The future of Australian politics in Western Sydney

An Excerpt from Western Horizon: Sydney's Heartland and the Future of Australian Politics [Scribe, 2003]

Introduction: Ill met by moonlight

'I am aweary of this moon. Would he would change!'

In 2001 the southern Australian summer came early. Across the east coast of Australia farmland and bushland baked in mid-summer temperatures from the middle of spring, plunging the countryside into drought and stirring up a plague of bushfires from Western Sydney's West to the mountains beyond. The air was hot, dry, and still, and a red haze hung over Sydney for weeks. At around the same time the weird glow of a full moon spread over the landscape, and Australian politics entered (or so it seemed) a veritable Midsummer Night's Dream.

In the moon's glow the familiar, unheroic contours of Australian politics seemed transformed. Opinion polls fluctuated like barometers in a cyclone. Sober political commentators became writers of Philippics. Kindly family folks scanned television images of leaking ships in search of terrorists. Long-time Labor activists renounced overnight the party which (so they said) had betrayed them, unforgivably, by trading righteous oblivion for inglorious survival. Watching the gusting fires over the mountains, and listening to the wild, intemperate commentaries sweeping from all sides on radio and TVtelevision, it was easy to turn Shakespearian.

The spring, the summer,
The childing autumn, angry winter, change
Their wonted liveries; and the mazed world,
By their increase, knows not which is which.
And this same progeny of evils comes
From our debate, from our dissension;
We are their parents and their original.

In truth, the pressure cells driving those overheated political air-currents were more mundane. The basic facts are well-known. In late August 2001 the Australian government, at least ostensibly reacting to a wave of immigration emanating from the Middle and Near East and South Asia, had refused to accept a cargo of people rescued by a Norwegian container-ship, the SS Tampa, after their vessel sank on the high seas.

Over the weeks that followed the government improvised a new policy according to which applicants for political asylum were to be housed on the territory of other sovereign states while their applications were assessed, apparently in order to circumvent the extensive avenues of appeal that had slowed to a crawl the application process in Australia to a crawl. These measures were highly electorally popular. The reputable opinion polls recorded that supporters outnumbered opponents by a margin of between three and four to one.

Nor was this so surprising. Australians have a long record of cautiousness caution towards high levels of immigration, and towards the immigration of unfamiliar peoples from unfamiliar parts of the world. And the notion that migration, like other planks of public policy, should be managed on orderly principles of fairness however relevant it may or may not have been in these circumstances, is deeply ingrained in Australian social attitudes. Yet the public response on these issues left liberal commentators thunderstruck.

When, in mid-September, four airliners were hijacked over American airspace by followers of a hitherto shadowy exiled Islamic militant, and used as crowded guided missiles for the destruction of American commerce's largest fortress, of the US armed forces' citadel, and (unsuccessfully) of the headquarters of the US Congress, these habitual public instincts towards caution were raised a number of notches towards outright fear. In the dying months of the year the US government prosecuted a war to displace the terrorists' host government in Afghanistan.

This campaign was accompanied by waves of anti-American and anti-Western demonstrations in Pakistan, Indonesia and elsewhere, all seemingly orchestrated by radical Muslim clerics and their local networks of religious schools.

Since almost all of those applying for political asylum in Australia had recently departed Afghanistan or other Muslim countries close by it, and since stories about one followed stories about the other in rapid succession on television screens, there were strong temptations to draw parallels between the two sets of events. When Australian troops were committed (albeit in small numbers) to the conflict in Afghanistan, public debate went for all purposes onto a war footing.

Over the weeks that followed a bitter public debate was fought out on behalf ofby those (a highly articulate minority) who asserted the primacy of the human rights of those people seeking asylum on Australian territory, and those (a largely inarticulate majority) who asserted what, so far as can be told, they saw, so far as can be told, as to be the primacy of Australian sovereignty.

In the process a government that had been dismissed by most recognised commentators as entirely doomed was saved from almost certain political oblivion, and transported instead to a massive electoral triumph.

