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Yesterday I did an interview with Jan Goldsmith and Chris Ritter’s book show,Published Or Not. It’s on3CR, Melbournes venerable community radio station, which broadcasts from a higgledy-piggedly terrace on Smith St in Fitzroy the heart of grungy, groovy Melbourne. Sure, the floor moves terrifyingly under your feet as you walk up to the studios, but it’s one of the most chilled-out friendly media organisations I’ve ever visited.
3CR, it turns out, was created after Gough Whitlam opened up the airwaves in the 1970s. I was told that it was created by a bunch of what are known disparagingly among political hacks like myself as Trots the equally higgledy-piggeldy assortment of far-left groups who think of the Labor Party as being almost as reprehensible a bunch of fascists as the Liberals.
I went on the show when I launched Disco Boy as well, and visiting their headquarters reminded me of the great things that can spring from politics. Clearly, the place was started by a bunch of unreconstructed idealists, as is made abundantly clear by the multicoloured assortment of bumper stickers on their wall advocating a cavalcade of lost causes. Clearly, theyre strapped for cash, and have been ever since they went on air in 1976. And the shows are presented by an eclectic assortment of passionate volunteers, which is more than evident from the range of people they work with. According to 3CR’s website, they include:
Some of theaffiliated organisations are Hepatitis C Council, Vic Jazz Club, Yarra Bicycle Users Group, Federation of Community LegalCentres, Anarchist Media Institute, CFMEU Building Division and the Bouyancy Foundation.
Anarchists, cyclists, jazz aficionados and well, I dont know if the Bouyancy Foundation represents a surname, a typo, or a foundation who is devoted to distributing lifejackets. What a remarkable mix.
Most radio stations are either commercial organisations whose primary purpose is to sell advertising for profit, or government stations which, extremely worthwhile as sources of news and entertaiment, have a certain uniformity of style.Whereas 3CR gives anybody from teenagers to retirees the chance to pitch a programme its effectively open-source, user-generated content from an age long before the internet.
One of my reasons for wanting to write a novel about politics is that I wanted to try and explore my own ambiguous feelings about the subject. And creations like 3CR fall firmly in the “benefits” column as evidence of the kind of extraordinary things politicians can do with a stroke of a pen. An entire ecosystem was created around this radio station that still flourishes, 34 years after its foundation, simply because a politician decided the airwaves should be open to community groups.
This election, by contrast, has involved a dispiriting lack of vision on both sides, who have kept their visions as minimalist as possible in order to give their opponents nothing about which to run attack ads. Vision are in short supply, and instead we are given platitudes and scare campaigns. My novelComradesis full of the characters who will go on to thrive in this kind of environment and yet the dilemma is that without being willing to play these sorts of games, it’s become increasingly impossible to get into a position of power to begin with.
All we can do is hope that when they’re actually in office, our politicians’ actions will differ substantially from their campaign rhetoric and in truth, they usually do. Because when politicians do something good, like the decision to establish community radio, the benefits of that one decision can flow for decades, giving hundreds of aficionados in stations like 3CR a place to pursue their interests and obsessions free from the restrictive logic of regular broadcasting. And that gives the likes of me a place to go and talk about their novels, spurred on by the knowledge that at least a few people out there are genuinely interested.
So while they may argue about turning around the boats as part of the ongoing effort to establish Fortress Australia, we should at least give our leaders credit for freeing our airwaves.
It was very considerate, I thought, of Julia Gillard to time her election to coincide with the launch of my book about a student election. And given its theme of political ruthlessness, it was even more considerate of her to depose the elected Prime Minister in a palace coup a mere month before its release date. There’s nothing like a bit of cross-promotion to really give your product a boost. Sales of Comrades should receive a substantial boost, I reckon, and also of knives.
Since both Gillard and Tony Abbott are both former student politicians, with Abbott a former President of the Students’ Representative Council at Sydney University, which is the prize on offer at the end of the fictional election I’ve written about, it seemed like a dream marketing opportunity, especially since my colleagues at The Chaser are back on the ABC with an election show , for which I’m writing. But it seems I have a lot to learn when it comes to electoral cross-promotion.
I’ve done my best, but the poll-themed book that’s been making headlines is Campaign Ruby, by a certain Jessica Rudd. Its plot are remarkably close to the events of late June – a popular male Prime Minister is deposed by his ambitious female deputy. When you realise that she must have started work on it last year, it’s either spooky, or proof that this scenario has long been a topic for conversation around the Rudd family dinner table.
In fact, it makes me wonder whether Rudd and Gillard cooked up this whole backstabbing thing as a particularly sophisticated form of cross-promotion for Jessica’s book, and that Kevin will soon return to the fold, all having being forgiven. The launch is even being held on the day of the ALP Campaign Launch, and in the same town – Brisbane.
There are still two and a half weeks left of the election campaign, though, so all may not be lost. Clearly, I need a publicity stunt of my own. I could try to engineer a dramatic spill on the campus of Sydney University, but I’m not sure even the majority of students would care much about that. Perhaps I could get Tony Abbott to agree to another debate with Julia Gillard, about the merits of my book on a very special edition of First Tuesday Book Club?
