On the 22nd of March 1921 Percy Brookfield was a passenger on a train from Broken Hill to Adelaide when a crazed gunman, Koorman Tomayoff, began firing indiscriminately at passengers.

The train had stopped at Riverton in South Australia’s Mid-North for a refreshment break when Tomayoff began firing at the crowded refreshment rooms. Brookfield, who was the NSW Member of Parliament for the Broken Hill based seat of Sturt, immediately went out onto the platform and confronted Tomayoff. Tomayoff’s fire immediately focussed on Brookfield, and away from the public allowing off duty policeman, Constable Ed Kinsella, the opportunity to tackle Tomayoff from behind while the gunman’s attention was on the Silver City MP.

Kinsella wrestled Tomayoff to the ground and effected an arrest, but by that stage Brookfield was fatally wounded by the bullets from Tomayoff’s gun. He died shortly after.

By any account it was an act of extraordinary bravery, but Percy Brookfield was a very brave man. He had shown that in the previous decades when, as a miner, he had organised with the hard rock miner’s union, the Amalgamated Miners Association. He had campaigned for safer mines, leading to the Chapman Commission that formally recognised silicosis and led to compensation for affected miners through the Dust Diseases Tribunal.

Brookfield campaigned against conscription during World War One, a conflict where 100,000 Australians lost their lives out of a population of just under five million. One in fifty Australians died in a war over the imperial ambitions of European powers. Brookfield was wise enough to see that it was war that would not benefit working Australians. He was fined 700 Pounds, over five times the basic annual wage for the time, and gaoled for his trouble.

Organising was not easy. The Broken Hill Miners were locked out more than once, and were badly defeated in 1892 and 1909. Brookfield learnt from these defeats and joined the local Labor Electoral Leagues, the nascent Australian Labor Party. He also began organising for his union, the Amalgamated Miners Association.

The Amalgamated Miners Association had been a cautious union under the leadership of John Cann, who became the local state Labor MP, but under the more radical leadership of those affiliated with the Broken Hill Socialist League the union had led the Barrier Trades and Labour Council in organising at the Broken Hill Proprietary Company’s mines, often to the chagrin of Cann, who had ensconced himself in the Labor leadership under Jim McGowan and Bill Holman.

Cann ratted on the ALP during the 1916 conscription split, and then bravely retired to become NSW Railways Commissioner. Brookfield immediately won ALP preselection for the subsequent byelection and went on to comfortable win the state seat of Sturt at the general election that followed.

Immediately it was obvious that here was no time-serving member. He worked on a report for the NSW Trades and Labour Council on the gaoling Industrial Workers of the World for their role in the great railway strike of 1917. He spoke in parliament in support of IWW members jailed, and in praise of the Bolshevik revolution.

Brookfield the quit the ALP because of the usual shit, the ALP’s soft support for entrenching capitalism as highlighted by Vere Gordon Childe in the following decade. Running as an openly Socialist candidate he won at the 1920 election. His support for the Storey led ALP government gave them the barest of majorities in the Legislative Assembly. He was using this leverage to improve conditions for miners when he was tragically shot.

While a brave man, a great fighter for worker’s rights, and a socialist died that afternoon on the Riverton Railway Station platform his ideas didn’t die. The Dust Diseases Tribunal continues to this day. Shortly after his death the miners at Broken Hill won a union only deal with the BHP, which extended to the entire town by the mid-1920s. The conditions established for underground miners continued, even into the age of The System™ and the wind back of workplace rights1.

105 years after Percy Brookfield gave his life for the community the party he was a member of adopts a supine position towards an aggressive megalomaniac, in the Trump administration, and the genocidal state, Isreal. A party that supports corporations such as Palantir, who seek to dismantle democracy. A party that is there to justify the worst excesses of the System™.

Lest we forget those who fought against capitalism, for those of us who work owe them much. If only we could have members of parliaments with such courage today.

*Yes! Yes! I know. Substack the Tenth and Substack the Twelfth are to be published, eventually.

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“By theft and murder they took the land
Now everywhere the walls rise up at their command”

- The World Turned Upside Down Leon Rosselson1

Umberto Eco’s debut novel The Name of The Rose is a cracking murder mystery set in a fourteenth century Benedictine monastery, which is an unlikely setting for what became a literary sensation, being remade as theatre, as a radio play and a popular Hollywood movie.

But before we got Sean Connery and Christian Slater on film sets looking meaningfully at medieval manuscripts we had this book that operates on more levels than Rune Factory 3. It is a detective story, an introduction to medieval church politics, a series of literary and historical in-jokes, an historical narrative, a travel journal, a flashback story, a deconstruction of monastic life; there are so many ways to catalogue this volume.

Most importantly it is a book about signs. It is a study in semiotics, how signs give us information; enhancing as well as obscuring reality, often at the same time. It is telling that the chief protagonist is a library.

Semiotics (which I thought was the study of interstate trucking) is important, as it underpins the insidious side of something we must name.

From the neolithic human society has used signs to convey ideas and information; to trade, boast, apologise, empathise, strengthen, scare, uplift, worry, hurt and dismay. Many of these signs coalesced into alphabets and gave us the written word, which you’re wading through now. But this Substack is not about how these squiggly lines came about, or where the seemingly countless number of pictograms, lights, symbols, brands or coded pictures came from, but more how they’re used. How they’re used towards a particular end.

The seamless strength of Neoliberalism is its apparent inviolability, it’s self ordained naturalness. Deconstructing it is a nightmare because many of its central themes are entwined in the daily existence of most in the west. Core Maslow concepts such as shelter, food, safety and security have become neoliberal torture chambers for most of the world’s population. It is a violation of humanity that engulfs most of us on a treadmill that would have been unthinkable to the unconscious architects of the post World War Two consensus.

Neoliberalism emerged as a radical departure from the government intervention of capitalism in the second half the twentieth century. It was a purist belief in the efficiency of markets in allocating resources and was driven by the economic philosophy of Freidrich Heyek and Ludwig von Mises splitting from the Walter Lippmann Colloquium to form the Mont Pelerin Society currently based in (where else) Lubbock, Texas.

Stay with me here…

The central ethos is that all human activity should be driven by free markets, with the state only to function to abolish barriers to market entry. Their work provided a fig leaf to cover what laissez faire economics always does; allow the wealthy powerful to exploit and pillage from the economically weak. Markets have powerful and weak participants. The weak are always exploited by the powerful in a market if there is no protection for them. Wealthy people from around the world saw how good this was for them and poured money into those organisations, like the Mont Pelerin Society, to advance the neoliberal agenda. Other organisations included academic institutions, media, political parties, civic groups, celebrities; all with the agenda to push back the gains of the western post-war middle and working classes, and post-colonial societies, and promote the interests of corporations and their wealthy owners and shareholders.

That last par is a shining example of why neoliberalism has been so hard to oppose, even while it’s destroying the living standards, environment and mental health of most in the west and many in the second and third worlds. If you made it through I’m proud of you. The par reads like an eighties Trotskyite newspaper. Neoliberalism is hard to oppose because its nature is fundamentally interminably dull. It’s inhuman in its sociopathic reach.

Even the mention of its name gets eyes glazed over. People think you’re talking about the Liberal Party, or the idea of liberals as progressives, or just another word with ‘ism’ at the end. All boring things end with ‘ism’.

And that eye glazing effect is not an accident, or a design flaw. It’s an integral part of neoliberal strategy and appeal to the economically powerful. How can you defeat something people can’t even name?

Australians know neoliberalism is there, it just doesn’t have a popular name. It’s had some euphemisms in the past; ‘economic rationalism’, ‘debt reduction’, ‘responsible economic management’ and, my favourite, ‘tightening the belt’. But after forty years of privatisation, downsizing, ‘cutting red tape’, cutting tariffs, ‘facing the real world’, budget cuts, welfare cuts, cuts to mental health, cuts to hospitals, decaying infrastructure, militarised policing of dissent, family businesses swallowed up by corporations, marketisation of public assets, forcing people onto digital platforms, turning art and sport into a business, big fish eating the little fish, the relentless demand for Cost Benefit Analysis for every aspect of human endeavour…we are done.

We have been browbeaten into submission by this relentless march of austerity for the many, and profit for the few.

Misreadings of Darwin promoted the ‘survival of the fittest’ idea, but correlation is not causation. Anyone with half a grasp of evolution knows that nature is largely symbiotic, not a zero-sum game with a leading futures index. Neoliberalism – under its many names - was sold as short term pain for long term gain, but the short-term pain just accumulated and accumulated and in the long term we’re all dead.

