Silver and Red: a history of working-class power in Broken Hill (part two)

In 1953, the Sydney Morning Herald published a series of three articles entitled ‘Broken Hill To-day’ (available here, here, and here). Written during a period when the conservative state Opposition was making a fuss about the Silver City’s culture of drinking and gambling, they provide an interesting glimpse of how the city’s unique social system was viewed by outsiders.

In the second article, it is noted that the city had thirty-nine hotels and nine licensed clubs serving a population of 32 000. There were also twelve thousand motor vehicle registrations there (roughly one per family), and Broken Hill reputedly had the highest bank savings per capita of any Australian city. This highlights the level of prosperity among ordinary people in Broken Hill. The city could also boast lower rates of drunkenness, crime, and juvenile delinquency than the state at large.

The articles also add to the picture of the BIC’s power: the writer labels the Council “the most remarkable feature of Broken Hill, apart from the line of lode itself”. The Council owned a greyhound racing track, which put on races “two Saturdays out of three” (and on the other Saturday, punters could attend the horse racing track, owned by the mining companies).

The third article describes in detail the lead bonus, which dated from a 1924 round of wage negotiations and had first kicked in when the price per ton of lead had hit £16 in 1934 – at the time of writing, it was £111, giving mine employees a bonus of £12 per week, almost one-half of which went into a superannuation account. The result of this was that miners actually earned more than the government-appointed mine inspectors.

The little workers’ utopia on the Barrier didn’t last, however. The bargaining power of workers in a mining town is very much dependent on the continuing high export prices of its commodities (in this case silver, lead, and zinc). Furthermore, the BIC’s conservative social policies would eventually bring it unstuck: its bar on married women working in unionised occupations eventually fell foul of anti-discrimination laws. After the mining companies managed to wriggle out of the six-decade-old wage negotiation arrangements in 1986, the mines’ workforce dropped to 1300 within the decade, and the city now depends on fads like eco-tourism. Macquarie Street’s nanny-statism also destroyed the city’s culture; its world-famous two-up school was closed in 1984.

Broken Hill’s exceptional system of industrial relations created an economic environment in which the city’s labour force was virtually entirely unionised, wages were high, prices were kept at reasonable levels, and BIC control of the labour market prevented capitalists from using the threat of unemployment to discipline workers. The BIC could have extended its power further: it could have established its planned network of co-operatives, or it could have used the superannuation fund created by the ‘lead bonus’ to purchase shares in the mining companies (à la the Meidner Plan, proposed by left-wing Swedish social democrats in the 1970s). Still, the working class of the Silver City achieved more freedom from capitalism than any other people in Australian history.

(Fun fact I learned while researching these posts: Srebrenica is also a silver-mining town; its name means ‘silver mine’.)

Silver and Red: a history of working-class power in Broken Hill (part one)

During the heyday of its mining industry, Broken Hill was arguably the most politically radical city in the Commonwealth. Its history provides us with a model of what an Australian model of socialism/social democracy looks like.

Following the First World War and a massive strike in 1919, the Amalgamated Miners Association, which organised the city’s miners, came under the influence of syndicalism and industrial unionism. In the spirit of the industrial unionist desire for ‘One Big Union’, it renamed itself the Barrier District of the Mining Division of the Workers’ Industrial Union of Australia, and sought to lure ‘surface workers’ (i.e. non-miners employed at the miners, such as engineers and train-drivers) away from their existing craft unions. By 1925, the city’s mines were entirely manned by union labour. In this era, the Silver City was a hotbed of left-wing radicalism. It elected to state Parliament the syndicalist sympathiser Percival Brookfield, and to federal Parliament Michael Considine, an unapologetic supporter of the Russian Revolution.

The WIUA played a key role in forming the Barrier Industrial Council in 1923. This represented a move away from its attempts to be the ‘One Big Union’ in the city’s mining industry, as it involved a truce with the unions who competed to organise the surface workers. The BIC also included the unions representing non-mine workers in the city. Such trade union peak bodies are common across Australia, but the BIC distinguished itself from most others in three main ways:

Firstly, it went to great lengths to mobilise workers to join its unions, and to similarly great lengths to enforce the closed shop in all workplaces where it organised. Four times a year, the Council would hold a ‘badge show day’, in which members of its affiliated unions were required to wear their membership badges to work, where a BIC official would inspect them, and all businesses in the town were required to show a sign in their window issued by the BIC to confirm that they only employed union labour. The Council’s efforts in this field were so successful that a 1953 report in the Sydney Morning Herald declared it “impossible…to employ non-union labour in Broken Hill for any length of time”.

