Pandering to prejudice

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This was published 13 years ago

Pandering to prejudice

By Mungo MacCallum

What the punters of Rooty Hill want, they'll get - no matter how irrational.

There are times when it appears that this election campaign is no more than a contest to win the hearts and minds of a handful of drunks in the front bar of a pub in the western suburbs of Sydney.

Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott acknowledged as much last night by locating their simultaneous community forums not in the town hall of a major city but in the RSL club of a suburb 42 kilometres west of Sydney's CBD, Rooty Hill. The name, incidentally, dates to 1802 and refers to the roots of trees, not the other kind.

But whatever the proclivities of its residents, they are considered by the pollsters, spin-doctors, sociologists, astrologers and other necromancers who staff the campaign headquarters of the major parties to be the ultimate swingers - the ones whose votes on August 21 will determine who governs not only Rooty Hill, but the entire continent.

The town is conveniently centred on the electorates of Lindsay, Macquarie, and Greenway (marginal Labor) and Hughes (marginal Liberal) and is also believed to have a psychological and psephological affinity with other Labor marginals such as Robertson and Dobell on the NSW mid-north coast.

Assuming even a small proportion of these voters were listening last night, Gillard and Abbott had a lot to win or lose on their performances. Which makes it all the more perplexing that both leaders have spent most of the past 12 months treating them like mugs.

It is certainly true that the westies, as they are known with a combination of affection and derision to the commentariat, are not exactly political philosophers in the Platonic tradition. They are, in contemporary terms, the battlers - some very successful ones and some still striving to catch up, but driven more by self-interest than idealism.

They tend to get most of their news and views from the tabloid Daily Telegraph and the shock-jocks of commercial radio, neither of which are obsessively committed to intellectual diversity. But this does not mean that they should all be categorised as a sub-class of urban rednecks, incapable of rational thought.

Their battling includes a great desire for education, if not for themselves then certainly for their children. This is particularly so for the migrant communities in the west. It is easy to characterise some of the suburbs as ghettos, but the word implies a level of poverty that is simply not there. The Lebanese, Vietnamese and Chinese communities in the west are thriving and the second generation is rapidly integrating with the mainstream. But they are, or at least some are, protective of their new home ground, and this is where the less scrupulous politicians have scented an opening. John Howard's notorious slogan, "We will decide who comes into this country and the circumstances in which they come", resonated, not because it made sense, but because it confirmed the legitimacy of some immigrants over that of others.

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The susceptibility of Sydney's west to scare campaigns about boat arrivals is one reason that Abbott, with his pledge to return to the Howard policies, is so interested in the area. And Gillard has done little to counter it: she says that she understands residents' concerns.

Well, they may be understandable given the election campaign, but they are also based purely on ignorance and fear. A strong leader would explain this and seek to change the view; Gillard finds it easier to go along with it. So, an acceptance of the irrational paranoia of a misguided section of the community becomes a central and bipartisan part of a federal election, because it is easier to pander to the prejudices of the swingers than to educate them to the truth. Thus we become involved in a race to the bottom, a descent to the lowest common denominator. And having abandoned a contest of vision and ideas, the rival parties are concentrating entirely on the hip pocket.

At least they are following a well-established precedent: in 1983, when Bob Hawke was planning his march into government, he planned a campaign based on the idea of three Rs - Recovery , Reconciliation and Restoration. Then Labor Party president Neville Wran, a highly successful New South Wales premier who knew all about gathering the westies' votes, was more down to earth. "Delegates," he rasped, "it's all very well to go on with this spiritual stuff, but if those greedy bastards out there wanted spiritualism they'd join the f---ing Hari Krishna."

So the focus of the policy speech went back to tax cuts. But it would be inaccurate and unfair to suggest that those few extra dollars a week were the only reason the westies voted Labor in 1983, or that they returned to the Libs in 1996, or that they swung again in 2007.

These are the people who were christened a few years ago the "aspirational" voters, on the basis that they were concerned primarily with material advancement. Surely that matters, but their aspirations go beyond bigger McMansions and plasma television sets. They are ambitious for a better, fuller and more satisfying life on every level; but today's politicians are only willing to offer the nethermost of bottom lines.

And since the swinging westies are the target for the whole election campaign, the rest of us also become victims of this cynical and poll-driven dumbing down. In The Sydney Morning Herald last week, a letter writer, Allan Walker, summed it up neatly: "The difference between the parties is that Labor is incapable of selling success and the Liberals are very capable of selling fear."

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Mr Walker is not himself a westie, but I'll bet a lot of people at the Rooty Hill RSL last night would agree with his conclusion.

Mungo MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator.

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