Domestic issues vanished from the political radar screen, as if into some morally charged Bermuda Triangle. Immigration suddenly turned from a third-order issue into a first-order one. The Labor opposition searched without success for a political formula which would allow it to assert sovereignty and compassion simultaneously.

Since that election the government has gone from strength to strength, and currently now looks poised for a lengthy long period of rule, perhaps even on the scale of the conservative hegemony of the 1950s and 1960s.

The election of 2001 was perhaps the greatest of all the electoral debacles of the modern federal Labor Party. Labor's primary vote was reduced to a lower level than 1996, 1975 or 1949. From the cusp of victory it was cast, within a matter of weeks, into the mire of a major defeat. All the hard work of six years seemed to have come undone, instantly.

More cruelly still, in the election's aftermath the public face of unity so painstakingly maintained ever since the calamity of 1996 fell apart. The status of the asylum-seeker issue as a national matter of conscience freed radicals and liberals alike (in their own minds, at least) from any petty bonds of political expediency.

The domination of these issues over the election campaign in turn served to drive deep fissures into Labor's rank and file, and in turn between the majority of the rank and file and the great majority of the Australian public. ALP branch meetings in the inner-cities may have been four-square behind the asylum-seekers, as Carmen Lawrence and others have come to claim.

In the outer cities and beyond, however, they seem, not infrequently, to have descended into a chaos too elaborate even for standing orders to resolve. Twelve months after the election the federal Labor Party was in much worse shape internally than it had been the day after; in a further twelve months things may well be worse again.

The nature of the government's electoral voctory like just about everything else in that period, became a matter of dispute. Some argued that, since Labor was already perceived as 'soft on refugees', it had nothing to lose from a more adventurous policy in the area. Others argued that since the two major parties' positions on the issue were not strikingly different, refugee policy had been unimportant in the outcome. Sometimes, bewilderingly, both arguments were advanced together.

Yet the evidence of the opinion polls and the attitude surveys seems clear enough. While the government's fortunes had been sneaking upwards since the middle of 2001, they fairly leapt in the weeks following the interception of the SS Tampa and the destruction of the World Trade Center.

When asked, voters consistently preferred the government's immigration policy to what they understood to be Labor's by a margin of almost 20 per cent. Nor did this change once the election was over. According to the Australian Election Study (a detailed survey carried out between November 2001 and January 2002), respondents preferred the Government's immigration policy to Labor's by 50 per cent to 20, while only 20 per cent or so claimed not to see a difference between them. Margins of similar magnitude marked responses on asylum policy and national security. It's difficult to imagine how a more adventurous policy on Labor's part could have gone either unnoticed or unopposed.

If Labor did poorly nationally, its local performances were decidedly uneven. In Victoria where the state electoral cycle was in a very different phase Labor even made modest gains. This made all the more striking its abject performance in New South Wales, traditionally the backbone of Labor victories. Labor's primary vote in Australia's most populous state fell for the third election in a row, to not much more than 36 per cent. Its pre-1996 tally of 33 lower-house seats in the state (out of 50) fell to a parlous 20.

Some of Labor's worst results came in what commentators had presumed to be Labor's greatest heartland, Sydney's west.

Key western Sydney seats Labor had been expected to win back, such as Macarthur in the city's outer south west, and Parramatta, actually swang away from it. Other seats in the broad area known as Greater Western Sydney, such as Lindsay and Macquarie, covering the territory from Penrith to the Blue Mountains, moved from being marginal Liberal to safe Liberal.

Traditionally, Sydney's electoral battlefield has resembled a form of regional trench warfare with the harbour as no-man's land.

For generations, booth after booth north of Sydney Harbour has voted solidly for the Coalition. The inner and mid-West have been and remain Liberal wastelands. Yet since 1996 these deeply-engraved trench-lines have been rapidly outflanked. Westwards, 'to the green fields beyond', Sydney's fast growing, outer suburban fringe has developed into a highly volatile electoral terrain, superficially Labor in appearance but increasingly Liberal in voting behaviour.

And so in the aftermath of Labor's defeat Western Sydney became, according to one's point of view, either harbinger or culprit. Liberal-minded journalists speculated as to what makes citizens of Sydney's west 'more racist' than the run of ordinary Australians.