It is so sublimely effective that there is even an acronym that sums up its external philosophy; TINA, which stands for There Is No Alternative. For this is how neoliberalism has been forced upon us.

And forced it was. It has never been popular, but there has been no cogent political opposition because its core values, like the black hole that allegedly sits at the centre of our galaxy, is hidden behind an amorphous wall of boring. It’s true agenda, enriching the corporate sector at the expense of the household sector, is seldom explicitly expressed.

It is why it was easy to throw the dust in our eyes. People got upset about greenies, refugees, dole bludgers, petty criminals because the media showed them as the enemy. The media that promoted neoliberalism as the ‘sensible’ way forward. The greatest enemies of us all where the three largest media proprietors in Australia at the end of the twentieth century; Kerry Packer, Kerry Stokes and, of course, our old friend, Rupert Murdoch.

From Malcolm Fraser onwards every one of our political ‘leaders’ went on bended knee to the media proprietors and largely embraced their neoliberal agenda2.

By the time the old media monopolies started falling apart, about 10-15 years ago, it was too late. This huge amorphous philosophical muck had seeped into every aspect of Australian life, from footy to forests, from hospitals to hotels. Fraser started with the wages freeze and the first secondary boycott laws, but Hawke really kicked the tin along with his treasurer Keating privatising Qantas and the Commonwealth Bank and giving capital gains discounts on investment properties and negative gearing alongside a host of corporate friendly policies. Under Howard the gloves came off and we went full Hayek on anything that didn’t threaten the National Party’s base (we kept all the regional boondoggles like the Diesel Fuel Rebate and the National Vegetation Initiative). Welfare was treated as a social misdemeanour while public housing became free range psychiatric institutions.

Rudd was elected when Howard went after the floor price of labour, but Rudd and his employment minister, Gillard, did little to help workers organise and Gillard threw public vocational training to the private sector and watched a thousand rorts bloom and credentialism (another ‘ism’!) become a commodity we had to buy just to work; the Cert II in Shitkicking, the RSA, the police check, the Working with Children Check, the HR License; all with private providers ready to collect - part and parcel of modern life’s humiliations. Like having to buy your own PPE.

We never voted for any of this. There was not one election, even the 2013 election that gave us Tony Abbott, where expanding corporate power and wealth was explicitly expressed as a policy by any party. Yet that is what we got, from every government elected since 1975. The power for wealth to be redistributed from households to corporations by forcing us into markets that had structural power imbalances. Neoliberalism.

But what if we gave it another name? What if we gave it a handle that wasn’t so slippery. What if we could deconstruct neoliberalism and understand what its essence is, and market that back to people, so it can be understood.

The overarching strategy of neoliberalism is the belief in the commodification of everything. Everything has a price.

Tactically this can be obtained through creating markets for every aspect of human existence. Markets which must be free from government intervention. Owners of capital – the wealthy – become very powerful in these markets; especially the markets for labour, which is one of the few pieces of capital most of us have.

What the fuck has all this got to do with a bunch of monks killing each other in fourteenth century Italy? Not a great deal in the literal sense, but a lot when we understand what sig. Eco was doing with his clever little tome.

Markets are full of signifiers. They work like jargon. One of the more obvious is currency. The ubiquitous $.

If you want one signifier for the embrace of neoliberalism it is the brand. It is no accident that neoliberalism’s rise began when people started becoming personal billboards for fashion labels.

The brand is a signifier of a consumable product or service. Brands sell fulfillment by consumption. Existence made by embracing the essential brand.

What Brand (the capital B is deliberate) would capture the essence of neoliberalism?

The System™

Australia is a capitalist country. The System™ inveigles every aspect of human existence in a capitalist country.

The System™ uses signs as both an incentive and a disciplinary punishment. The discipline is important, because it disallows any dissent from the course of The System ™.

In The System™ you only exist as a source of financial return for the economically powerful. You must have a positive return on your Cost Benefit Analysis to justify your existence. If you don’t pay your rent to the increasingly corporatised and platform-based landlord’s agent you are homeless. Under The System™ you only exist as a valid citizen if you are a consumer or an exploiter, with many of us being both to various degrees, but with the vast, vast majority being exploited.

The Marxists already know that, but they’re all either boring or crazy, right? See how seamlessly The System™ defends itself and neutralises external threat? It acts like a living organism, which in many ways it is.

We’re entering the greatest economic shock since, maybe worse than, September 1929, and there were more words published about Kyle Fucking Sandilands than the Straits of Hormuz last week. The System™ sets up these mental trapdoors that open up under ideas that are an external threat to its relentless project of extracting stupid amounts of return on its ever expanding capital. All the while destroying much that is good about society, the environment and human existence.

How do you oppose this philosophical dreadnaught?

Well, you name it for starters. Then, what the other signs are hiding starts to make sense.

I’m not happy with this lumbering 2000 word tome, but I’ve been bouncing it around for two weeks now and hopefully it’s the start of a wider conversation where we can learn something useful. Gah! Well done if you made it this far!

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- Money Changes Everything (Tom Gray)

When I’m paying for life’s necessities at Coles and I’m asked by the overworked and underpaid checkout operator if I have Flybuys I usually reply, “Thanks anyway, but I don’t want to buy any flies.”

It’s cruel to deliver lame and specious humour towards someone chained to a workstation - like those people who think it’s okay to flirt with the barista or earbash taxi drivers with their latest cooker theory - but I’m trying to hold onto some dignity here by taking the piss, via the roundabout way of subverting the dominant paradigm with bad humour. I seek to mock that which mocks me.

In financial year 2023, the latest year I could find reliable figures for, Coles made $220 million from an outfit called Coles 360. Coles 360 is Coles’ “media” arm. What is the product that Coles 360 sells? Well, if you shop at Coles, it’s you.

You can’t move in Coles without Flybuys being promoted at you. Data is collected from the approximately 9,000,000 Australians who are part of this personal information hoover (which Coles half owns alongside Wesfarmers, of Bunnings1 fame), but it’s not just Flybuys that’s the problem, you are also spied on through other measurement tools at the checkout, through POS and app use.

Coles uses this data to “partner” with companies to provide various ways to market directly to shoppers, and not just in the store. They will know how to trace you on social media, on YouTube, into your phone apps and even into your social life.

They’re not keeping this a secret. It’s all on the Coles 360 website. where they brag about pursuing you on the life’s philosophical journey of Awareness, Interest, Desire, Purchase.

It’s a variation on the old birth, school, work, death theme.

It’s also where the rubber hits the road on The System’s™ Satanic spawn, surveillance capitalism.

If you read the Ts and Cs (and who the hell does!) you’ll discover that you’ve given up your right to be a private citizen once you step into the realm of Flybuys. If this practice was being engaged by the Federal Government you’d reasonably assume you were living in an Orwellian dystopia2.

We all sort of know this in some vague human part of our brain but the convenience – and the Chinesium encrusted kitchenware – sucks us in until resistance is futile.

This is repeated across other platform economy-based retailers and service providers. Think of Uber, Google, Facebook, Waze, Everyday Rewards, Qantas Points, DoorDash, Spotify, Afterpay, Guzman Y Gomez, Substack and so on and so forth until as far as the eye can see. Why do you think these corporations – many of which have more control and influence over human life than sovereign states – spend so much effort pushing you toward app-based platforms? You’re giving yourself for free so they can sell you down the river.

Out of a total of 91 apps, I have 55 apps on my phone that are almost certainly collecting data from me. There are probably more than the 55 that measure to some degree my phone use. 87% of all Australians, including kids, have a “smart” phone. We’re second only to South Korea in population percentage use of smart phones, so we are probably one the most surveyed populations in the world. We have none of the privacy protections afforded in the EU or Fourth Amendment protections afforded by the US Constitution.

While data about our behaviour is being monetised by corporations, I’d hazard a guess that very few Australians are aware of this. We never voted for it to be okay. At no stage did we give informed consent about our lifestyles being used as an earner by third parties, but here we are.

There was a recommendation from the Privacy Commissioner for the Albanese Government to act on consumer privacy back in 2023 but, ho ho, Albo’s not here to upset Woolworths, is he? And I doubt the economically beaten population cares enough to shift votes on it. And where would their vote go? Would the Coalition or One Nation step in to stop citizens from the household sector getting economically abused? I doubt it. The Greens probably would, but, hey, they’re crazy doncherknow.

