By Denis Bright
Once again, Jim Chalmers is representing all Australians in the USA on his high-level discussions with leaders of global influence. Whether Left leaning commentators like it or not, the Anglo-American world is reasserting its global influence through the economic diplomacy of both the Biden Administration and the Conservative Government of Rishi Sunak in Britain. Australia can and should offer a different perspective as a responsible middle-power in the Indo Pacific Region on current interactions with the G20 Finance Ministers, the Central Bank Governors’ Meeting and the IMF World Bank Spring Meeting.
In the words of that old Great War Marching Song, our Jim Chalmers should be boasting to his adoring hosts that it’s a long way from Logan City to the echelons of global power and influence. If Queensland had its way on 21 May 2022, the federal LNP would still be at the helm with Labor reduced to five members out of thirty in the House of Representatives and just three senators out of twelve in the Australian Senate.
Watching Jim Chalmers responding enthusiastically to the easy to answer questions raised by Sarah Ferguson on the 7.30 Report (13 April 2023) gave me a welcome flashback to my little chores with other teacher trainees at Bremer SHS just prior to the 1963 election when I had just completed the Year 12 examinations. Scholarships were awarded at the end of year 10 and transferable to university courses after year 12.
Two teacher trainees travelled to St. Edmund’s Catholic College to retrieve stationery left over from the examinations with a best left unnamed long deceased teacher who discouraged building workers on a construction site with their enthusiasm for the Labor Party.
Bill Hayden in the largely Ipswich based seat of Oxley had just completed his first term in parliament as the snap election date approached on 30 November 1963. Oxley had been an LNP stronghold since its formation in 1949 until Bill Hayden’s victory in 1961 on a 10.8 per cent swing to Labor in primary votes and 9.4 per cent after preferences.
The election came just eight days after the assassination of US President John F. Kennedy, an event Calwell claimed contributed to his loss. The government retained office comfortably, gaining ten seats from Labor, giving it 72 to the opposition’s 50 in a House of Representatives of 122 members.
Locally, Bill Hayden’s vote went against the national trend. Bill Hayden’s vote continued to increase throughout the 1960s even during the Khaki election of 1966 when Harold Holt wanted to take Australia All the Way with the USA into commitment to the Vietnam War. By 1969, Oxley was one of the safest Labor seats in Australia with a Labor primary vote of 67.1 percent.
In a case of opportunism gone astray, the decision to hold an early election in 1963 meant that a separate senate election was needed in 1964 at great cost and time-wasting for Australia’s neo-colonial guided democracy.
Menzies played his foreign policy cards in the 1963 election speech. This could be Peter Dutton today:
“We want growth and progress and security at home. For that purpose we need security abroad. We want friends and a defence policy which gets us strength and a true willingness and capacity to co-operate with our friends in the defence of the common security.
It was my Government which negotiated the ANZUS pact with the U.S.A. and New Zealand. It is of vital importance. To take an example, we have made it clear that we will defend Papua-New Guinea against attack, as if it were part of the Australian mainland. That promise of ours is, as a result of ANZUS, completely backed by the United States.
Yet the A.L.P. has never been enthusiastic about ANZUS. Its left-wingers, who have to be placated and compromised with, and who might very well dominate it in the next three years, are very uncritical of ‘Communist Imperialism’, which the world knows to be a threatening reality.”
All this was an example of Australia’s moral and later military support to the Vietnam Wars. In the first Vietnam war of the late 1940s, Chinese nationalist forces in Hainan had made port and air strips built during the Japanese occupation available for raids against Vietnam’s new socialist government by British and French forces keen on restoring the empire across Indochina. The Nationalists held on in Hainan for several months after the Chinese revolution.
In a closer relationship with the US Military Industrial Complexes announced in 1963, Australia purchased F-111 aircraft from General Dynamics. Which were delivered ten years later like the proposed AUKUS submarines of our times.
Missing from the questions raised with Jim Chalmers on the 7.30 Report (13 April 2023) was attention to the problems of Australian investment levels which are crucial to our own independent economic diplomacy in a new age of Anglo-American (AA) economic revival. Economic diplomacy should not be left to great powers. DFAT has the resources to work on such objectives which helped to obtain the cancellation of tariffs against our exports of barley to China. Hopefully barriers to wine export to China will soon be removed.
Crucial elements of this AA revival are higher interest rates and global arms sales which commenced long before the current conflicts in Ukraine.
