Clivosaurus

In reply to Guy Rundle's Quarterly Essay, Clivosaurus: The politics of Clive Palmer.

CLIVOSAURUS

Correspondence


Geoff Robinson

Guy Rundle tells a great story in Clivosaurus. It is the story of Clive Palmer, a boy from the Gold Coast who lived the Australian dream of an ample sufficiency and who then became the defender of this dream against Tony Abbott. But like most good writers, Rundle also tells his own story: of a boy from the Arena-land of the inner-city left, in search of the suburban and coastal Australian dream – Upper Middle Bogan as essay. It is Coolangatta to Canberra for Palmer, and Carlton to Carrum for Rundle. Both Rundle and Palmer are nationalist optimists and both diverge from stereotypical images of “left” and “right”: Rundle is a longstanding critic of conventional left-libertarianism on issues such as euthanasia, and mining baron Palmer has rallied to the defence of Australian welfarism. That Rundle is fascinated by Palmer is not surprising, but in the end the hopes he places in him are misplaced.

Rundle’s fascination is with the ideal of Clive Palmer. To Rundle, Palmer’s mastery of reinvention makes him a man for the times. Rundle commences with a consideration of the divergence between Palmer’s liberal views on the government budget deficit and refugees, and the conservatism of many who voted for him. To Rundle, the pre-election and post-election Palmer are distinct. Palmer’s own life story, Rundle contends, has made him someone who can boldly articulate what “Australians owed to each other” within an “overarching moral account” that makes him uniquely suited to be a bearer of the “core values … close to the centre of Australian politics.”

After the Abbott government’s first budget, many on the left saw their Facebook timelines cluttered by excited shares of Palmer’s press conferences. Rundle’s essay reflects that time and mood. There is wishful thinking here. Left intellectuals in Australia are usually dissatisfied with “their” parties and regularly offer what they believe to be election-winning advice. Left politicians usually ignore this advice, to their electoral benefit. Rundle seems to leap from the fact that Palmer provided an obstruction to Tony Abbott to the assumption that somehow his challenge to Abbott resonated with the public. In fact, discontent with Abbott fuelled the rapid political revival of the establishment left, in the form of Labor and the Greens.

Rundle is keen to refute the image of Palmer as an amoral conservative opportunist, but his narrative of Palmer’s colourful life story is deeply teleological: Palmer’s many identities – Catholic conservative, liberal reformer, romantic poet and mining entrepreneur – are seen to have made him a vessel for particular values. For Rundle, these values are Australian egalitarianism and a Catholic social justice tradition. For all the thick description that Rundle gives us, Palmer remains a shadowy figure in his portrayal. It seems Rundle believes that Palmer’s significance is dependent on his ideological depth. This reflects a modernist conception of political life as an intensely serious task. To Rundle, Palmer must have ideological depth to be a significant figure. But Palmer can be all surface, reinvention and appearance, yet also remain deeply significant. Palmer is a postmodern politician whose persona is based on constant reinvention, but his rise and apparent fall speaks to the exhaustion of postmodernity in the age of financial crisis and secular stagnation.

Rundle wants to find a foundation for Palmer, and so he revives the discourses of the early 1990s, when B.A. Santamaria was feted by some on the left as a critic of neoliberalism. To Rundle, Palmer’s defence of Australian values reflects a Catholic legacy; Rundle is concerned to enlist Palmer in a familiar crusade against that communitarian/conservative/socialist bogy the “atomised and content-less self of classical liberal doctrine.” For Rundle, content and depth are important, and he seeks to persuade readers that Palmer has these qualities.

After the death of socialism, Rundle as a left intellectual finds the model of depth and seriousness in Catholicism. For Rundle, ultimately Palmer’s politics are all about the legacy of the 1891 papal encyclical Rerum Novarum. But Rerum Novarum is like Marx’s Capital: often cited but rarely read. The encyclical is largely a polemic against socialism, which gives little support to trade unions or the welfare state. Rather like Clive Palmer himself, it is a symbol attached to competing causes. Catholics who faced competition from socialism cited Rerum Novarum to justify policies largely identical to those of the moderate left. Catholic unions were not fundamentally different from socialist unions; Australian Labor had an abundance of Catholic leaders, but its practice was distinctly non-Catholic. The significance of the arbitration system lay not in its regulation of wages, but in its promotion of trade unionism. As Peter Lindert shows in his 2004 book Growing Public, European political Catholicism did not encourage the growth of the welfare state until after World War II. It was then that European Catholics decided to compete democratically with their rivals to the left rather than exclude them from politics by anti-democratic force. In Australia, B.A. Santamaria took the word of papal encyclicals seriously; for him, this meant opposition to the arbitration system as a promoter of class conflict, together with a deep suspicion of social welfare as an subversion of family responsibilities. Rundle makes much of the living wage as an Australian ideal, but as a principle separate from trade unionism it only arrived in the economically rational 1990s, with the Keating government’s 1993 industrial relations reforms.

The Australian values that Rundle evokes may have been a muddled compromise, but they were the result of real social struggles and movements – which no longer exist. But to Rundle, Australian values exist as an eternal identity slumbering in the hearts of citizens. From this perspective, conservative excesses call into automatic existence champions of ordinary life such as Kevin Rudd or Clive Palmer. At times of conservative ascendancy, the Australian left has often rallied to ideals and myths: Russel Ward’s evocation of the bush legend during the Menzies era, or Judith Brett’s discovery of the moral middle class during the Howard years. In the age of Abbott, Rundle rallies the left by evoking the spirit of the suburbs, as manifest in Clive Palmer. In truth, Australian history is not on the side of the left. Clivosaurus tells us much about Clive Palmer, but it tells us more about the contemporary Australian left.

Geoff Robinson

CONTINUE READING

This is a reply to Guy Rundle’s Quarterly Essay, Clivosaurus: The politics of Clive Palmer. To read the full essay, login, subscribe, or buy the book.

ALSO FROM QUARTERLY ESSAY

Lech Blaine
Peter Dutton's Strongman Politics
Alan Kohler
Australia's Housing Mess and How to Fix It
Micheline Lee
Disability, Humanity and the NDIS
Megan Davis
On Recognition and Renewal
Saul Griffith
Electrification and Community Renewal
Katharine Murphy
Albanese and the New Politics