finally you cracked and hugged me in your famous nicotine tinged embrace.
“Why in God’s name do you want to go to that God forsaken nation of child molesters”?
I sensed in your voice a hint of envy that you weren’t leaving with me. You lived all your life in a small Irish town while your siblings and then your children spread their wings to the four corners of the globe. I can’t help feeling that you felt suffocated by your place in life, as though you were in a village surrounded by a deep and forbidding wood. You knew however, that a light shone beyond those woods and you wanted to go and see what makes it shine.
You certainly bolted from that small town whenever you could, hitting the beaches of Southern Europe each summer. You even ventured to Eastern Europe before the wall came down which was tremendously cool to the teenage communist within me.
I met you in Sydney and Switzerland and the back streets of London’s Chinatown. You treated each as your personal fiefdom, finding the best place to sneak a smoke and a crafty glass of wine. It’s ironic that your last big trip was to the USA around the time of September 11th, 2001. In hindsight, the memory thief was already nibbling away at you then and if the whole world changed on that fateful day, then the same could be said for you.
You left Boston on the morning of Sept. 11th in a car heading for Niagara Falls with Dad and mad Uncle Brendan. You were probably the last people in the Northern hemisphere to hear that day’s news, because Brendan insisted on playing 1950’s Irish show band music all the way there in the car.
The events of that day have become legendary in our family. Your spur of the moment trip across the Canadian border without passports on a day when America was sealing its borders. Your insistence to the yanks that you should be allowed into their country when nobody else was (apart from some intrepid Mexican illegals) or your lack of understanding as to what all the fuss about. All of it proves that were unique and lived life on your terms.
It’s not just your sense of humour that I’ll miss. You were the typical Irish mammy is so many ways. Proud of all my achievements to the outside world but ready to put me in my place whenever I got ahead of myself. “I could bucken buy and sell you all” you’d say in that desire to show your self-confidence and to demonstrate that you would never commit the venal sin of cursing but could come up with a ready substitute.
I’ll also miss the cup of tea you used to offer me when I’d enter the sitting room, even when I’d only been to the toilet to relieve myself after the five cups of tea you had already offered that day. Tea was your currency and your way of saying hello.
You loved your tea as well of course and it was a challenge to all your children to make it to the correct strength and with just the right amount of Marvel creamer. You spurned milk because you were always watching your weight. How cruel then that God decided that you couldn’t eat and when you passed you were down to a weight you probably desired all your life but were not in a position to appreciate it.
We liked you the way you were though Mam. Always ready with a hug or a piece of advice. When I went through the pain of a break up in 1994, you were the only one who spoke sense to me and stepped beyond the clichés of “There are plenty more fish in the sea” and “it’s probably for the best”. You reminded me of how I’d been raised and that I was entitled to my feelings and you also were to yours.
You were an ordinary Irish woman, but you will always be extraordinary to me. Enjoy the big lie in.
Rest in Peace.
You’re at rest now and the memory thief can no longer burgle your thoughts. I’d like to think that you are in a better place but to be honest, the hand of fate that God dealt you these past few years has tested my faith. All your obituaries spoke about your daily Mass attendance and unquestioning devotion. I’m not so sure about the unquestioning bit, but you weren’t rewarded for making that daily pilgrimage to St. Malacys.
You would tell me of course that your reward will be in heaven and no doubt you’re up there now telling the big fellow that he’s sitting in your chair. What those obituaries don’t say of course is that you always had questions about the doctrine we were forced to ingest in the old Ireland of Police and Priests.
You never accepted any of it at face value and had a healthy disrespect for the aristocracy of the church. We were the first family to leave the Papal Mass in Drogheda in 1979 because you were annoyed that the Pope was getting carried around in a chair while you had to sit in a field.
And every time that Pope would issue a pompous missive on the subject of divorce or abortion, you would throw your eyes to heaven and say, “What would a man know about those things”? When I’d point out that Jesus was a man, you’d say “Sure he lived at home with his Mother until he was thirty. Where do you think he learned everything he knew”?
At least I got to say goodbye before you went. I don’t think you’d have forgiven me if I didn’t. The first time we said goodbye was when I left home to move to London. You kept your emotions in check until I was about to pass through the departure gate. Finally you cracked and hugged me in your famous nicotine tinged embrace.
“Why in God’s name do you want to go to that God forsaken nation of child molesters”?
I sensed in your voice a hint of envy that you weren’t leaving with me. You lived all your life in a small Irish town while your siblings and then your children spread their wings to the four corners of the globe. I can’t help feeling that you felt suffocated by your place in life, as though you were in a village surrounded by a deep and forbidding wood. You knew however, that a light shone beyond those woods and you wanted to go and see what makes it shine.
You certainly bolted from that small town whenever you could, hitting the beaches of Southern Europe each summer. You even ventured to Eastern Europe before the wall came down which was tremendously cool to the teenage communist within me.
I met you in Sydney and Switzerland and the back streets of London’s Chinatown. You treated each as your personal fiefdom, finding the best place to sneak a smoke and a crafty glass of wine. It’s ironic that your last big trip was to the USA around the time of September 11th, 2001. In hindsight, the memory thief was already nibbling away at you then and if the whole world changed on that fateful day, then the same could be said for you.
You left Boston on the morning of Sept. 11th in a car heading for Niagara Falls with Dad and mad Uncle Brendan. You were probably the last people in the Northern hemisphere to hear that day’s news, because Brendan insisted on playing 1950’s Irish show band music all the way there in the car.
The events of that day have become legendary in our family. Your spur of the moment trip across the Canadian border without passports on a day when America was sealing its borders. Your insistence to the yanks that you should be allowed into their country when nobody else was (apart from some intrepid Mexican illegals) or your lack of understanding as to what all the fuss about. All of it proves that were unique and lived life on your terms.
It’s not just your sense of humour that I’ll miss. You were the typical Irish mammy is so many ways. Proud of all my achievements to the outside world but ready to put me in my place whenever I got ahead of myself. “I could bucken buy and sell you all” you’d say in that desire to show your self-confidence and to demonstrate that you would never commit the venal sin of cursing but could come up with a ready substitute.
I’ll also miss the cup of tea you used to offer me when I’d enter the sitting room, even when I’d only been to the toilet to relieve myself after the five cups of tea you had already offered that day. Tea was your currency and your way of saying hello.
You loved your tea as well of course and it was a challenge to all your children to make it to the correct strength and with just the right amount of Marvel creamer. You spurned milk because you were always watching your weight. How cruel then that God decided that you couldn’t eat and when you passed you were down to a weight you probably desired all your life but were not in a position to appreciate it.
We liked you the way you were though Mam. Always ready with a hug or a piece of advice. When I went through the pain of a break up in 1994, you were the only one who spoke sense to me and stepped beyond the clichés of “There are plenty more fish in the sea” and “it’s probably for the best”. You reminded me of how I’d been raised and that I was entitled to my feelings and you also were to yours.
You were an ordinary Irish woman, but you will always be extraordinary to me. Enjoy the big lie in.
Rest in Peace.
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