Secondly, the Council as a whole, rather than its individual unions, negotiated with the mining companies, the city’s dominant group of employers. From the 1920s to the 1980s, the negotiations between the BIC and the mining companies took place, by mutual consent, outside the framework of the federal industrial relations system. One concession won during the 1920s, which bore fruit in later years, was the ‘lead bonus’, which tied workers’ wages to upward spikes in the price of Broken Hill’s lead on the London Metal Exchange, with just under one-half of the resulting bonus to be paid into a superannuation fund.

Thirdly, the Council used its power to influence the economic and social life of the city. It appointed a Prices Committee, which kept a watchful eye over the cost of living; for example, in 1941, the BIC responded to an increase in the price of beer at the city’s pubs and clubs by boycotting them. A resolution passed at a mass meeting declared that an “increase in the price of beer is a direct attack on our living standard”, and people were forced to journey to Menindee and Cockburn (over the South Australian border) to have a drink. In one of Australia’s most Catholic cities, the BIC also enforced a paternalistic labour market policy, ensuring that women found it impossible to continue working after marriage. It also usually limited work on the mines to those born or educated in Broken Hill, or married to a woman from the city.

The BIC’s original ambitions went even further, however. Its original name was the Barrier Industrial and Political Council, indicating its desire to usurp the functions of the local section of the ALP. It also planned to establish a series of co-operatives which would compete with private businesses in the city. On the other hand, it was successful in establishing its own newspaper, the Barrier Daily Truth, to counter the pro-mining company editorial line of the Barrier Miner.

What the BIC succeeded in creating was arguably the closest thing experienced in the Anglo-Saxon world to the dictatorship of the proletariat. The workers’ representatives on the Council enforced a city-wide closed shop, virtually dictated wages and prices, and were so powerful that Macquarie Street was unable to enforce six o’clock closing and other ‘blue laws’. Decisions on a variety of matters – from bread and butter wage claims to the question of supporting the Republican cause in the Spanish Civil War – were taken by mass meetings of workers rather than by union officials.

All this isn’t to say that the unions ruled Broken Hill without opposition. The mining companies were powerful, but hampered by the fact that their owners and directors didn’t live in the city. Non-Labor independents were a permanent feature on the city council, and the RSL encouraged the formation of yellow unions during and after the First World War. The BIC also faced down challenges from its left: communists at regular intervals, the unemployed movement during the Depression, and the (quasi-spontaneist) ‘job committee’ movement later in the 1930s. Nevertheless, the ‘Broken Hill model’ was, while it lasted, the most pro-worker socio-economic regime to have existed on this continent this side of 1788.

Ovens and Murray Grand Final 2013 review: Albury v. Yarrawonga at Lavington

September on the Border means two things: the world-famous Henty Field Days and an Albury-Yarrawonga grand final. For the fifth consecutive year, the Tigers and the Pigeons met at the Lavington Panthers Oval on the penultimate Sunday in September for de facto supremacy in country Victorian football.

After the eighteen-game regular season (punctuated by the league’s representative selection losing to the Mornington Peninsula League at Cardboard Oval Princes Park), Albury emerged as minor premiers; the Big Two had traded home wins in their two encounters, but Yarrawonga had dropped a further four points at Lavington in Round 15. The finals series, conducted according to the bog-standard McIntyre Final Five format and played entirely at neutral venues, then ensued, with Lavington, Wangaratta Rovers, and North Albury (captain-coached by some guy who was in the AFL once) falling by the wayside. The region’s two strongest clubs were left standing to fight it out on the second-last Sunday in September.

