Imprisoning children instead of feeding them, pandering to our royal masters and sacrificing our kids in foreign wars are all signs of Australia's distinct system of privilege. Founder Dave Donovan and managing editor Michelle Pini discuss our well-entrenched class system.
THE NOTION Australia is a classless society is an utter furphy.
Australia has a distinct system of privilege, which is largely built upon promoting the interests of the affluent, powerful and well-connected, and further disadvantaging the less fortunate.
This systemic privilege is often well obscured, but its hostile appearance is sometimes breathtaking. The Queensland State Election is one of these times.
With the ardent support of the dominant Murdoch media, the LNP won this State Election under the stewardship of the uninspiring David Crisafulli and with just two notable policies. Firstly, the slogan ‘Adult Crime, Adult Time’ and secondly, the blatant redistribution of Labor initiatives meant for the less well-off to the already well-off.
SACRIFICING CHILDREN
The Adult Crime, Adult Time refrain – already in full swing in the Northern Territory courtesy of its newly minted CLP Government – was promoted with the assistance of a staged interview with a White middle-class woman, who tearfully declaimed being preyed upon by a group of youths. It was emotive stuff, especially if you are the White pearl-clutching type that makes up a major part of the LNP’s voter base.
Meanwhile, police statistics show youth crime rates are at record lows. So this policy makes no sense outside of class concerns, as there is no such thing as “Adult Crime”, but merely crime.
As for “Adult Time”, this slogan incorporates lowering the age of criminal responsibility so children as young as ten may be gaoled and receive similar sentences as adults if they offend.
It is a move that clearly targets Indigenous Australians and those from economically and socially disadvantaged sections of the Queensland population, which make up the majority of youth offenders. No attempts at rehabilitation, but merely punitive measures to further entrench these young persons’ struggles. Any young offender who can afford better legal counsel, however, will also have the benefit of a justice system shown to be more lenient to those from more affluent backgrounds, and will doubtless escape the full force of these new laws.
Crisafulli has pledged to roll back the Miles Government’s initiative to provide school lunches for all, and will also likely revoke 50-cent public transport fares — both of which distinctly advantage the poorer members of our society.
News Corp, which has a near monopoly of mainstream media in the State of Queensland, campaigned incessantly against the “wastefulness” of these moves. Multinational, billionaire-owned media almost universally places the interests of big business, the wealthy and the powerful over the interests of who they see as the “undeserving poor”.
With these as his main policies, Crisafulli was elected. Therefore, the election may be seen as a case study about how Australia has a distinct class divide between the haves and the have-nots, in terms of our politics, our legal and justice system, and the entrenched bias of our mainstream media.
The Courier-Mail headline shown at the top of this article says it succintly. And in case you're not convinced, this was accompanied by the following introductory paragraph:
In the end it was all about children: giving the lunch or locking them up. As the voters in Townsville, Mackay and bayside Brisbane have shown, curbing youth crime is what matters most to Queenslanders.
There are many other signs of our class divisions, of course.
WE'LL NEVER BE ROYALS
There is another class above Australia's domestic haves and have-nots, and that is our imperial overlords: the British monarchy and our American military masters.
As exemplified by the recent desultory royal tour, completely paid for by the Australian taxpayer (even down to the purchase of the gifts bestowed by the royal couple on their lowly local attendants), Australia meekly submits itself to an archaic system of undemocratic, inherited privilege.
The only thing worth reporting about this visit is Senator Lidia Thorpe interrupting the mind-numbing proceedings long enough to shout, “Fuck the colony” and “You are not my King”, and demanding a Treaty.
The incident made front-page news around the world, but back in Oz, the news reports concerned themselves only with any embarrassment caused to the royals and called for Lidia’s head. The mere 200-odd years of dispossession of our First Nations' rightful sovereigns was conveniently overlooked, despite their 60,000 or so years of diligent stewardship of this vast continent.
As our name betokens, Independent Australia strongly advocates an independent Australia. One aspect of our quasi-feudal Constitutional set-up that sticks in our craw is that we are tied to a group of unelected foreigners who are deigned to be more important than every single person in this land, including our prime minister and governor-general, and towards whom we are all expected to tug a forelock. IA has, indeed, gotten into trouble at various times for not tugging it enough…
FOREIGN ADVENTURES
Finally – and most distressing of all – is the way Australia willingly sacrifices our youth in imperial foreign wars. First, in Great Britain’s and then in the United States’ foreign adventures. We even glorify a pointless ancient bloodbath in Turkey every year. It is called Anzac Day.
Not only do we pay in blood for the privilege to protect our Imperial masters, but we also pay in money. During WWI, to pay for our military arms, we signed a lend-lease agreement with Britain, which we didn’t pay off until WWII, when we signed another similar agreement with the United States, to pay for the next grand conflict.
They say war is a racket. They are right — and Australians are prime suckers.
There is no sign this will change any time soon, with Australia recently signing up to the AUKUS agreement to buy $348 billion of useless nuclear submarines and another fortune to buy second-rate fighter jets from America.
Because Australians are in apparent agreement that, although some of us are regarded as more important than others, we are all mere serfs when it comes to our betters — the foreigners who rule over us all.
No class system? On the contrary. Australians are serfs. It's just that some of us are considered lowlier, amongst ourselves. than some of our others.
You can follow, on Twitter/X, IA founder Dave Donovan @davrosz and managing editor Michelle Pini @vmp9.
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