It is also a passing observation that Coles’ digital monitoring of consumer behaviour was followed by a significant increase in retail prices; a major driver of inflation and the accompanying cost-of-living crisis and the Reserve Bank’s socially abusive monetary policy. A cynical person might think they learnt from Flybuys that retail goods were a lot less price sensitive than supposed. Especially when the big increases have been for the long-life consumer discretionary items: Think of decent dairy, Shampoo or premium dog food.

Coles made A$1.08 billion in profits last year, which equates to about $120 from every Flybuys victim. Despite giving you the casual discounts and the Chinesium encrusted kitchenware, Coles are still making money out of you, and you’re paying them for the privilege. And, under Australia’s unfettered surveillance capitalism environment, it’s only going to get worse. Well done!

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—

* Yes, I know. Substacks eight and ten are experiencing elephantine gestation periods.

Look at the law man 
beating up the wrong guy
I wonder if he’ll ever know
He’s in the best selling show

David Bowie - 'Life On Mars'

The recent police riots in Sydney were a brutal and bloody affair. As confronting and distressing as the images are, they are not a unique outlier in how the state handles dissent in this raked over British colony.

Nothing that happened during the visit of the Israeli President will be new to anyone who grew up in the Queensland of Joh Bjielke-Petersen. People such as Peter Beattie, who went on to become Premier of Queensland, before rising to higher offices, such as President of the National Rugby League, experienced first-hand extreme police violence while he was protesting against the 1971 Springbok tour.

There is a photo, which has been Google wiped – in its role as the Ministry of Information - featuring Peter Beattie attending an anti-apartheid rally1. That rally featured 400 protesters facing off against 500 police; it turned violent, with police using batons and fists to disperse the protest. Beattie, along with many others, was hospitalised. Witnesses reported a female protester being held by two officers while a third repeatedly punched her.

While that happened early in Joh’s premiership it was not an outlier. Protests against uranium mining, for land rights and even against police brutality were met in Queensland with…police brutality. A special kind of Queensland police brutality that was public, state sanctioned and largely popular with the electorate.

The repression of Joh’s Queensland culminated in the 1977 ban on any more than five people assembling without a permit. And the permit? Joh said there was no point in applying for one as they wouldn’t be granted. “The days of street marches are over,” he declared.

This didn’t stop Queensland secretary of the Australian Journalists Association, and Brisbane Sun journalist, Norm Harriden taking his family to the street in defiance of the ban. It made good media, but the Queensland truncheons kept cracking the protester’s heads, and for the most part people shrugged and moved on.

Joh’s Queensland became the punchline to bad jokes for progressives and libertarians alike, but nothing changed until the Goss Government came to power and introduced the Peaceful Assembly Laws, following recommendations from the Fitzgerald Royal Commission into police corruption in Queensland.

While the example of Joh is obvious, and is easy to point to, it is not in and of itself an outlier. From the Bushranging Acts of the early colonies, to massacres like Myall Creek, to the Eureka Stockade, through the Masters and Servants Acts, to the Jerilderie Letter; colonial Australia has daily examples of how Trooper and then Police violence is used at the behest of the powerful – the squattocracy, mining and shipping interests – against those resisting that power, or seeking justice.

This continued jauntily along into the twentieth century with police action against the IWW, against early indigenous politicisation, against striking workers. Teenager Norman Brown was shot by police at Rothbury on December 16, 1929 when NSW Police opened fire on unarmed and locked out coal miners protesting the arrival of scab labour.

Police used violence against the unemployed during the depression in every Australian state, especially when the unemployed attempted to organise.

Unprovoked police violence against citizens continued after World War II, where it fell largely on marginalised groups, indigenous Australians, migrants, homosexuals. Much of this violence never saw the light of day, and was accompanied by the use of the Summary Offences Act in NSW and its equivalents interstate.

In Adelaide three members of the SA Police Vice Squad; Francis John Cawley, Michael Kenneth Clayton, and Brian Edwin Hudson were implicated in the death of university lecturer George Duncan in 1972. It was an old trope of poofter bashing on a well known Adelaide beat. None were convicted.

Through the Vietnam protests of the sixties and on to the Uranium and anti-Fraser protests of the seventies the bashing, illegal arrests and baton charges continued. Public resistance to police violence – at the Bathurst bike races and the Star Hotel in Newcastle – gave the NSW police the opportunity to form the Tactical Response Group, quickly followed by equivalents in all Australian states, thus ushering in the militarisation of the various Australian police services.

On September 11 2000 the Bracks Government hosted the World Economic Forum at Southbank in Melbourne. I witnessed firsthand at this event the training officers had received in use of force against non-resisting, nonviolent protesters. From the removal of name tags, summary beatings and excruciating nerve holds. It was explicit, painful and it worked a treat.

In all the sorry history of the previous 200 years one of the few moments when police power was receded and public rights protected was under NSW Attorney General Frank Walker. Wran’s law man was one of the few Attorneys General to push back against police violence and intransigence; abolishing the Summary Offences Act, and changing bail laws and oversight of police services.

Much of this work has been undone over the last thirty years, with Premier Minns being just another in a long line of Premiers who have taken their orders from the Police (and the Daily Telegraph). This is true for every other Australian state in the last thirty years. In Victoria you’d probably throw the Police Association in as well as one of the drivers of public policy.

The history of Australia is not one of freedom or liberty. The Australian Constitution is not a document of rights and liberties. It is largely a commercial document, covering the integration of markets and taxation systems across six colonies. There is no explicit freedom guaranteed by the constitution, although generous interpretation by members if the High Court established some precedent of freedom of political expression, notably in the Theophanous decision. Subsequently the High Court backtracked on that and said such freedoms of political expression were, in fact, invalid.

Your rights of association, even your rights to vote, are all covered by parliamentary legislation and can be repealed without referenda.

In the bright optimism of postwar Australia, Ben Chifley’s Attorney General, Herbert Vere “Doc” Evatt had proposed protections for the “four freedoms” as outlined by US President Franklin Roosevelt; Freedom of Speech and Expression, Freedom of Worship, Freedom from Want, and Freedom from Fear. But the 1949 election came along, the Menzies Government was elected, and that was the end of that. While a socialist government sought to enshrine our freedoms, a liberal one ensured they were never there to begin with.

And while Franklin Delano had not just the US Constitution behind him, he also had over 150 years of a culture of rights and freedoms enshrined in that constitution. Rights and Freedoms that many Australians, even today, would baulk at. We don’t have the culture of the citizen, we are subjects of the Crown, and we are dependent upon the pleasure or otherwise of his Majesty King Charles III. And his representatives, if they so choose, can treat us in such ways as the law affords, and without process, in such ways as the law prohibits; unless you’ve got the resources, including time and willpower, to resist such transgressions.

One who did was Danny Lim2 who, after a violent assault by police, won his judicial case against the NSW Police, and the right to call Tony Abbot a cunt in public. Resistance is not futile.

The police riots in Sydney in February 2026 are not signs that we are sliding into some fascist abyss, we have always had this authoritarian streak in Australian society. Dissent, which has always been the hallmark of liberal democracy, has never been too well received in Australia. It’s never been very popular. Of course it is necessary, and in a lot of cases dissent has mitigated great evil and resisted oppression, but it has, at best, been suffered rather than celebrated as a right.

What the NSW Police Force did last week is unsurprising. It’s what they do. It’s what all Australian police forces do. It’s what they’ve always done. It’s just showing us which side the state is on. Are we surprised that governments have this silent, implied, endorsement of the state of Israel over the people of Gaza? Anyone who holds an umbrella over a war criminal has made a decision, and that decision is to side with the powerful against the weak.

It’s what any bully does when they use force. They get a kick that they can physically control another being. They have taken themselves to a higher level. Our lived experience of Attorney General Frank Walker and Danny Lim shows this need not always be the case. For most bullies are cowards, and cowards, ultimately, are weak3

.

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* I know, Substack the eighth is in gestation, be patient.

My poems

Aren’t meant
For ordinarv people
For ordinary people
Don’t want
My poems.
Ordinary people are
Already perfect.
My poems are purgatives
For extraordinary people
Stupefied by education
people
To bring them up to the level of ordinary people
Who know too much to read
And so do not need
My poems.

- Harry Hooton

Poetry is often, and fairly, derided as self-indulgent, navel gazing bullshit. Harry Hooton’s My Poems, above, indicates some of the problem.

Like all the best artists Hooton is largely obscure. A member of the IWW (like Vere Gordon-Childe discussed in a previous Substack, are you seeing a pattern here?), he wrote and published poetry, created literary journals and corresponded with leading avant guarde writers of the mid-twentieth century including Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Tuli Kupferberg. But he had a day job as a mail sorter (like Charles Bukowski) at the GPO in Sydney, when GPO’s did GPO stuff, not acting as a haven for the super wealthy.

