SO THE PRIME MINISTER MADE a speech. As speeches go, it’s not actually that bad, speaking as someone who’s drafted notes for a few of them. Addresses the topic, makes some good noises, intelligently mentions the subject of the speech, isn’t boring. And since it seems to address precisely the experiment I’m taking with my life for the next little while, that of not entirely working, and doing some study, it’s of particular interest.

I’ll admit that it does come across a little bit too much as the Nightride bus of meaning, which has had to endure the 11pm-4am shift of habitual language, and has had the suffering drunks of pandering to slow readers vomit their half-digested cliché all over the back seats. Sure, it gets you where you want to go—but then you want to brush your teeth and have a shower. I think if I read the phrase “forwards not backwards” again I’ll go out and throw myself under a vehicular unit of public transport infrastructure. The front end, not the back end.

But that’s pure aesthetics, and I give credit to the nameless speechwriter who’s had to deliver a mulligrubber to the intellectual and reading level of the Press Gallery. Unashamed materialists, like your correspondent, enjoy reading it again to see what the PM’s actually said. There’s been a bit of discussion elsewhere about this fruity section:

The Greens have some worthy ideas and many of their supporters sincerely want a better politics in our country. They have good intentions but fail to understand the centrepiece of our big picture—the people Labor strives to represent need work.
And the Greens will never embrace Labor’s delight at sharing the values of every day Australians, in our cities, suburbs, towns and bush, who day after day do the right thing, leading purposeful and dignified lives, driven by love of family and nation.

First things first: who’d have thought it was outrageous that a Leader of a particular political Party might express her opinion that hers had the best policies? I’m unreliably told the reporting of these paragraphs had Greens staffers in Canberra in tears. Bizarre. It’s a simple fact; the Greens do not understand the Labourist fixation on economic growth and employment, any more than the ones in this State share the misunderstood folk history of Jack Lang and the Depression that scarred the NSW ALP: it’s deliberate, and from a certain point of view, laudable. The Greens agenda places economic production and the employment-rate firmly second, behind environmental sustainability. That’s who they are, and none should be ashamed proclaiming it. No Jobs On A Dead Planet, as I recall the slogan goes.

But really. Do Easts supporters take offence when the Wests Tigers declare they’re better football team, and more likely to be finalists? I mean, more than the usual level of offence Roosters fans take at anything?

Speaking personally, until now, I’ve shared that morbid horror of unemployment with the Labourist Australians the Prime Minister lauds, and going along, broke, to job interviews, remains a peculiar hatred of mine. In no other section of adult life are all participants expected to debase themselves quite so thoroughly, or play quite so pompous roles, or tell quite so many outrageous lies. “Yes, I have a great deal of experience in the area”, “you’ll be glad to hear this job offers career opportunity and a competitive salary”, “we value a team ethic in this office”, “yes, the position as you’ve described it coincides very much with my own personal interests”, and so on. Perhaps this is a white-collar failing, but I doubt it. A highly sensitive ethic of unwork may be my anti-Weberian revenge against capitalism.

Second, and more important, there’s an ominous conflation in Gillard’s speech of Australian sentiment, and of purpose and dignity more generally, with paid work, and with “Australian values”, whatever they are when they’re at home, that simply can’t be maintained if you know the first thing about the Australian settlement, Australian labour trends, or the mythology and history of the Labor movement. Or, to be honest, if you know anything about working.

Quite apart from the uncontroversial truth that most jobs are by definition not what any autonomous person would rather be doing with their time—therefore requiring cash payment in return—and are more often than not unpleasant to some degree, there’s the basic tenet of feminism that work, is work, is work, whether you’re paid for it in money or in security or Good Onya Mum advertisements. It uses up time at exactly the same rate.

Most to the point, as in my previous post, paid employment crowds out the unpaid. The less power you have over determining the former, even less you have in allowing time and energy for the latter—where reside the most of most people’s sense of dignity and independence. In the Labor Party mythos, it was the late-nineteenth century hyper-masculine itinerant workers who most embodied the values the Prime Minister claims to share:

[Labor] prizes the great Australian tradition of informality and rejects the sort of snobbishness and obsequiousness that infect other societies…

Shearers, most notably, but any high-skill, highly-productive, labour-intensive area would have fit the bill. If she or he was a historian, or knew anything at all about the past, the Prime Minister’s speechwriter would have known that this tradition of informality and forthrightness has an economic and structural basis. If you can tell your authority figures to go to Hell, it’s probably because you’ve got some other card in your hand. Because you can afford for them to tell you that you’re sacked, for instance, you have private income or savings, a skill with valuable scarcity or experience at a particular task, to say nothing of organised unionism.

Instruments like Work For The Dole, and the ABCC, on the other hand, represent exactly a demand for obsequiousness, obedience, and subordination from workers to quasi-lawful authority. A decent and moral Australian polity would describe them for exactly what they are, an affront to the independence and dignity of workers, quietly forget the former, and noisily abolish the latter.

But back to the Prime Minister’s assertion before, and let’s see if you, reader, notice my addition.

the people Labor strives to represent need power to determine their conditions at, their ability to access, and their rate, if hired, of work

See it? And it’s a small, privileged, exercise of that power, I hope, which is exactly what this experiment in cooking blogging will be. Continue, reader, as I Un-Work For The Un-Dole, embracing un-Labour’s delight.

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