[Peakoil-announce] The party's over and Liberals will soon be history

[Alex Pollard]

A strong opinion piece from today's SMH

Alex
O4O4873828

ACT Peak Oil
http://act-peakoil.org

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http://www.smh.com.au/articles/2007/11/28/1196036982629.html

The party's over and Liberals will soon be history
November 29, 2007

Steve Biddulph:

The Liberal Party is in trauma. The corporate sector is attempting to calm 
its nerves, and even the victors in the Labor Party cannot quite believe 
the seismic change in the landscape of power. But the ramifications of last 
Saturday may be much greater than just one election won or lost. In a way 
that seems unthinkable to us now, 2007 may mark the end of the Liberal 
Party itself. It won't happen overnight, but just watch it happen.

We are so conditioned to the idea that two main parties define politics, we 
even call them left and right as if they were parts of our body. But 
parties spring up in response to the primary tensions in a certain time and 
place. In the 20th century that polarisation was capital versus labour. A 
century earlier, before even the idea of power among the working poor, 
politics was aristocrats versus tradesmen, the growing middle class of 
shopkeepers and artisans that formed the basis of the Tories.

This is no longer the central tension in modern democracies. Centrist 
governments cover all the bases, and conservative politics has begun to 
wither away. This is a change that has come late to Australia. But social 
evolution is now speeding up and even this alignment is becoming dated.

The issue of the future, coming down on us now like a steam train, is of 
course the environment, the double hammer blows of climate change and peak 
oil. Energy, weather and human misery are the factors that will define our 
lives for decades to come. You can cancel your newspaper, those are the 
only four words you need to know.

Linked to this, but compounding it in frightening ways, is the imminent 
demise of the United States economy. In fact the whisper, the subplot in 
economist circles, was that this election was one to lose. That whoever 
inherited Australia in 2007 inherited a coming economic collapse in 
globalised trade that would suck Australia and much of the rest of the 
world down with it. For two years now the best predictions have been that 
the subprime meltdown would act as merely the detonator of a much larger 
explosive charge created long ago by US consumer debt, concealed by Chinese 
and Arab investment in keeping that great hungry maw that is America 
sucking in what it could not begin to pay for. The avalanche-like fall of 
US house prices will be closely followed by the same in linked economies 
worldwide, and presage a harsh and very different world than the one we 
have lived in. In short, the party is over. We are a civilisation in 
collapse.

Labor is the right party to manage this. Despite the widespread belief 
after years of cynical politics that politicians are all the same, Rudd and 
Gillard are not in power for power's sake. I am willing to stake my 30 
years as a psychologist on this, but I think many observers have also come 
to this conclusion. Kevin and Julia, as Australia already calls them, want 
to make this country a better place for the people in it. In the coming 
times of deprivation, they have the value systems that will be needed to 
care for the sudden rise in poverty, stress, and need. They also have the 
unity.

So what will be the new polarity in future elections? It's the ecology, 
stupid. The Greens will emerge as the new opposition, though this will take 
probably two election cycles. By the 2010 election, 20 per cent will vote 
Green, simply because peak oil and climate catastrophe will have proven 
them right, and thinking people will see the need for austerity now for our 
children's tomorrow. The Liberal Party will be lucky to attract 30 per 
cent, which is the habitual, rusted-on portion of the community that thinks 
greed is good.

By 2014, we will have a struggle between a new left and right - Labor and 
Green - and the issue will be simply how green, how to balance the need for 
a much simpler and more communal kind of life, with the need to give people 
comfort and amenity now. This issue will continue to define life for the 
rest of this century.

Climate change will bring horrific costs this century unless a global 
effort is rallied in a way that has never been done before to regulate our 
gluttonous use of the air and water. Perhaps a billion lives are at risk, 
let alone 2 to 3 billion refugees, as agriculture and water supplies 
collapse across southern Asia and elsewhere, and producer countries, like 
Australia, find they can barely feed themselves.

The big lie of Liberal supremacy was economic management. In fact, they 
knew how to generate income, but not how to spend it. We could have been 
building what Europe built in this past decade - superb hospitals, bullet 
trains, schools and training centres, low cost public transport of 
luxurious quality, magnificent public housing. We pissed it all away on tax 
giveaways and consumer goods. On bloated homes that we will not be able to 
cool or heat, or sell, and cars we won't be able to afford to drive. A 
party based on self interest may evaporate along with our rivers and lakes, 
and have no role to play in a world where we co-operate or die.

Steve Biddulph is a psychologist and author.