He stole a packet of tobacco in Maitland during the depression and was convicted for Committing Unarmed Robbery. From this experience he published a chap book of poems entitled Things You See When You Haven’t Got A Gun. He had a sense of humour. The literary establishment hated him. Max Harris – most famous for falling for the Ern Malley hoax - dismissed him: “Our anarchist bull careers madly through his intellectual fog.”

But Hooton persisted; with a modernist worldview and a belief that all poetry should be didactic. His philosophy was humanity should have power over machines, but not each other. An idea very relevant to an age of the algorithm and AI.

Recently the party of progress introduced hate speech laws that may severely curtail an already limited free speech in Australia. In that environment the empty halls of the mansion of poetry may be a refuge for those who seek a didactic expression that may offend the dominant paradigm. It could be a literary version of WhatsApp.

Desi Freeman may well be a leading Australian poet by now. Who would know?

Many years ago I started a monthly poetry reading at a pub in the Blue Mountains; I’ll burn in a special part of hell for that. I haven’t had much to do with the Poetry in the Pub for two decades, but the same people, if they’re not dead yet, go along and read their self-indulgent confessionals to each other every month, like a public AA meeting in licensed premises. It’s a wonder they don’t have each reader begin with “My name is Desi, and I’m a poet…”

Despite its arcane and obtuse nature, or maybe because of it, there are good Australian poets and good Australian poems. Like a frangipani popping up as a weed in the garden, they are not something many people seek but are a delight when found.

I found the following on an economics website. One of those accessible shit sheets that has predicted twenty-two of the last three recessions. In the comments section there was an untitled poem by a user with the nickname nineofclubs. I present it verbatim. I think Mr Hooton would have liked it:

In the rarefied air of the Globalist Club
the captains of industry spoke
of the shortage of skills faced by businesses, which
would surely be sending them broke.

One old exec rumbled, “now, these local yobs
have no bloody skills that we need,
they’re all ignorant pills, insufferable dills!
...the others completely agreed

The Chambers of Commerce were of the same mind,
industry was doomed to sure failure
“The problem is clear, there’s just no talent here
there’s no drive, brains or go in Australia”

Then someone opined, “I know just what we’ll do;
“We’ll call in a Government favour,
We’ll rethink immigration; migrants our salvation
We’ll import what we need in skilled labour.

So with great jubilation the papers announced
“Skills shortages soon to be eased”
And in corporate boardrooms from Sydney to Perth
The globalist crowd was well pleased

For to train up Australians in relevant trades
Would take far too long and cost heaps
Much quicker and easier to get what you need
From somewhere else where labour’s cheap

Young Khaija runs home through the ruins of Kabul,
At each checkpoint silently cursing
Bursting with great news, she’ll be leaving there soon
For Australia where she’ll practice nursing

Her family’s elated, they’ve got a new life
Away from the war’s stress and care
Afghanistan’s happy for her, but in truth
God knows they could use her skills there

While out at St Mary’s, Caitlyn lives in fear,
her son Will’s forever in strife
hangs out with the louts, left school at fifteen
hasn’t had a day’s work in his life

He used to try hard, looked for work every day
but now he’s caved in to dejection
ten knock-backs a week and he’s hammering ice
erasing the pain of rejection

In a country hotel on a bleak Tuesday night
John Smith sits alone and depressed
He’s in his mid 50’s, the factory’s closed
He’s lost his job like all the rest

They’re looking for welders at the new paper mill
And he wants that job more than he’ll mention
but he won’t get it, no; he’s not formally trained
So he fakes a bad back for a pension

While Sydney keeps growing through mass immigration
a cancer of bricks tiles and mortar
not much thought’s committed to shortages of
our species and topsoil and water.

And a government hungry for tax cuts soon blows
the funds to retrain our lost folk
the National Interest’s a thing of the past
To them it’s an outdated joke

In the rarefied air of the Globalist Club
the captains of industry spoke
of the high cost of welfare, which without a doubt
would shortly be driving them broke.

Some young mogul said, “Look, my tax bill’s too high,
bank-rolling this great bludging herd,
Aussies are too lazy, supporting them’s crazy”
the others all fully concurred…

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“Turning and turning in the widening gyre   
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world”

- William Butler Yeats The Second Coming

Somewhere in the first half of the sixth Century the roof of the grand basilica in what is today Wroxeter threatened to collapse. The citizens of what had been the large Romano-British Civitas of Viroconium Cornoviorum carefully dismantled the basilica and replaced it with a large two-story wooden structure built in imitation of the Roman style.

The Roman Legions left Britain over 120 years previously, still these people were clinging to a Romanised society in a Britain awash with warlords; Brythonic and Germanic, establishing petty kingdoms in the power vacuum left by Imperial Rome. There are other examples in London and Exeter of this continuation of Romano-British life as its wider social structures collapsed. Some villas lasted as late as the seventh Century, signifying an enclosed and protected elite not subject to the depredations of dark ages Britain.

The wooden Viroconium survived for another 70 or 80 years before the rising flood of Saxon, Jute and even Irish raiders sweeping back and forth across the upper Severn valley wiped away any written records. By the early eighth Century the Angles of the Wreocesaete had conquered the area and Roman culture was largely subsumed into the Germanic world of the Blood Feud and trial-by-ordeal.

In early December 2025 the roof of the M4 Motorway tunnel in Strathfield in Sydney’s Inner West threatened to collapse. The use of shotcrete to line the roof of the tunnel had been impacted by excessive “rebound” – basically the concrete didn’t stick to the surface.

The M4 East project was constructed by Leighton Constructions, Samsung and John Holland for the Sydney Motorway Corporation (SMC) – which is now 51% owned by Transurban following the SMC privatisation by the Berkijillian Government in 2018. SMC operates the M4 East tunnel under the brand WestConnex.

Shotcrete isn’t the biggest problem for the M4 East. The tunnel walls are made from precast concrete panels made of autoclaved aerated concrete (AAC). AAC is a cheap building material that has a lifespan of 30 years. Under the WestConnex agreement Sydney Motorway Corporation Transurban has the right to collect tolls for the next 42 years, effectively until the end of the infrastructure’s life span1.

AAC is used extensively in modern construction; from apartment blocks in Caringbah, to low-rise residences, aged care facilities, warehouses, high-rise apartments, and commercial buildings - usually supplied under the brand names CSR Hebel and Nasahi, but there are others.

The problem with AAC is its limited life span and its cheap, lightweight nature leaving it vulnerable to cracking or failure.

The poor quality of concrete used in Australian construction came to a head in December 2018 when cracking became exposed in the Opal residential tower in Olympic Park2. This, and another large residential block in Zetland, made the news after serious structural flaws emerged in the buildings.

The rational, if not ethical, response to discovering serious structural flaws in an expensive asset is to move the asset on to the market and thus avoid liability for its rectification. Which would indicate that there are many, many more examples of poor construction across Sydney if not Australia. Opal Tower is probably the tip of the iceberg.

A study by the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) found that approximately 70% of Australia’s 10.9 million homes suffer from major building defects. Think about that.

This has been allowed since the ALP’s Craig Knowles introduced private Building Certification in NSW in 1998 at the behest of the developer lobby, who had control of the Carr ALP Government (and every government since). Private certification was able to be used if projects were declared as State Significant Development by the Minister for Planning and Public Spaces following recommendations from the Housing Delivery Authority. Basically, any large housing development or infrastructure project.

With oversight of the construction sector by state institutions – local councils – annulled by the ALP, private certifiers are used to regulate large swathes of construction work. These private certifiers are dependent upon their livelihood by being amenable to their clients, resulting in a conflict of interest managed by, ho ho, the free market. Shoddy work was okayed because certifiers needed to make a buck, and those certifiers who were amenable to approval receiving industry support while those who were more stringent losing business.

While the Federal Government spent millions chasing socialists out of the CFMEU – only to have them replaced with criminals – at the same time state governments were deregulating oversight standards. The result is workplace conditions, incomes and construction standards have all fallen, while the only benefit has been to developers. There is no political response to this as the developers have complete hold on, not only both major political parties, but the media and have managed to obviate themselves from public opinion, with infrastructure failure typically being blamed on immigration, individuals and simple homespun racism.

There is no technical reason that we can’t build without using inferior concrete or technologies such as AAC purely to save money on construction costs. But there is a compelling economic reason, the developer has to maximise their return on their investment. In fact, that’s part of Federal Corporations Law. Public policy is driving infrastructure collapse.