But these are forlorn hopes. The best way to make headlines, of course, would be to usurp Jessica Rudd’s position. I’m not quite sure how to achieve that, but I’m sure Bill Shorten could give me a few ideas.
If I could somehow be acclaimed as the author of Campaign Ruby as well as Comrades, I would be unquestionably the nation’s premier author of election-related fiction released in August 2010. And I have to admit, I thought that title would be mine automatically.
When I was an undergraduate, the Left managed to topple the right-wing SRC President because he’d handed out beer during his campaign, or something allegedly improper along those lines. And I bet Jessica Rudd will be handing out beer at her launch in Brisbane, just before election day. Stay tuned.
Last night, my competitor’s father attempted to heal the wounds others had inflicted on him in the course of a classy interview with Phillip Adams. He self-effacingly stated that there were more important things at stake in this election than the future of K Rudd. He’s right. And in my opinion, my book is one of them.
I seem to be airing quite a few of my secret shames in this week’s blog articles. While I’m making confessions, here’s an even more embarrassing one. I was a student politician myself. It wasn’t my fault, honestly. It was just a rort that went wrong, honestly! That’s all. Let me explain how.
In elections for the Sydney University Students’ Representative Council, there are strict funding limits, and you can get audited. But when I ran to be an editor of the student newspaper Honi Soit in 1998, it occurred to us that if we ran for other positions using the same name (“Xpress for Honi”, named nerdily after the then-industry leading desktop publishing software, QuarkXPress), we could increase our limit. And so it was that we also ran as XPress for SRC and NUS (the National Union of Students).
We didn’t campaign for the SRC election specifically, but we blanketed the university with Honi materials. And somehow or other, I got ten or so primary votes – I’ve no idea why. And even more strangely, I got a few other people’s preferences from within our ticket. And so I got a phone call at 3am on election night from my friend who was working on the count to tell me that I’d been elected the very last of the thirty-odd representatives, by something like a third of a vote.
I took my responsibilities seriously, mind you. I attended every council meeting I could, and not just for the free Turkish pizza they handed out to try to get people to turn up. They didn’t, unfortunately – the meetings were almost always inquorate. But the Turkish pizza was darn tasty.
And that was it. My student politics career – over. I didn’t accomplish much, other than getting the SRC to upgrade our computers. But I’d like to think by not taking any of it terribly seriously, I faithfully represented the intentions of all who voted for me.
Not that I think student politics is unimportant, mind you. Some of the battles being fought were crucial, such as the attempts to oppose voluntary student unionism, to make the HECS system more equitable and to make Youth Allowance slightly less of a pittance. It’s just that I figured the proper student pollies were already on the case, and that I could contribute off to one side, making jokes.
In some ways, then, my book Comrades is a little hypocritical when it mocks those who serve in the trenches of our student organisations. But that’s permissible, I think. After all, I was once a politician.
I’ve always been interested in politics. There, I said it. I can’t explain it, exactly – maybe I received a blow to a particularly vulnerable quadrant of my head at an early age. Or maybe I’ve just never had a sufficiently interesting social life. But for me, politics is as fascinating as sport, only without the rules or pretensions to decency.
As a child, I thought Bob Hawke was awesome, the way every kid idolises the Prime Minister who was in office when they were in primary school. I simultaneously believed that Ronald Reagan was awesome, which goes to show just how naive I was. And I was genuinely frightened of that horrible man with the bushy eyebrows who wanted to take over from the nice Mr Hawke.
It didn’t last. Cynicism set in during my teenage years, to the point where one day, in my early thirties, I would confront that same eyebrowed man, who turned out not to be so scary after all. At the time, I was dressed as a rabbit. And while I can’t remember the veneer of topical justification for dressing up in such a ridiculous costume with my colleagues from The Chaser, I’m sure it was terribly satirical.
In my university days, it all seemed so simple. Education should be free, I was sure of it, because I didn’t see why I should have to pay for it. Health care should be free too – a basic human right, wasn’t it? I didn’t quite know who would pay for it all, but that was a minor detail.
But gradually, I came to realise that to make all these lofty goals possible, it was necessary to win elections, and that disappointingly, far too few people agreed with my point of view for that to happen. To get to change anything at all, you had to compromise. so as to appeal to more of the electorate. You had to tell them what they wanted to hear, even if you didn’t entirely agree with it. But how much? Where was the line in the sand, the point at which you were willing to walk away?
Last year, Malcolm Turnbull decided that he wasn’t willing to scupper the minimal emissions trading scheme that he’d helped to develop in order to stave off a leadership challenge. And so he’s on the backbench today, watching as Tony Abbott contests the election. But those who are willing to take a stand that endangers their personal ambition are few and far between, and were Turnbull a slightly less stubborn man, I wonder whether even he would have done it.
The difficulty of knowing when to take a stand and when to compromise is at the heart of why I decided to write a novel about student politics. For me, university was a simpler time, a time when we could protest and shout, bathed in the glow of absolute certainty that we were right, and that those who disagreed with us were not only wrong, but evil.
But even then, our would-be leaders resorted to shonky deals to try and grab control of the relatively insignificant institutions on our campus. And I looked on disappointedly, and wondered if it had to be that way. Ten years after I left university, when some of the people I knew back then have gone on to run the country, Comrades is my attempt to find an answer.
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