In Australia it is widely known, for it is a fact brayed and trumpeted aloud by our politicians, that discrimination – whether on the basis of age, disability, race or gender – is prohibited by law. This is not to say that discrimination on these bases does not occur; on the contrary, anti-discrimination laws are passed and upheld precisely because such forms of discrimination and social injustice – problematic even for a sham democracy – are endemic. What will never be passed into Australian law, either commonwealth or state, are laws designed to prevent widespread and systematic discrimination against the poor. This alarming state of affairs exists because poverty – like its privileged twin, property – is a principle entrenched “between the lines” of Australian law.
Whereas poverty is indiscriminate, wealth derived from property can do no other than to discriminate, to fence and to defend itself against this destitute Other: property’s shadow, poverty, which materializes in a rising underclass that comprises miserable tenants and many thousands of homeless persons, domestic as well as global seekers of asylum, of refuge.
For a while, certainly, the underclass is forced to endure systematic discrimination: the legally sanctioned impoverishment not only of its fortunes – whatever they might once have amounted to, or promised to become – but also of its self-esteem, its civic pride and sense of belonging to community or place, its good will and ultimately, its hope – naive and increasingly forlorn – that humane wisdom might prevail in a world demented by political economy.
Welfare, the wellbeing of all the people who comprise a democratic society, is all but neglected in the open-slather scramble for bigger profits. In Australia today the public good, the good of the community, is perpetually mocked and ridiculed; it is being sacrificed in the name of private property, under the aegis of on overarching hubris that applauds wanton accumulation of individual profits and the hoarding of private wealth, over and against the claims and interests of the community, the people at large.
The tacit conclusion that Sir Gorgeous Midas, would-be Prime Minister Clive Palmer, is entitled to spend his dirty mining billions in whatever way he chooses or deems fit, has become a plank in the eye of Australian politics, preventing it from witnessing the enormity of its own (much less the property tycoon’s) utter contempt for true democratic principles; its morally if not (yet) legally repugnant worship of that false idol, capital.
At a touch of Sir Midas’s unfathomably privileged hand, the common good – Australia’s landscape and environment, for starters – is transmuted into a wholly private benefit, a stockpile of personal wealth the proceeds of which are promised to “trickle down” to even the lowest strata of Australian society.
Lest we forget: Palmer’s is the kind of ill-gotten wealth that permits one to run as a candidate for senate or parliament in the first place, swaying or bribing electorates, monopolising media discourse, imposing one’s own self-indulgently corpulent – if not morbidly obese – ideological profile onto the emaciated figure of Australian public policy.
Political candidacy is just one more (ostensibly) democratic “right” enjoyed by the rich but denied absolutely to the Australian poor. To make matters worse, by allowing the private exploitation of its national resources, the public itself has indirectly funded Palmer's electoral campaign, together with the machinations of his self-styled political party. But, whatever the ultimate outcome of Palmer's current political bid, it will suffice to demonstrate my larger thesis: that wealth and its absence, poverty, are fault lines of discrimination threatening to undermine social cohesion within Australia.
Whereas poverty is indiscriminate, wealth derived from property can do no other than to discriminate, to fence and to defend itself against this destitute Other: property’s shadow, poverty, which materializes in a rising underclass that comprises miserable tenants and many thousands of homeless persons, domestic as well as global seekers of asylum, of refuge.
For a while, certainly, the underclass is forced to endure systematic discrimination: the legally sanctioned impoverishment not only of its fortunes – whatever they might once have amounted to, or promised to become – but also of its self-esteem, its civic pride and sense of belonging to community or place, its good will and ultimately, its hope – naive and increasingly forlorn – that humane wisdom might prevail in a world demented by political economy.
Welfare, the wellbeing of all the people who comprise a democratic society, is all but neglected in the open-slather scramble for bigger profits. In Australia today the public good, the good of the community, is perpetually mocked and ridiculed; it is being sacrificed in the name of private property, under the aegis of on overarching hubris that applauds wanton accumulation of individual profits and the hoarding of private wealth, over and against the claims and interests of the community, the people at large.
The tacit conclusion that Sir Gorgeous Midas, would-be Prime Minister Clive Palmer, is entitled to spend his dirty mining billions in whatever way he chooses or deems fit, has become a plank in the eye of Australian politics, preventing it from witnessing the enormity of its own (much less the property tycoon’s) utter contempt for true democratic principles; its morally if not (yet) legally repugnant worship of that false idol, capital.
At a touch of Sir Midas’s unfathomably privileged hand, the common good – Australia’s landscape and environment, for starters – is transmuted into a wholly private benefit, a stockpile of personal wealth the proceeds of which are promised to “trickle down” to even the lowest strata of Australian society.
Lest we forget: Palmer’s is the kind of ill-gotten wealth that permits one to run as a candidate for senate or parliament in the first place, swaying or bribing electorates, monopolising media discourse, imposing one’s own self-indulgently corpulent – if not morbidly obese – ideological profile onto the emaciated figure of Australian public policy.
Political candidacy is just one more (ostensibly) democratic “right” enjoyed by the rich but denied absolutely to the Australian poor. To make matters worse, by allowing the private exploitation of its national resources, the public itself has indirectly funded Palmer's electoral campaign, together with the machinations of his self-styled political party. But, whatever the ultimate outcome of Palmer's current political bid, it will suffice to demonstrate my larger thesis: that wealth and its absence, poverty, are fault lines of discrimination threatening to undermine social cohesion within Australia.