This is all a symptom of something larger: societal collapse.

We should be able to recognise it because we’re living through it, but sometimes you can’t see you’re looking at a tree because your eyes are too close to the bark.

That societies collapse is inevitable; Western liberal democracy is no exception. Francis Fukiyama was wrong. We all know that. It’s how our society is collapsing that is of pressing issue and of more use to understand.

We could call it the collapse of western civilisation, but we have to remember Ghandi’s comment when asked what he thought of western civilisation: He replied that he thought “it would be a good idea”.

Western civilisation is constantly reinventing a culture that dates to the Greek city states. The same way Indian culture can trace itself back to Vedic cultures or Chinese can trace back to Huaxia culture. Its probably more useful to think of our society as part of western liberal democratic societies. These emerged with the enlightenment and concept of the nation state with defined borders (which largely followed the Treaty of Westphalia). This liberal democratic notion of sovereign government includes both colonial and post-colonial polities. As shorthand we can refer to it as ‘the West’.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, the West thought it had “won”. The Soviet collapse merely preceded liberal democracy by around fifty years.

The increasingly repressive, paternalistic and authoritarian nature of the West since the September 11 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre show that the foundations of liberal democracy are as cracked and faulty as a Sydney high rise. The horrific attacks in Bondi were used as an excuse in NSW to ram through yet more repressive legislation about public freedom, and most people cheered it on.

Just how far we are down the privatised crumbling motorway heading to totalitarianism is expressed in a reaction to Winston Churchill’s jingoistic assault on foreigners in Edwardian Britain. In response to his attempt to subvert the judicial system to allow executive authority over ‘aliens’, the MP Josiah Wedgewood wrote; “You know as well as I do that human life does not matter a rap in comparison with the death of ideas and the betrayal of English traditions.” By ‘English traditions’ Wedgewood meant the rights and freedoms afforded by liberal democracy. It is not a sentiment that would find much expression in the Cabinet of NSW Premier Chris Minns.

I imagine that in some post-Mandarin speaking matriculation class of the future three reasons for the decline of liberal democracy will be asked by the pedagogy. The formula answer will be militarism, neoliberalism and September 11.

It’s not the environmental response to climate change that threatens liberal democracy – for that threatens all life – but it is the economic response in the first world that threatens liberal democracy. The inequality of having the bulk of the population forced into substandard housing and paying higher prices for energy is just fertiliser for social disruption and reaction. Which is why the illiberal right – in Australia in the form of One Nation – will continue to grow the more neoliberalism squeezes the household sector.

Does a crack in the concrete of the M4 signify the end of days? Not in and of itself, but while it doesn’t mean we’ve arrived at a collapse of the liberal democratic West, you can probably see it from here.

It is not just the failure of our physical structures that illustrate the collapse of our society; it’s the rise of authoritarianism, the militarisation of law enforcement, the neoliberal assault on the working class, the lack of engagement with policy making by the population, and the undemocratic nature of managing dissent. And that list goes on.

We started with a modernist poet - poets that paradoxically believed in constant human progress and yet who lived in the looming shadow of different flavours of authoritarianism – so we may as well end with one:

“This is the way the world ends
Not with a bang but a whimper.”

-T.S. Eliot The Hollow Men

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Now largely forgotten by the national conscience, maybe because of his politics but also for the taboo of suicide in Australia in the Fifties; if he is remembered at all it is because of his work on early European and west Asian archaeology. Work he largely conducted in Britain between the world wars of the last century.

He was a giant in the modernist world of 20th century archeology, where he famously applied the historical theories of Marx to understanding the transition from the Neolithic to the Iron Age across a diverse range of prehistoric cultures.

Known as “the great synthesizer” his ideas are now less fashionable than they were, but he is still greatly respected to the point where he was one of the models for Indiana Jones - Harrison Ford’s character name checks him in one of the films.

Gordon Childe would have made an interesting film subject in his own right – a member of the Industrial Workers of the World who became the private secretary to Jack Storey, the Labor Premier of NSW who pulled the party back together after the conscription split of 1917. Gordon Childe was in Britain in 1921 - working for the NSW Government - when Storey tragically died. With the loss of his political patron, and the incoming Bertram Stevens Nationalist government deciding his services were no longer required, Gordon Childe set out on a course of autodidactic study and academic publishing that saw him end up as the Abercromby Professor of Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh.

But it is not Gordon Childe’s archaeology that is most relevant today. In 1923 he wrote a book, based upon his experiences of working for Storey and his involvement with the IWW and the labour movement, entitled How Labour Governs. This volume explains what Labor governments are, and is as true today as it was 100 years ago.

Recently we saw Tim Dunlop and Joel Jenkins from Bogan Intelligentsia railing against a perceived failure of progressive policy courage by the ALP.

Then there is the emergence of Labor Tribune*, which is a bright enough read but looks and feels like one of those Trot papers from the eighties. Selling Marxism in the party of Eddie Obeid is a tough gig and I can only have sympathy for their position, wish them well and encourage readers to subscribe, but they’re as close to state and federal government policy decision making as you or I.

Tim wants to save Labor, but what exactly is he saving?

This is not new. Apart from V. Gordon Childe, journalist Alan Ramsay made a career out of it under at Fairfax under Hawke and Keating, who made the ALP a neoliberal party of the business elite.

I like Tim and Joel - and loved Ramsay back in the day – but they all failed to understand what they were dealing with**, and to help them and their readers better cope with what is in front of us it is best to understand what the ALP is, what it isn’t, what it could be and what it probably will be.

From its first incarnations in the nineteenth century, the ALP has first and foremost been an electoral machine. In fact, there is little else it has consistently done in its lifetime.

As Gordon Childe says, “As the [Australian] Labour Party, starting with a band of inspired Socialists, degenerated into a vast machine for capturing political power, but did not know how to use that political power except for the profit of individuals.” Under this understanding Eddie Obeid, Ian Macdonald, Stephen Conroy and Graham Richardson are closer to the true nature of the ALP than John Curtin or Gough Whitlam.

It is not a socialist organization and, the Blackburn amendment aside, it never will be. The Socialist Objective***, which every ALP member signed up to uphold, was an embarrassment to the ALP for decades. They were never going to implement it after Chifley’s tilt at the banks – and they finally let it quietly die a few years ago, like a demented old uncle.

If it has been progressive it has been by accident, not design, driven by powerful personalities like Jack Lang, Gough Whitlam, Rex Connor or Frank Walker. It is individuals that have driven progressivism within the ALP, not the collective. Lang openly split the party, Whitlam effectively did, Connor brought down a government and Walker’s work has largely been undone by the privatization of public housing and the militarization of the police force.

That their reforms were driven by individuals is shown by how easily their work was undone by subsequent ministries. The ALP’s greatest reform was Medicare, but that had a false start as Medibank under Whitlam, and the Howard government so successfully undermined bulk billing that copayment is now grudgingly accepted by many. What government is in these days of liberal democratic collapse: managing disappointment.

That they are the exception rather than the rule is exemplified by the number of ex MPs and, unelected political staffers – the political class - that end up with corporate lobbyists or in some public/private busywork sinecure. That’s where the bulk of the apparatchiks end up.

The ALP could be a progressive organization, but it would need to decentralize its decision making and democratize and substantially increase its base. This is highly unlikely as Albanese has never been a democrat and never will be. From his earliest days in Young Labor he worked hard to get the numbers at whatever cost, stacking union delegations to conference with bemused students, shutting down or blocking Young Labor Associations that were unsympathetic to his rule. The organisations run by Albo have been totalitarian in their character. Decisions are made by a small elite and promulgated for the rank and file to adopt. Nothing has changed. It is why he is where he is.

Change would need to be driven by some great crisis – some Black Swan event (which doesn’t appear to be on the horizon). There is a school of historical thought, most recently promulgated by Thomas Picketty and studies from the London School of Economics, that progressive economic change occurs off the back of social crisis. In the absence of such crisis the status quo, with increasing economic repression, is a safe bet.

The ALP is currently captured by lobbyists, and has been at a state and federal level for all this century – conforming with Donald Horne’s thesis that, “Australia a lucky country run by second rate people.”

The ALP’s great technocratic skill is in what Guy Rundle calls managing the reproduction of a society it has no plans on transforming. The ALP will most likely continue to deliver a neoliberal agenda for the benefit of corporate lobbyists while marketing itself as the defender of ordinary household Australians. Continuing in the vein of the Hawke and Keating governments, which oversaw a massive transfer of wealth from the household sector to corporations. It is a marketing exercise, as was the Carr, Beattie, Bracks, and Rudd governments.

