When Angus Taylor talks values, and his gang repeat him, it’s all about rhetoric, with zero substance.
Like most management consultants, Taylor probably doesn’t actually believe in anything, except making money and keeping clients on the hook. So what was that values statement all about?
The context is that Angus Taylor was freshly elected Liberal leader when he felt compelled to make a statement about migration, on which One Nation had outbid the Coalition for extremism on the already extreme political right.
It should have been uncontroversial for Taylor to argue that ‘immigrants’ should ‘adhere to core beliefs in democracy, the rule of law and basic freedoms’. It is a paraphrase of an ‘Australian values statement, signed by temporary and permanent visa applicants’ referring to ‘freedom of speech and religion, commitment to the rule of law, equality of opportunity and the idea of a “fair go”’. See the Home Affairs site for that value statement.
And it wouldn’t have been controversial if Taylor had not been addressing the entire electorate instead of clarifying this was a rebuke solely for Muslim immigrants on behalf of Israel, which is exerting alarmingly successful pressure on Australian politicians to do its bidding, under the pretext of acting on antisemitism.
What does Angus Taylor mean by values?
It would be easy to assume Taylor has no idea what values are. Or at least only a consultant’s ideas. You get together a management team, brainstorm management word salad, and come up with a values statement that sounds meaningful, but becomes just some words printed on marketing materials and in annual reports. Everyone knows the statement is meaningless, and that the actual values are only ever expressed in what the management team actually does, and how that translates into organizational culture.
‘Values’ are probably merely a branding exercise as far as Taylor is concerned. They cannot be enforced, and they will forever be ambiguous enough to fit any specific circumstance, or to offend against any specific circumstance.
What does Angus Taylor mean by democracy?
We can assume he means the Australian system of Westminster-style representative parliamentary democracy, but also the oligopoly system in Australia by which new entrants into politics face steep hurdles, and in which, for the past 80 or so years, the ALP and the Coalition have enjoyed a virtual duopoly of political power.
So, Taylor’s democracy is a condition in which the Coalition is guaranteed a place at the table, no matter it suffered its worst election defeat since 1944 at last May’s federal poll. No matter the electorate has decisively rejected the Coalition’s right wing extremism. And no matter that One Nation is apparently more popular than the current Coalition parties.
It could be said that Angus Taylor conceives of democracy as his own political privilege, fixed as a static condition impervious to change, or the need to reinvent his party and its policies. There is no need to listen to the electorate, because that electorate will always turn back to the Coalition again. And that is indeed the experience of the past. Whether it will hold for the future is yet to be seen. We might get a foretaste of things to come at the South Australian election next month.
What does Angus Taylor mean by rule of law?
Here’s where things get tricky for Taylor. His intent might well have been to preach obedience, but the rule of law is a concept that is unforgiving in requiring that everyone is subject to law, which is clearly not the case in Australia.
Continuous, highly visible, and completely unpunished corruption in the private and public sectors is probably the most embarrassing failure of democracy and the rule of law in Australia. Whether it’s watergate (Taylor’s own weak spot), sports rorts, car park rorts, Robodebt, banking frauds against customers, natural gas and groceries price-gouging, wage theft, or a seemingly endless list of white collar crimes, there seems to be zero accountability under law for the rich and powerful.
And everyone knows that accessing the law is deliberately priced on such astronomical scales that most citizens cannot possibly afford legal proceedings, making it quite plain that the law is designed to serve only the wealthy, and usually only in order for the wealthy to subvert or frustrate the intention of the laws they go to court to dispute.
In that context, mentioning the rule of law seems to be no more than Angus Taylor saying ‘obey’. Unquestioningly. Blindly. Whatever the demand by whatever bureaucrat, cop, or media commentator. Not a remote reflection on how corrupt such authority figures can be. And an obedience now anchored in the most authoritarian restrictions on assembly and speech since federation. Laws that might have been enacted by a Labor government, but only after a hyperventilating, neurotic campaign by the Coalition and News Corp media assets demanding exactly that. And even then only after Israeli counter-intelligence efforts were put into overdrive to prevent criticism of its Gaza genocide, justified as an illogical and contradictory effort to fight antisemitism. As if antisemitism were remotely related to any critique of Israeli fascism and its Gaza genocide.
What does Taylor mean by ‘basic freedoms’?