The Lavington Sports Club Oval Panthers Oval sits on land on the urban fringe that was once part of Hume Shire, a product of the era when virgin outer suburban land was the fashionable place to build stadiums, leading football administrators to concoct brilliant schemes likes Waverley Park. Under its former name, it hosted two NSWRL pre-season competition finals, one NSW-Victoria Sheffield Shield match, and one match at the 1992 cricket World Cup, in which Zimbabwe, newly ennobled to test status, dismissed Graham Gooch for a duck and held Ian Botham to eighteen to upset England by nine runs. It was to this Hallowed Turf that your humble correspondent would journey to witness the annual titanic struggle between two of the finest eighteens ever assembled in country football.

Earlier in the season, your humble correspondent observed Albury’s thumping victory against cross-town rivals North Albury in the Anzac Day blockbuster, noting that the Tigers’ strength derived from the combination of a strong defence, Chris Hyde’s dominance of the forward line, and the willingness of 2012 Morris Medallist Joel Mackie to Get Stuck In™. The form shown on that day, when the homeboys outclassed the mid-table mediocrity of Akermanis and Friends, evidently continued throughout the season, and the eighteen-time premiers racked up seventeen wins, the minor premiership, and a free pass to the second week of Professor McIntyre’s famous finals format.

In addition to their star recruit being relieved of Dancing With The Stars duties this season, Yarrawonga added to its ranks another ex-AFL player: Brad Ottens, late of the Cattery. The Pigeons were undefeated for most of the year, until they lost two of their last four on away trips to the Queen City of the South. They redeemed themselves by opening up an almighty can of Whoop-Ass on Lavington in the qualifying final at West Wodonga, winning by sixty-four points. Then came the second semi-final at North Albury, and an unexpected thirty-two-point Pigeons victory, spurred by an eight-goal haul by That Man Fev. Banished to the preliminary final, the Tigers travelled to Wangaratta for a derby against Lavington. In a pulsating encounter in which both sides gave 110%, went in hard, put their bodies on the line, and various other clichés of sports journalism, the Tigers came from twenty points behind in the final term to prevail by one point, and booked themselves a spot in the Big Game at the End of the Season.

Going into the match, i gialloneri were without Matt Fowler, the last survivor of their 1990s premiership hat-trick. For the men from Moira Shire, Big Fev needed ten goals to beat the goal-scoring record for an O&M finals series, and eleven to beat the record in a grand final. Brad Ottens was absent for what would have been his fourth game of the season, owing to his commitments with the Geelong VFL team in their grand final against Box Hill. A crowd of eleven thousand (one-fifth of that which patronised the world-famous Henty Field Days) filed into the Lavington Something Something Oval on a bright September-y day, including your humble correspondent, who decided to Bring Tha Noise every time Albury scored a goal by banging on the advertising signs at the far end of the field.

Pre-match entertainment was provided by some guy who was on Australia’s Got Factor or The X-Talent or some such, who regaled the crowd with his Amateur Hour version of Stereophonics’ ‘Dakota’. Topping last year’s act (man-about-television Brian Mannix belting out ‘We Can Be Heroes’ from the back of a Holden ute) evidently proved impossible for the organisers. After said Holden utes paraded local AFL identities, hall of fame inductees, and under-14s best and fairest joint second runners-up around the paddock, we were ready for some action.

The first quarter saw action at both ends. Drew Barnes opened the scoring for the out-of-towners, but Albury led by nine points at the break. Yarrawonga’s star forward began to personify his team’s frustration when he began to engage his opponents in some argy-bargy of the knee-in-stomach variety. Early in the second quarter, the Tigers hit their highest lead for the match – sixteen points – and your humble correspondent was quietly confident about their chances when they led by seven at the half.

Albury’s brilliant idea in the first half was to flood Yarrawonga’s forward line, leaving their own attacking fifty-metre arc as empty as Henty after the world-famous Field Days has left town. This didn’t net them much of a lead, and when the Tigers players began to tire in the second half, and their other brilliant tactical manoeuvre (having two defenders chaperone Fevola) failed, It All Went Pete Tong for the eighteen-time premiers.

In the third quarter, Yarrawonga started playing that High Pressure Football that turned the entire nation purple when the Dockers played it against Sydney the night before. Indeed, the stadium seemed to turn more blue and white, as the entire population of the Yarrawonga-Mulwala conurbation, who were in attendance, got rowdier. Albury ended the quarter in the red, trailing by fifteen points at lemon time.

