DIGRESSION ONE - LEADERSHIP

In the movie, "the Prestige", magic performers use their bag of tricks to reveal an object, turn that object into something extraordinary, and then return the object back to its rightful place. One element in re-thinking the Social Contract is that some element of leadership will be required to re-galvanise the debate about justice as fairness, and any number of other equivalents to describe the debate. Before we move on to some further parts to the search for justice, we need to examine the state of leadership which will act as an element in helping correct-thinking. Unfortunately, the landscape here is not too encouraging. Authority is meant to act to facilitate the drive towards equivalence, and I have already tried to supply some examples of how arbitrariness has been used to protect elites, rather than chasten them. But the state of politics in Australia hopefully provides an example of how the Will to Power has become more important than proper leadership. Australia, like a number of countries, has seen an embarrassing rise in wedge politics, designed to identify, and isolate, a minority of "aliens" or "others" who can be vilified and scorned by the majority. The Co-alition government from the mid-1990's to 2007 played to a whole range of bogeymen, from the universally Allied-against Muslim-as-terrorist, to the legitimate refugee-as-claim jumper boat arrivee. All quite tawdry. But it played to the genuine "fears" of the general population, and therefore had an immediacy, and currency, to the debate e.g. No matter how many historical transgressions could be evidenced, the bombing of the World Trade Centre raised the stakes; no matter how illegitimate white man invasion might have historically been, the current population can have some control over immigration policies/routes of entry. The escalation in the wedge has also been an almost universal feature in a number of countries, but the form of the escalation in Australia is illustrative of a peculiar form of nastiness. To try to wedge 50% of the population against the other 50%, by way of gender wars, is politics in extremis. Ignoring the historical merits, read Gillard's misogyny tirade as a deflecting technique against the following-day release of misogynistic comments by a supporting member of her tight-as-drum hung parliamentary majority; read the announcement of a particularly long period of time to the election date as deflecting tactic to the following-day arrest of another member upon who's vote the Gillard government requires. Read the policies and administrative arrangements which have been put in place to assist Gillard's union-based support network as the ultimate deflecting tactic to ensure that those same unions don't use their connections to ( yet at least) move a vote to remove her as leader. All cosy-network tactics, with the dupes being the fools who think that Gillard is being authentic over the last seven to eight months. The Will to Power has produced a bizarre political framework not unlike the juvenality that emerges in the Student Representative Councils at university. What is just as disappointing is that the Opposition in the forthcoming election will have a mandate to wind back those policies, but nothing else. More useless Will to Power politics based around nothing more than saying "no".and the forthcoming period will be dominated by the spectre of Revenge, not unlike "The Carnival in Romans" where Emmanuel Roy de Ladurie described how the town's elite opportunistically and cynically extracted revenge on workers who had used the shortage of labourers arising due to the Black Death to claim higher rewards and status for themselves. Strong leadership is required to recognise the challenges that the GFC has both posed, and the opportunities that exist, to wrest some of the arbitrariness, and "elites" position-protecting that now needs to be wound back. This epoch will be squandered if the politics of recidivism, and revenge, becomes the only paradigm which is adopted by elected officials. It is as if the world has become too complex for our politicians to rise to the role that they so covetously seek.