They wallpaper over their bastardry by tinkering at the edges of a few unconscionable and glaring injustices. But they will do nothing about Robodebt, AI, militarization, and offer small tokenistic efforts towards workplace rights and incomes, health, housing, indigenous justice and infrastructure. Nothing that will threaten the stream of funding from corporate donations.

In many ways the ALP is the true conservative party of Australian politics, seeking to support and expand the neoliberal status quo, whereas the various oppositions; the coalition, One Nation, the Greens – all seek a radical departure from current norms, in various directions and degrees of coherency.

Gordon Childe believed the Labor Party membership lost control when branches lost the ability to direct how elected representatives would vote. This was replaced by giving branches state conference delegates, and conference was alleged to be the supreme policy making organ of the ALP. People in NSW paying premium prices for privatized electricity may remember that a special conference of the ALP in 2008 directed the Iemma government to abandon plans to privatize electricity. Ho ho, just kidding. Not only could members no longer direct MPs on how to vote, even caucus can’t control ALP ministries.

It was a tragedy for left wing politics, for archaeology and humanity in this country when Vere Gordon Childe let gravity takes its toll at Blackheath that sunny Saturday afternoon. The chances of there ever being a progressive ALP probably went over the cliff with him.

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*The name owes something to the old CPA newspaper, surely? I’d like to think they have a subversive sense of humour as well.

**Their misunderstanding stems from the myth of the left-wing Gough, but that’s probably a Substack for another time.

*** “I support the democratic socialization of industry, production , commerce and exchange to the extent necessary to eliminate exploitation in these fields.” (That’s off the top of my head!)

Doyle’s Second Law of Seasons states that summer in Australia begins when one randomly hears, or hears reference to, Midnight Oil’s Power And The Passion.

From the moment Peter Gifford’s staccato bass line entered our lives on the eve of the March ’83 election, things were never going to be the same for “all the people, wasting away, in paradise”.

It was the second single from the album 10,9,8,7,6,5,4,3,2,1 Produced by Nick Launay – fresh from making The Birthday Party’s Junkyard vaguely listenable - and recorded at the end of the (northern) summer in London, just as Thatcherism was hitting top gear. The album was both harder and more eclectic than the straight up rock of the preceding Place Without A Postcard. Its use of synthesisers and sequencers could reasonably place it as an early example of Australian New Wave, but Oils fans would probably kill you for saying that. Which is fair and reasonable.

Power and The Passion was both a mirror of Australia in the early eighties, and a warning of what we would become.

Art is a fickle beast, and largely useless to most social utility, but there are times when it excels its worth and becomes essential. In the way that in revolutions today’s impossibility becomes tomorrow’s imperative, art can capture a social zeitgeist and transform into an organic movement.

In many ways art is like science in that regard. There are times when its conclusions are not economically neutral. In the late twentieth century there were two popular art forms, television, and popular music. In music and, to some degree, in public television, there were didactic productions that were scornful of capitalism and geopolitics, certainly in Australia. Artists like Redgum, Goanna and Do-Re-Mi were successful mainstream acts with content that was highly critical of conservative institutions, capitalism and militarism. There were plenty of others.

It’s a long bow to say that Midnight Oil formed the politics of Generation X in Australia, but it’s certain that they had a significant influence on it. In many respects they were first-among-equals of the socially active musicians in Australia in the early eighties, if for no other reason than the sheer size of their following.

For many Australians, certainly for most Gen X kids, a beginning to understanding the plight of Indigenous Australia began by introduction through the music of Midnight Oil. But that came later. Power and The Passion was about torching the Boomer dream of suburban Australia. An Australia that conformed to Donald Horne’s thesis that we were “A lucky Country run by second rate people”. A list of Fraser, Hawke and Keating’s cabinets will attest this.

We were all so excited in ’83 when Malcolm Fraser broke down in tears at the Wentworth Hotel to concede defeat to the Australian Labor Party led by Robert James Lee Hawke. Those of us informed by the politics of Midnight Oil were horrified by the Fraser Government and excited that we would return to the days of Gough, and continue with the arc of history’s march towards equality and progress.

What appeared as a dawn of promise was simply a hostile corporate takeover by the neoliberal acolytes of the Chicago School of Economics, led by Fraser’s secretary of the Treasury, John Stone, who made sure he had Hawke’s Treasurer, Paul Keating, inside the tent pissing out right through the eighties.

“‘cause Gough was tough until he hit the rough” made sure that Hawke toed the US line. We went wholesale down the American path: “Flat chat, Pine Gap, in every home a Big Mac and no one goes outback, that’s that.”

Power and the Passion warned us that this was the status quo. We heard dark stories emanating from Reagan’s America, Thatcher’s Britain and Rogernomics from New Zealand as we spent the rest of the eighties “going backwards”. We tasted it firsthand early on when Hawke volunteered Australia as a target for the US MX Missile tests. And who led the charge within the ALP to subvert Hawke’s toadying to the US? It would be Albanese, A. who had T Shirts printed featuring his Young Labor as “MX Busters”, drawing on the trope of the ubiquitous Ghostbusters imagery of the mid-eighties Anglosphere.

Later came the dole crackdowns, the privatisations (The Commonwealth Government once owned a bank!), university fees, the retreat from Commonwealth funding of housing and health, the consumption tax, and then the oil wars of the early nineties; the transfer of wealth from the housing sector to the corporate sector: neoliberalism pretty much. By this time the ALP and Liberal machine politicians had reduced elections to a legitimising tool for our own corporate oppression.

I didn’t leave the ALP during this time. The ALP left me.

We are never going to die on our feet in this country when debt slavery can keep us on our knees. And, as that great scion of Generation X – Anthony Albanese, the MX buster – reminds us, we are not going to take the hardest line. No, “you take what you get, and get what you please”.

Power and the Passion has drummer Rob Hirst’s fingerprints all over it. Credited also to singer – and later politician* - Peter Garrett and guitarist/synth player Jim Moginie, Hirst’s drum solo underpinned a lyric content that was more direct than the allusions used by Garrett in earlier and later works. The ideas here are concrete, direct and unambiguous. This is not a musician trying to write a political song, this is a political activist trying to be a musician.

I saw them live in 2017 – a wonderful gift from a good mate – and what struck me most was not the band, or its music, still as unashamedly political as ever; it was the audience that got me. The aging surfers and the ones that had been lucky in the Australian Housing racket. There were the fans, of course, but mostly it was fifty something surfies and those that might be labelled “middle class.” There weren’t any trots, or many bogans. It must’ve been a nightmare getting back over the Spit Bridge later that night.

Power and the Passion succeeds as contemporary commentary and stands up as a warning to future generations. It is both right and wrong. It showed patriarchal eighties Australia as it was, with the “underarms and football clubs”. It knew we had “too much of sunshine/too much of sky/It’s just enough to make you want to cry…”

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Power and the Passion

All the people
Wasting away
In paradise
Going backwards, once in a while
Taking your time, give it a try
What do you believe? what do you believe?
What do you believe is true?
Nothing they say makes a difference these days
Nothing they say they’ll do

You take all the trouble that you can afford
At least you won’t have time to be bored
O, the power and the passion,
O, the temper of the time
O, the power and the passion
Sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line

Sunburnt faces around, with skin so brown
Smiling, zinc cream and crowds
Sundays the beach never a cloud
Breathing eucalypt, pushing panel vans
Stuff and munch junk food
Laughing at the truth,
‘cause Gough was tough ‘til he hit the rough
Uncle Sam and John Bull were quite enough
Too much of sunshine
Too much of sky
It’s just enough to make you want to cry
O, the power and the passion,
O, the temper of the time
O, the power and the passion
Sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line

I see buildings, clothing the sky, in paradise
Sydney, nights are warm
Daytime telly, blue rinse dawn
Dad’s so bad he lives in the pub
It’s underarms and football clubs
Flat chat, Pine Gap, in every home a Big Mac
And no one goes outback, that’s that
You take what you get and get what you please
It’s better to die on your feet than to live on your knees
O, the power and the passion,
O, the temper of the time
O, the power and the passion
Sometimes you’ve got to take the hardest line

(Peter Garrett, Rob Hirst, Jim Moginie)

* I could drone on about Garret’s role as a useful Aspie for the NSW ALP early this century, or even his foray into the Nuclear Disarmament Party in the eighties, but who cares? He achieved nothing in either role as close as Midnight Oils curating of political values of Gen X Australians.

