[Pil-pc-oceania] SMH article "the Party's Over..."

[Robyn Francis]

This article is definitely a worth-while read - with some punchy quotable
quotes you might make use of - it's heartening to see mainstream media
publishing this
Ciao
Robyn


 Sydney Morning Herald

The party's over and Liberals will soon be history
Steve Biddulph 
November 29, 2007 

The Liberal Party is in trauma. The corporate sector is attempting to calm
its nerves, and even the victors in the Labor Party cannot quite believe the
seismic change in the landscape of power. But the ramifications of last
Saturday may be much greater than just one election won or lost. In a way
that seems unthinkable to us now, 2007 may mark the end of the Liberal Party
itself. It won't happen overnight, but just watch it happen.

We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we
even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But parties
spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and place.
In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour. A century
earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, politics was
aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of shopkeepers and
artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.

This is no longer the central tension in modern democracies. Centrist
governments cover all the bases, and conservative politics has begun to
wither away. This is a change that has come late to Australia. But social
evolution is now speeding up and even this alignment is becoming dated.

The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of
course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak
oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our
lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the only
four words you need to know.

Linked to this, but compounding it in frightening ways, is the imminent
demise of the United States economy. In fact the whisper, the subplot in
economist circles, was that this election was one to lose. That whoever
inherited Australia in 2007 inherited a coming economic collapse in
globalised trade that would suck Australia and much of the rest of the world
down with it. For two years now the best predictions have been that the
subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger
explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese
and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America sucking
in what it could not begin to pay for. The avalanche-like fall of US house
prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies worldwide,
and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we have lived in.
In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in collapse.
Labor is the right party to manage this. Despite the widespread belief after
years of cynical politics that politicians are all the same, Rudd and
Gillard are not in power for power's sake. I am willing to stake my 30 years
as a psychologist on this, but I think many observers have also come to this
conclusion. Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them, want to make
this country a better place for the people in it. In the coming times of
deprivation, they have the value systems that will be needed to care for the
sudden rise in poverty, stress, and need. They also have the unity.

So what will be the new polarity in future elections? It's the ecology,
stupid. The Greens will emerge as the new opposition, though this will take
probably two election cycles. By the 2010 election, 20 per cent will vote
Green, simply because peak oil and climate catastrophe will have proven them
right, and thinking people will see the need for austerity now for our
children's tomorrow. The Liberal Party will be lucky to attract 30 per cent,
which is the habitual, rusted-on portion of the community that thinks greed
is good. 

By 2014, we will have a struggle between a new left and right - Labor and
Green - and the issue will be simply how green, how to balance the need for
a much simpler and more communal kind of life, with the need to give people
comfort and amenity now. This issue will continue to define life for the
rest of this century.

Climate change will bring horrific costs this century unless a global effort
is rallied in a way that has never been done before to regulate our
gluttonous use of the air and water. Perhaps a billion lives are at risk,
let alone 2 to 3 billion refugees, as agriculture and water supplies
collapse across southern Asia and elsewhere, and producer countries, like
Australia, find they can barely feed themselves.

The big lie of Liberal supremacy was economic management. In fact, they knew
how to generate income, but not how to spend it. We could have been building
what Europe built in this past decade - superb hospitals, bullet trains,
schools and training centres, low cost public transport of luxurious
quality, magnificent public housing. We pissed it all away on tax giveaways
and consumer goods. On bloated homes that we will not be able to cool or
heat, or sell, and cars we won't be able to afford to drive. A party based
on self interest may evaporate along with our rivers and lakes, and have no
role to play in a world where we co-operate or die.

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist and author.
This story was found at:
http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/28/1196036982629.html