Political demographers, casting around for a shorthand explanation of the west's apparently sudden reversal of sympathies, cast the spotlight onto the 'aspirational' voter, a supposedly self-focussed and upwardly-mobile creature whose unsmiling countenance was the face of the nation's future.

The first action of Labor's new leader, Simon Crean, was to conduct a small pilgrimage to the south-western suburbs of Sydney, to pay penance for Labor's electoral sins. There he pressed the flesh at shopping centres, trod the greens at a golf-course, and wobbled uncertainly up a suburban train- carriage, a hopeful smile glued to his lips. For a few days the casual television viewer was treated to cameos of the shopping centres of Sydney's outer suburbs, its yawning expanses of suburban and semi-rural sprawl, its multi-car garages, walled estates and multi-storey red-brick castles. Somewhere around here, Crean and the media all hoped together, could be found the elusive secrets of the 'aspirationals', that newly-discovered demographic whose flight of electoral fickleness had caused Labor such heartache.

Crean's gesture evoked strong responses among commentators. For some it marked a new turn outwards by Labor from the 'heartland' which Labor had wooed with modest success ever since the previous great debacle in 1996. For others it represented merely the latest in a long line of Labor betrayals, a capitulation to 'spin-doctoring' and to a market-research view of the world.

One ABC journalist wrote described 'aspirationalism' as projecting 'a Thatcherite, me-first, set of values onto the lower-middle class, assuming that they will prefer private schools for their children, private hospitals for their health care, private housing estates fenced off from the lower orders from which they've only too recently escaped.'

Tom Keneally, one of Australia's most findly regarded novelists, described 'aspirational' as 'an ugly adjective which countenances an idea uglier still. It countenances the end of egalitarianism'.

Residents of western Sydney were entitled to feel a little bewildered, and perhaps also a little wounded, by all this sudden, unasked-for attention. For half a century the region had been variously neglected, stigmatised, and made the butt of the city's notorious humour, none of which, it seems, required any particular attention to geographical exactitude.

Now, aAfter decades of being treated as the 'problem' area of Sydney on account of poverty and poor infrastructure, it seemed that western Sydney was a problem of an entirely different order.

Now, its newfound relative affluence was to blame, and journalists armed with street directories were awash with snippets of sociological theory.

The purpose of this book isn't to solve these grand problems, real or imagined. No study of Sydney's west is going to unravel knots which have been tied on a national scale. Nor is it my intention here to discover the 'real' western Sydney, wherever that may be.

Indeed, it may be precisely the region's diversity, rather than its imagined homogeneity, which is the key to its current notorious reputation. Nor, finally, do I want to mount a passionate defence of western Sydney and its inhabitants, on the basis of their historical mistreatment at the hands of others, or their perceived social virtues, or on some other grounds.

My smaller aim is to generate some local insights into the complicated political phenomenon of western Sydney, as it appears both to the social statistician and to the 'engaged' journalist.

To the extent that this lesser task requires, as it certainly does require, an understanding of the role of the west in the wider political and cultural dramas of Sydney and, indeed, the nation, it has implications for what we know about the present state of Australian politics, and in particular of the Labor Party.

For the argument that western Sydney, or even Sydney more broadly, is a 'problem' for Labor to solve, a riddle to be decoded, or a malady to be cured, seems to me at best an alibi, and at worst a form of self-deception.

Over the last few years Australians radicals and liberals on the political left, who had come to believe that in the eighties and nineties Australia was changed into a different kind of country - one whose instincts and sympathies were not dissimilar to their own - have experienced a series of political electric shocks.

After that kind of treatment it's no doubt comforting to attribute the current's source to a faulty electric heater, an overloaded toaster, a hair-balled hair-dryer. In the case of western Sydney, as in the cases of other similarly mythologised political objects, the simple elimination of preconceptions, presumptions and over-leapt conclusions can itself be a healthy and productive thing. For in learning that 'they' are not so dissimilar from you and I, we are impelled to look a little more closely in the political mirror.

'O Bottom, thou art changed! What do I see on thee?'

'What do you see? You see an ass head of your own'