“I don’t like cricket, oh no
I love it! Oh yeah!”

10CC “Dreadlock Holiday”

I have always loved cricket more than cricket has loved me.

Which explains the once burning desire of youth becoming the bewildered disappointment of middle age. That’s how abusive relationships go.

Like all truly bad relationships I cannot let it go. Cricket is something more than sport; it has Laws, not rules. I have learned a lot from cricket over the years. It has formed part of me.

Cricket taught me the true meaning of Christmas, which is the day off before the Boxing Day Test starts.

The formalised form of the game has always reeked of Barker, Scotch College and the like. St Peters boys like the Chappell brothers (the grandsons of the most volatile Australian Cricket captain until, well, the Chappell brothers). It was white, middle class and entitled. Even down to the grass roots where some frustrated Dentist or the local postmaster ran the local association like a central Asian Soviet republic.

Cricket is very much an establishment game in Australia - not as pronounced as in England - but it can surprise you, especially in its support.

It was the game of Cranbrook and Brisbane Grammar, but it was also a game of suburban parks, inner city alleyways and country town back streets. Russell Drysdale’s laconic painting ‘The Cricketers’ captures it as the long Australian summer pastime.

The negotiated rules of any informal game of cricket – over the fence is six and out, if you nick it onto dad’s car your out, in the prickly pear is four runs but you have to get the ball out – was where you learnt innate justice. (I’d rather have no runs and YOU get the ball out of the prickly pear!) Is there anything fairer than the can’t-get-out-first-ball rule? It’s not in the MCC Laws of Cricket Seventh Edition, but you’ll find it in most backyard games.

Michael Clarke - the third most vilified Australian Cricket Captain after Graham Yallop and Kim Hughes* - was a state school kid; straight outta Liverpool. No wonder the Daily Telegraph hated him. It helped that his dad owned an indoor cricket centre when that was still a thing. (Is indoor cricket still a thing anywhere? Or has it gone the way of BlockBuster Home Video and Alan Jones?)

Despite these realities Australian Cricket was essentially very straight, as in the way the Sydney Diocese of the Anglican Church is very straight. When someone like Greg Matthews is presented as a wild iconoclast you know you are dealing with something innately conservative. Hard wired to resist the impetuous or the different.

Certainly, if David Boon and Merv Hughes had walked into a Darlinghurst leather bar in the early nineties they would have felt simultaneously at home and very uncomfortable. And they would have lost the moustaches first thing next morning.

Whatever was the state of contemporaneous cricket it always seemed to fall short of some harkened-back-to golden age. To stories of Victor Trumper hammering a century before lunch (then dying too young after giving us Rugby League to deal with); Jack Hobbs scoring centuries on pitches with pools of water on them, Arthur Coningham lighting a fire in the outfield at Blackpool on an English tour; or the witty heckling of Yabba, now commemorated after a fashion with an obtuse statue at the SCG. My old nan also loved cricket. When “Keithy” Miller was playing at the SCG she would chuck a sickie from her job at the match factory in Zetland and walk two blocks from her house in Paddington, armed with a few bottles of beer, and watch her hero from the Paddo Hill. Nostalgia is a very powerful thing. Emeritus ABC cricket commentator Alun MacGilvray wrote The Game Is Not The Same, and he was right for all the wrong reasons.

Kerry Packer changed it all. Kerry fucking Packer – who was no neoliberal, not for him the Ayn Rand self-made man, no! He was made when his dad, Sir Frank, saw his older brother Clyde walking down Oxford Street in a mumu in the seventies, and promptly disinherited him, thus handing Kerry his hard-earned dowry. (Christ, young James should have bought a mumu. And no, Kate Fischer doesn’t count.)

As with all things, the neoliberals took what was made available to a greedy and complacent ruling class by Malcolm Fraser and his Treasurer John Howard and ran with it. Cricket was no exception. Gone were the days when Bill Lawry had to pay his own tram fare to the ground, or learnt about being sacked as Captain by hearing it on the radio. James Sutherland oversaw the final transformation of association to corporation. With the former Ernst & Young accountant at the helm, the Australian Cricket Boa…ahem…Cricket Australia got down to the serious business of making money.

And, as with everything neoliberal, they knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Cricket became too expensive to be a working-class day out. And everything, from the ticketing, to the shit food, to the overpriced beer and tacky merchandise and the heavy-handed security, reduced over 150 years of First Class cricket to a bunch of middle class yobboes chanting Aussie! Aussie! Aussie! Oi! Oi! Oi!

I am ancient enough to remember before it went downhill. When blokes (and they were blokes) wheeled in wheelbarrows full of long necks and ice to the SCG. People brought eskies stuffed with beer. It was your classic Australian alco-riot, like the Bathurst 1000 or the Bong Bong races. But now, with our militarised police and the ever-present private security rent-a-cops, Yabba and my Nan would be turfed out before drinks on day one.

The Leviathan that Australian Cricket became in the late nineties struck me as ugly. The big bats, the big boofheads like Carl Rackemann and Matthew Hayden. Tubby Taylor flogging air conditioning on the telly. The pastel ties and television sets. It was as beige as the New Zealand one day uniform.

The crowds, once witty and knowledgeable, became sallow and mean. Like pornography, the need for climax became shorter and shorter and more impatient. Increasingly meaningless fixtures flooded pay TV to draw the eyeballs and ring the virtual cash registers. A very select few became very, very wealthy. Until it is no longer a sport, but a business.

So? What does it matter? Isn’t all sport gone the same way?

Here we are on the eve of the seventy-fourth Ashes series; a contest older than most of the world’s sovereign nation states, including Australia. Apparently the Australian cricket team is the worst since the one we sent to England in 1991. We all know what happened there. But our first-choice spinner is wildly out of form. We haven’t got a reliable allrounder. Our best quick and captain has broken down. We have a recognised cheat filling in for him. Our most in form batter is suspect to playing off his hips. We’ve only got one serious opener, and the Poms have brought the fastest bowling attack here since the West Indies in ‘92/93.

That Australian Cricket team strut is still there, and the underdog status will suit the myth building, but the days when the highest office in public life, the Australian Cricket Captaincy, held sway are teetering on an abyss.

Australians, generally, are a cowardly lot and, with neoliberalism, have absorbed that American trait of flocking to a winner and abandoning losers. The National Trauma has left us devoid of empathy. Our social structures are transactional. Loyalty is viewed as a quaint folly by more of us every year. If that trend continues, and Australian Cricket starts to look like West Indian cricket, then its hollowed out business model may look like a bigger and less quaint folly.

*In my lifetime at least.

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Shiv Nair beams beatifically from the back end of the bus. His knowing smile and steady gaze a study of calm, confident surety. Orwell described such a gaze as “full of power and mysterious calm, and so vast that it almost filled up the screen”*.

But Shiv Nair is not a totalitarian dictator like Big Brother. Nor is he some sage guru, nor a religious, a motivational speaker or even some wellness crank. Shiv Nair is a real estate agent.

And he’s not alone.

The real-estate-agent-as-their-own-brand has become ubiquitous in metropolitan and regional Australia. Hoardings, sometimes as big as small billboards, pollute the main roads and backstreets of our cities, suburbs, towns and even countryside. Featuring one economic vandal or another smiling down on us common sods, offering the gateway to something as magical as having a roof to keep the weather off; acting like they’ve cured cancer while they’re at it.

Like most marketing gimmicks I suspect it originated in the United States. Realtors marketing themselves as a product alongside the jerry-built slums-of-tomorrow they’re flogging off to the financially gullible. What they call ‘building their brand’.

Leaving aside the fact that it is hard to think of a more soulless, antisocial or unproductive industry than real estate, for that is a Substack for another day, it is a hallmark of neoliberalism, and the deindustrialisation of Australia, that we’re left with this orgy of narcissism thrust into the tattered remnants of the public sphere.

We don’t create anything except egos in this day and age.

For this is part of the zeitgeist of our neoliberal age. The age where the individual is the centre of the universe, and the celebrity reigns supreme. Why ask an expert on public health or reports from WHO about the impact of AIDS in sub–Saharan Africa when you can go to Bono instead?

It’s easy to kick old Paul Hewson around, but from the seventies on, alongside the rise of neoliberalism, has been this trope of the wise outsider. The rugged individualism so fetishised by Ayn Rand infused into popular culture through movies and television the idea of the outsider who knew more than “egghead experts”, and who then prevails (mostly). Think of any private detective film, most “action” films, Buffy Summers, The X Files, Being There or even Rain Man.