Trading Economics (TE) shows how AA interest rates surge during difficult times to vacuum global currencies back to financial heartlands plaster over structural weaknesses in both financial hubs with the added benefits of tax evasions by multinational companies.
Percentage Changes in British Interest Rates (Sterling Overnight Rates)
Percentage Changes in US Fed Interest Rates
High Fed US Interest rates were a key strategy of the Reagan Administration to kick-start the US economy after the global recession of the early 1980s with the support of massive arm sales to allies in the US Global Alliance to global strategic policies and to lessen the burdens of maintaining US hegemony on taxpayers at home.
Bill Hayden’s successes in Oxley during the 1960s was always welcomed by the local electorate.
The federal LNP and its far-right allies have captured the progressive populist rhetoric which was once the forte of successful Labor members in formerly heartland seats like Leichhardt, Capricornia and Oxley in Queensland. With federal Labor reduced to five House of Representative’s members in Queensland, it is time for federal Labor to rediscover the value of this progressive populism which was also embedded in US Democratic Party Politics in the eras of William Bryan and of course the New Deal Programme of the FDR Administration (1932-45). Few are aware that the Wizard of Oz story from the USA is firmly embedded in these populist traditions of author L Frank Baum in juxtaposition with the Make American Great Again Traditions of President McKinley (1897-1901) who literally invaded countries like the Cuba and the Philippines to assist with their liberation from Spanish colonialism to incorporate them in a Greater American Global Empire.
Neoliberalism has re-formed a social cleavage in contemporary Australia which has been unlocked in the SGS Economic and Planning Indices for our cities and regions’ The federal LNP dislikes this type of discussion which is dismissed as irrelevant class politics which is really as modern as next year’s news (SBS News 22 July 2022):
“The findings released by the Australian Council of Social Service (ACOSS) on Friday found that Australia’s richest 10 per cent of households have an average household wealth of $6.1 million – almost half of the entire country’s wealth combined.
The majority of Australians remain on the lower scale of wealth, with 60 per cent of the population only pocketing 17 per cent of the country’s wealth.
In 2021, the richest 1 per cent of Australians held 50 times the wealth of the lower 60 per cent of Australians, and 11 times the wealth of the average-income household.
UNSW Director of the Social Policy Resource Centre Carla Treloar said the findings were a reminder of the stark gap between the rich and poor in Australia.
‘Once again, this report reminds us that wealth in Australia is distributed very unevenly,’ she said.”
The full Wealth Inequality reports are available online from the Australian Council of Social Service in partnership with UNSW Sydney.
Although this report is almost a year old, it is highly relevant to tomorrow’s planning by Treasury and other agencies to address the growing social divide not only in Australia but in all developed countries which cling to Thatcherite economics when alternatives are demanded by a restless electorate that wants solutions over pious rhetoric from policy leaders.
Defending Phase 3 Tax concessions are ridiculous contracts with AA military industrial complexes should be anathema to Labor governments and is also supported by the best progressive traditions in the USA itself as mentioned earlier in this article.
Washington DC maybe a long way from Logan City but as Jim Chalmers mixes with the rich and famous in Joe Biden’s administration, he will surely recall the faces in the street from his own electorate in the traditions of that US recruiting song from the Great War in which the Wilson Administration briefly participated after 1917. Its horrors were covered in the British anti-war movie from director Sam Mendes.
Marching Through Vladivostok 1918
In a double cross with his own idealism for peace Woodrow Wilson allowed US troops to occupy Vladivostok and parts of Siberia during the Russian Civil Wilson in a multinational operation with Japanese and other allied forces.
Enjoy the American version of the recruiting song from 1917. Advocates of US global outreach should note that the US Democrat Administration was defeated after two terms in 1920 after the crisis of the Spanish flu epidemic which was brought back by returning soldiers from Europe. The Republicans soon made neoliberalism a hit again in the Roaring Twenties as William Wilson struggled with his own mental health problems in retirement prior to his death in 1924.
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Postscript: “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary” is a British music hall song written by Jack Judge and co-credited to Henry James “Harry” Williams. It was allegedly written for a 5-shilling bet in Stalybridge on 30 January 1912 and performed the next night at the local music hall. Now commonly called “It’s a Long Way to Tipperary”, the original printed music calls it “It’s a Long, Long Way to Tipperary”. It became popular among soldiers in the First World War and is remembered as a song of that war.
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