A matter of time
An early federal election either likely or not likely, depending on which papers you read.
Writing in Queensland, press gallery veteran Dennis Atkins lays out the case for a November 27 election, observing that the imminent passage of technical electoral law legislation will “put the final duck in place for Morrison to call an election from the next weekend, with an announcement on either Saturday, October 23 or the following day”. With New South Wales’ super Saturday of state by-elections sure to be set for December 4, this would be the only feasible date for an election this year, at a time when “the balance of risk tilts further and further towards a poll in 2021” – at least in Atkins’ assessment.
Conversely, James Morrow of the Daily Telegraph reckons the by-elections have “dramatically shrank (sic) the chances of an early federal election”. Unspecified “insiders” point to the risks of “election fatigue”, together with the hope that the government’s stocks might be boosted by the opening of national borders early next year and summer weather keeping case numbers within acceptable limits.
Other news:
• As noted in the post below, Andrew Constance will resign from his state seat of Bega to contest preselection for the corresponding federal seat of Gilmore, which Fiona Phillips gained for Labor in 2019 by a 2.6% margin after a 3.3% swing against the trend. Constance is particularly helpful for the Liberals in this seat due to the sympathetic media attention he received after nearly losing his Malua Bay house in the 2019/20 bushfires, which devolved into a public relations disaster for Scott Morrison. However, he will first have to face a local preselection ballot, which the state party is loath to deny its members after imposing Warren Mundine on them in 2019, only for him to lose the seat. He has a rival contender lined up in Paul Ell, an associate with law firm RMB Lawyers. The Guardian reports Ell has “strong support of moderates in the branch”, such that “some senior party sources say an intervention will be needed to ensure Constance is preselected”.
• There has been much speculation that Gladys Berejiklian could line up as the Liberal candidate for Warringah, which Tony Abbott lost to independent Zali Steggall in 2019. However, David Crowe of the Sydney Morning Herald reports a consensus that this will not be feasible until the Independent Commission Against Corruption brings down the findings of investigation into her, presumably under the assumption that such findings would be favourable, which it is not likely to do for several months. The Daily Telegraph reports the preselection front-runner is Jane Buncle, a Manly barrister and factional moderate who is “understood to believe climate change is real”, although a number of others are named as potentially competitive starters.
• The West Australian reports Liberal MP Melissa Price had no trouble seeing off a preselection challenge for her seat of Durack from Busselton councillor Jo Barrett-Lennard, winning the party ballot by 47 votes to three.
• Karen Grogan, national political coordinator with the United Workers Union and Left faction convener, has been officially confirmed to fill the South Australian Labor Senate vacancy caused by the death of Alex Gallacher on August 29.
• The Age/Herald have published Newspoll-style quarterly breakdowns of federal voting intention by state from their regular monthly Resolve Strategic polling. This might have been interesting if they had included results from the smaller states, but they are in fact only provided for New South Wales, Victoria and Queensland, breakdowns for which are already provided in the regular monthly release.
Bernard Collaery has secrecy ruling overturned ahead of trial over his alleged role in exposing Timor-Leste bugging scandal
SOHRAB AHMARI: The Political Economy of Dystopia. “What if dystopia is already here? What if our territory already conforms to maps drawn long ago by science-fiction authors? Could it be that we have crossed the invisible frontier that divides an ordinary place, an ordinary topos, from a dystopian realm?”
To tie all this together: It seems to me that we are living in a kind of Eden-Olympia writ large. Or rather, we are in a stage of transition—a shift between, on one hand, a vestigial world of still-embodied communities inhabited by political animals with historical memories and, on the other, the nightmarish utopia of Eden-Olympia (note that the name is both biblical and classical, suggesting a religious-mythic utopia, or non-place, which, when established in the real world is, of course, a dystopia). The paroxysms that so worry us—woke-ism, cancel culture, gender ideology, etc.—are symptoms of this historical passage.
The neoliberal class, the globalist class, the managerial class—whatever you wish to call it—is subjecting us to a kind of ratissage, raking us over to create a world that will serve its material interests even better than the semi-normality that prevailed just a few years ago.
Hence, for example, the bodily obsession and social distancing: the dream of a world without grime, without the scent and sweat and germs of other human beings—an aspiration as much for Eden-Olympia’s executives [from novelist J.G. Ballard’s Super-Cannes] as for our ruling class.
The laptop class generates value by manipulating information on screens, and it looks with bewilderment and contempt at two classes it sees as vestigial: small property holders and what I have called tangible workers. What to do with them? Ideally, all that kind of labor and value generation would be automated, relegated to drones, online retailers, and so on. But the intangibles class, or the laptop class, still needs tangible labor: Silicon Valley, as the author Michael Lind has pointed out, can’t do all it does without massive storage and power-generation facilities spread across the heartland of the United States and maintained by the working class, by tangible labor.
Eden-Olympia needs farmers and restaurants and high-end escorts and private security. Now enter Covid-19: a real crisis, but also what a tremendous opportunity to squeeze the tangibles class, to discipline it, to transfer as much of its livelihood as possible to virtual realms controlled by the laptop class—an incredible opportunity for an upward transfer of wealth. And, of course, the added benefit of social distancing: literally enacting distance between people and classes, a separation symbolized by the medical hijab and the Plexiglas barrier. Why won’t they let the virus go? Why won’t they let us move on? Because class war is carried out in many ways.
Hence, too, the war against historical memory. The bringing about of Eden-Olympia demands ahistoricity. People who have historical memory have heroes, they have romantic ideals, they have authorities that guide their individual consciences, they have national pride. Family and community form the warp and weft of their characters. People who don’t have such things make the perfect corporate subjects, be they the ones who occupy the commanding heights or the ones who toil on the peripheries.
Related: “Cheers Up, Liberals. You Have the America You Wanted,”Ross Douthat writes in the New York Times.
He’s sitting in a gently lit living room, wearing a blue, button-down shirt, a pullover sweater, and a small smile. The pitch of his voice is soft; the words are reflective, self-critical.
“They saw your greatest strength is your greatest weakness,” he begins. “I’m living proof of that. I can rub people the wrong way…or talk when I should listen, I own that.” He then explains that he’s fought for a longer school day, tougher gun laws, and a higher minimum wage, before concluding “I may not always get it right; but when it comes to fighting for Chicago, and Chicago’s future—no one’s going to fight harder.” (You can see the whole ad here. - The words are coming from Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel)
REVIEW: The Many Saints of Newark.
In The Many Saints of Newark, we see the mob boss on whom Tony modeled himself—his uncle, Dickie Moltisanti (“many saints”)—behave in much the same fashion. But for some odd reason, the movie’s creative team—Chase, his cowriter Lawrence Konner, and director Alan Taylor—seem to want us to excuse Dickie’s behavior. Dickie stumbles into his evil and is torn up about it, as though that makes a difference. What’s more, they cast Alessandro Nivola in the part, and while Nivola is a fine actor, he comes across as a matinee idol who wandered in from another kind of picture entirely.
Everything that’s good about The Many Saints of Newark has little to do with the story, plot, or themes. It looks like a million bucks. The set design, costumes, and rendering of late-1960s/early-1970s New Jersey are all sumptuous and seductive. Many Saints is a beautiful thing to look at, which is something The Sopranos never was—it was far too exact about the sociological details of the dull suburban lives Tony and his confrères were living to glamorize or beautify them. The Many Saints of Newark makes you wish you could live in Newark for a while, which, trust me, you didn’t even then.
One of John Lindsay’s reelection commercials in 1969 was basically, “Sure, I really screwed up, but vote for me anyhow — at least I didn’t transform the Fun City into Newark!”