1 post tagged “politics left right australia green”

I'm not sure how it happened. When I was in grade 2 at school, age 7, there was a state election going on.  Labor was in power, but was struggling.  The Liberal opposition leader came to the school for a policy statement and photo op, and our teacher encouraged us all to write a letter to him.  Mine basically said;

Thank you for coming to our school and good luck, but I hope the other guy wins!

I don't know why.  It may be some kind of rebel attitude that attached me to the perceived underdog (in first grade, I told the teacher I Quit when she wanted the class to sing some silly song. I sat it out).  My parents were both conservative.  My mum, now deceased, wasn't very political, but she always listened to conservative talk back radio, rallying against the gays and immigrants.  My dad was a bit of a swing voter, going for Labor or Liberal depending on who would do the most for him, but being a country boy also, he was generally conservative.

In late primary school I broke with a friend because of his racist attitude towards aboriginies.

In early high school, we were looking at the end of the Keating era in Australian politics - a Labor prime minister who declared Australia was in "the recession we had to have".  There was, understandably, a massive negative reaction towards him in the media and among the general public, but I challenged my Keating-bashing friends (following the positions of their parents) to tell me what, exactly, he had done wrong.

In late primary school we had the great political battle of my education.  There was a group of guys, dubbed the "Balcony Boys", owing to where they spent their lunch hours.  Most of them were pretty okay - bloke's blokes, but honest and true. But one of them,  a polish guy called Marick, was a Nazi.  Well his dad was a Nazi, a member of National Action, an Australian Ku Klux Klan style organization.  Allegedly, he had a collection of Nazi weapons and memorabilia, and went on protest marches though immigrant-heavy suburbs, calling for them all to be sent home.

In the parking lot, after school, 1996:

Marrick:  Commie!
Jimbob:  Fascist!
Marrick:  You don't know what that means! Don't use word when you don't know what they mean!

From that point on, I was proudly the school communist; even wore a fake Red Army cap to casuals day.  I even joined the Socialist Alliance, after meeting them in Rundle Mall before an anti-racism protest march.  I told them about the racism inherent in my highschool, they promised to put someone on the case, and I paid my $5 membership.  They called my house later that week, an got my mother, who later grilled me for joining "The Communists!".  But she was right - they were a bunch of totalitarian, top-down, Stalinist wankers.  Never heard from them again.

In university I decided upon anarchy, choosing deliberately not to vote in student elections, given that the choice was between the same ideologically pure art-student Stalinists who's parents would buy them a convertable the minute they graduated, and Young Liberal engineering students.  The student newspaper at Adelaide, On Dit, was charmingly progressive, and charmingly beige. I saw that nothing real was going on on campus, so I decided to keep out of it, lest I encourage the bastards. 

And that's where the story ends.  I vote Green, unless it matters, in which case I hold my nose and vote Labor.  Carpe dium.