‘Basic’ is the key word here. Freedom to practice religion, so long as ‘we’ (being the born-to-rule set) approve of the way it is practised. Freedom to live the consumer, wage slavery life we prescribe for the lesser classes. Freedom to vote once in a while for a variant on the same economic policy of wealth concentration and inequality supported by all major, established parties.
Freedom to regard oneself either as part of the master race of white Christian nationalists, or the naturally lesser class of middle class people that have to be suffered to guarantee there is an upper class at all. But the corollary is that most people are invited to frind their freedom in being worker drones, ‘bludgers’, ‘abos’, ‘wogs’, and ‘refos’, with all of them expected to acknowledge a born-to-rule aristocracy of predominantly (but not only) Sydney-based spivs, distinguished by nothing more than the moneyed families they were born into, and the privilege that comes with money and the old boy network of private school chums looking out for each other all their lives. In that regard Australia is hardly different to Britain or the USA, where such class distinctions are also played out, and played upon, but we’ve never yet confronted this reality openly.
So, Angus Taylor wasn’t really talking about values at all. He was talking about Patrician expectations of an obedient mass of Plebeians.
Note: if some of the derogatory terms used here seem alien or abhorrent, keep in mind that most politicians are older than 50, and grew up in the 1980s or 1990s, when such words were quite commonplace even in public debates.
What are actual values?
Values aren’t rules to be obeyed or enforced. They are, as the word says, qualities actually valued by a majority of people, and reflected in how they behave, not how police, jurists, politicians, or any other authority figure would like them to behave. Moreover, they vary greatly by locality, or community. There is no common ground across localities or states. But we might guess that values are driven by economic pressures, particularly among those who are scraping by, or just subsisting.
This absence of common Australian values possibly caused a belated recognition in the political class, reflected in the sudden decision by state and federal education ministers that ‘values’ would be taught in school. As a desperate effort to be seen to be addressing antisemitism, but maybe also to create some sort of common ground in the formerly free-for-all, market-driven social consciousness of children and their parents. Whether school indoctrination can reverse the ideological capture of class consciousness, and its radicalization, is another question altogether. No one whose experiences don’t match the ‘values’ talked up like cheap marketing patter by politicians will adopt those empty phrases just because they’re told to.
The ‘values’ to be ideologized in schools include all of Taylor’s euphemisms, plus the ‘fair go’, whatever that is supposed to mean, given it seems to have been abolished during John Howard’s long ascendancy. Howard’s signal achievement was to commended to us all the market virtues of mean-spirited selfishness, spite, and culture war contempt for people we’ve never met: all the demographics already mentioned with pejoratives above, and today conveniently classified as ‘woke’, or ‘radicalized’, to avoid the odium of the people using such terms being unambiguously identified as the bigoted, prejudiced xenophobes they are.
It seems like Angus Taylor jinxed himself by talking values at all, since the outcome has been to draw attention to the fact that the only widely shared values at the top of the town are about engaging in and profiting from corruption. And the values lower down the class hierarchy are anyone’s guess. They range from compassion, cooperation, and the old fair go, meaning giving everyone a chance, to hatred and spite for everyone and everything not immediately beneficial to a local clan, congregation, or community. The first set of values probably leads its adherents to vote against the right wing extremists of the Coalition, and beyond. The second set probably has its adherents switching to right wing extremism even more extreme than the Coalition. Leaving Angus Taylor’s Coalition appealing solely to the fantasy world proposed by News Corp propagandists, and a narrow group of patrons and cronies.
Lest this be seen as too one-sided a viewpoint, let’s reflect for a few seconds on the ALP’s profligate surrender to Israeli propaganda demands. This is how federal education minister Jason Clare represented that surrender to The Australian:
‘“We are the best country in the world, and part of the reason for that is the value we place on things like democracy, the rule of law, basic freedoms and just a fair go,’’ Mr Clare told The Australian after the meeting.
‘“It’s what helps hold us together, and make us who we are. It’s something we pass from one generation to the next – that’s why this work is so important.’’’
Hold us together, as in ‘social cohesion’. So cohesive our children are to be indoctrinated with ideological lies that don’t bear scrutiny. It means that Labor’s idea of social cohesion is something that has to be coerced and compelled. And that means these are not Australian values at all.
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