There is a subtext hostile to the idea of scientific method or at least the idea of peer-reviewed knowledge. An idea so infused into western subconscious it is unsurprising conspiracy theories gain as much traction as they do.

It was the British historian Simon Schama that introduced me to the idea of the latter half of the seventeenth century - Restoration England under the last King Charles - as the age of optics. Fashions that invited ogling, even men flashing their garters. The new technologies of the telescope and the microscope letting us see more and further than we could before.

The Greeks and, as always, the Arabs had known of the powers of lens technology centuries before western Europeans. By the beginning of the seventeenth century Galileo Galilei had improved on the work of the Dutch spectacle makers Metius and Jansenn to develop the compound microscope. But it was under the Royal sponsorship of Charles II that this technology flourished during the Restoration. Yes, there was a great deal of scientific advancement under the Royal Society, but there was also a large degree of voyeurism. For voyeurism to succeed you need an exhibitionist, and for that you need a narcissist.

The Grecian tale of Narcissus is an old one - the Dutch linguist R.S. P. Beekes even suggests that it is older than Greek itself - and it doesn’t end well for the protagonist. Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD) is listed in the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fifth Edition; the famous DSM5. For all I know it’s also in The Art of The Deal, and if it isn’t, it should be.

Are all these realtors suffering from NPD? Well, I’m no psychiatrist (but I’ve known a few nyuk nyuk), but my answer would be probably. But where’s the disorder? Aren’t these people successful? Aren’t they winners? Well, under the rules of neoliberalism they are, but that’s probably a form of sociopathy as well. Could you imagine being stuck on a desert island with one of these self-made real estate celebrities?

I saw one on a bus in Baulkham Hills where the agent stated his pride in embarrassing his wife and children by putting his face all over norwest Sydney. Childhood trauma, right there.

We are in Restoration England on steroids, where the gaze is not just invited, but demanded. From Instagram, from Tik Tok, and all Teh Socials the faces scream “LOOK AT ME! LOOK AT ME!” Neoliberalism green lights this carnival of Narcissus as a celebration of the individual as a seething mass of western humanity implore this attention, even to the point where washed up hack writers start scribbling on Substack like some pathetic lunatic yelling down an empty well.

Meanwhile some sad suburban property flipper pulls on a rictus grin and plasters himself over the public sphere. Hell, they probably believe their own inflated worth.

But this is the paradox. We are all individually different, but we cannot survive as individuals. We are collective creatures. Even Ayn Rand had to create sociopathic transactional emotional relationships to make her fantasy dystopias work. For neoliberalism knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.

There are two spaces that will give you a visual image of what neoliberalism looks like. One is a tumour of real estate hoardings outside a large block of flats, all featuring the face of a different realtor. All offering the same thing, an overpriced, poorly planned and sub optimal social necessity. The other is an underfunded emergency department in any public hospital.

So Shiv Nair is not our friend; and for invading our public space he’s not even a good guy. But I doubt any intervention would be effective, there are too many Shiv Nair’s out there already. And the way this zeitgeist is headed, there will probably be many, many more before God gets back from Vegas.

If the night is not too dark, and you’re not alone, it may be possible to imagine where this age of narcissism might lead us:

“On coins, on stamps, on the covers of books, on banners, on posters, and on the wrappings of a cigarette Packet -- everywhere. Always the eyes watching you and the voice enveloping you. Asleep or awake, working or eating, indoors or out of doors, in the bath or in bed -- no escape. Nothing was your own except the few cubic centimetres inside your skull.”*

* George Orwell Nineteen Eighty Four Penguin Australia (Sydney 2015)

“Unemployed at last!”
- Such is Life, Tom Collins (Joseph Furphy)

It’s the greatest opening line to any novel I’ve ever read. A great starting point for understanding this modern world and the new feudalism that adorns the decline of the Anglosphere enlightenment, liberal democracy and the state as an agency for our common wealth.

Across the English-speaking world the only thing that determines your social status - the only identity that matters - is your economic ability. Any other identity is overwhelmed by it. A rich person from any non-privileged group has more agency than a poor person from a privileged group. Lindsay Fox is a good example of this, as is Alan Joyce.

Fundamental human conditions, base even by Maslow’s standards, from diet and housing to health are all dictated by economic ability. How much money do you have? In Anglo societies money isn’t everything, it’s the only thing. This is not a radical idea – it once was, but not anymore. Neoliberalism is built on these very foundations: The price of everything and everything has a price.

With public spaces receding and shared experience vaporised it is only monetising human interaction that gives it meaning. Gaming is a good example of this (computer gaming, not pokies, they have their own special kind of vaporisation). So is sport.

Sport was once the realm of the wealthy. The dilletante landed gentry passing the endless hours of leisure time which having an onsite peasantry afforded the average young squire. Soon it became apparent that sporting ability was not the sole preserve of the aristocrat (do I tell the joke here?). Indeed, the inverse was often true. Ever since the Black Death of the fourteenth century the British peasant knew their worth. They were not going to bowl and field for Lord Cavendish-Warwick on the lawns of Little-Becking-On-The-Wold for free. Jeeves’ great grandfather knew his value even then.

Professionalism, which arose from cricket in the eighteenth century, spread to various forms of football and in the twentieth century to almost all forms of human recreation. The spectator became more important than the practitioner. It was spectacle as a business. Paying the most talented to play gave us Pele and George Best, as well as Joey Chestnut.

News of player movements in team sports now dwarfs obscure information such as results. Why are so many sports fans invested in the imposition of the individual into what is a collective endeavour? No one who understands team sport for its physics and mechanics believes that inserting one individual will alter the fortunes of a team, or the club that owns them, but it sells tickets, subscriptions and merch.

And that’s what we’re here for.

The fantastical money thrown at this elite – which should be measured in units called ICU Beds: “I see Collingwood are paying Jaxon Wrnmskliff 200 ICU Beds to move!” – is consistent with every aspect of human endeavour – higher, faster, further be damned – being measured in pieces of silver is what counts.

You can’t even go camping in a National Park in NSW without paying a fee now. I can’t go homeless, it costs too much.

There are three primary ways people get money; return on investment, luck and work.

Investment is where I give you money for you to make more money and then give it back to me. Sort of a reverse Ponzi scheme. This saves the investor from the disagreeable activity of work (see below).

Most wealthy people are the victims of dumb arsed luck. Where and to whom they were born figure prominently. Being born into money isn’t a guarantee of wealth, but there’s been a few studies by the Ponds Institute that tend to indicate that it helps. There is also some overlap between the lucky and the investor, as there is between the investor and those who make money through work.

The hardest and stupidest way to make money is to work. Happily, that’s what most fools do. From selling missiles to erratic central Asian regimes, through retail, pick and pack and hospitality, to negotiating Centrelink and the Magical Bureaucracy Tour of Workforce Australia, work is often time consuming, tiring, degrading, emotionally charged and existentially unrewarding, even for those on the big bucks.

The Sopranos showed us that even glamorous jobs are filled out with the mundane like panel beaters bog on an 80’s Datsun. Even Bindi Irwin has to renew her license at whatever they have rebranded the motor registry as in Queensland. Every schmuck must queue for bread in late era capitalism, just like Andropov’s Russia+.

If only there was some way you could make money without compound interest, daddy or swelter? Only the Capitalist really has agency, whatever their colour, gender, religion or whatever fruits or vegetables they molest. They are the only real privileged.

Which makes the independently unemployed the most subversive people in these times.

There was a more enlightened time when it was possible to subvert the dominant paradigm on a state scholarship called Unemployment Benefits. In the mid 80’s Paul Keating saw what was going on there and, whipped on by Rupert Murdoch, he sent mild mannered Peter Baldwin in to take the sjambok to the hippies, punks and crusties that came of age during Paul Keating’s recession we had to have. Living in their share houses on cask wine and cheap speed, playing in great bands. It was the end of a golden age.

Howard finished off the job by driving them into low paid retail and hospitality jobs where the wage was the wage since they were competing with all the displaced factory workers from John Button’s jihad against secure manufacturing jobs.

Successive governments came up with increasingly sadistic measures for dealing with the compulsory 5% unemployed Treasury said we had to have. Until we ended up with RoboDebt. By this time being on the dole is some kind of vaguely criminal activity.

In response to this assault on the social safety net the ACTU commissioned a mural, and maybe a performance piece. Marieke Hardy will know, text her and ask.

In any event, it is unlikely that anytime soon we will be “unemployed at last!”

+ there’s a very good joke here that I’ll tell you one day, if you behave.

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