The ‘money quarter’, as our brothers across the Pacific call it, also witnessed some action of the non-Sherrin-chasing kind. There was the usual handbags-at-twenty-paces stuff between Fevola and however many Albury defenders he wanted to take on, then a nice old brawl in the Yarrawonga forward line which would have had Mr. Demetriou and the other members of the PC Brigade frothing in their Collins Street skinny decaf lattés. To top it off, Tigers enforcer Joel Mackie gave his opposite number the kind of whack on the chin that you just don’t see nowadays outside of Greek parliamentary debates.

For the last three-eighths of the match, Yarrawonga piled on goal after goal while denying Albury any such privilege; the Tigers’ last was at the six-minute mark of the third quarter. Albury’s defence restricted Fevola to four goals, but the rest of the Yarrawonga side picked up the slack.

The Magnificent Moira-gyars were…well, magnificent, combining Fremantlesque pressure in defence with an ability to slot them through from all points in the forward fifty and beyond. Their fifteen-point lead extrapolated itself to thirty-six in the final quarter, and the Pigeons sealed back-to-back premierships. Yarrawonga’s Drew Barnes, playing in his tenth grand final in as many seasons (five for Nathalia and five for Yarrawonga), was awarded the Did Simpson Medal as best on ground, after a Toyota Magic Moments Ad-worthy performance, while Fevola cleared up any doubts about his future within days of the match by committing himself to another two seasons at the J. C. Lowe Oval.

The final score: Yarrawonga 13.12.90 defeated Albury 8.6.54.

And thus ends another season of the world’s finest provincial football league. By winning three of the four encounters between the Big Two (and two from three against the duopoly’s closest challenger, Lavington), the mob from down the river proved themselves worthy premiers.

When his team were eliminated in the elimination final, highly-paid import Jason ‘Aker the Wacker’ blasted Albury for ‘ruining the league’ with its all-star line-up. The facts on the ground, however, indicate that the good burghers of the 060 area code area aren’t at all sick of playing host to one of the biggest superclásicos in Australian sport. Your humble correspondent wouldn’t be alone in wishing for a sixth Albury-Yarrawonga decider in 2014…

The Pivotonians

Recent discussion on United States foreign policy has been focused on the idea of a ‘pivot’, i.e. the Obama Administration shifting Washington’s attention away from Europe and the Middle East and towards Asia (and ‘Asia’ in this context usually means ‘China’). This ‘pivot’ is usually presented as a Good Thing; apparently, the Middle East is doing just fine, Latin America and Africa don’t merit America’s attention, and China’s human rights record and imperialism in Africa pose no barriers to America working with it to solve whatever it is they’re supposed to be solving at these no-tie summits. An Australian scholar, Michael Fullilove, has a piece in the Los Angeles Times which serves as a good study of the mindset of the ‘pivot lobby’.

Opponents often mock neoconservative foreign policy thinkers for believing that ‘it’s always 1938 somewhere’. It’s not just the neocons, however. For anyone with an idea of what American should do and to whom it should do it, the isolationist political climate of the 1930s is always a convenient punching bag.

Fullilove wants Obama to follow in the footsteps of – guess who – FDR, who undertook “the last successful pivot” between the start of World War II and Pearl Harbor. We’ve heard this story a million times: Dieselpunk-era America was rejecting multilateralism, restricting immigration, and building tariff barriers until ‘That Man’ led the nation into a glorious future of peace, security, and progress. Fullilove’s unique take on this narrative is to focus on the work of Roosevelt’s confidants and advisors, but it still combines the Great Man Theory of history with the Green Lantern Theory of the presidency.

The first thing I took issue with in the piece is the idea that isolationism was defeated through FDR’s speechmaking, powers of persuasion, and “subtle diplomacy”. But the story of America in 1939-1941 can’t be told without mentioning the Brown Scare, a smear campaign which ruined more careers and reputations than that of Joe McCarthy. It also ignores domestic political considerations: Roosevelt’s hawkishness and anglophilia lost him votes among German-Americans and Irish-Americans, but those losses were offset by increased support among newer ethnic groups such as Jews, Poles, Czechs, and Serbs, who were registering and voting in greater numbers. Isolationism didn’t lose the battle of ideas – even before Pearl Harbor it was hounded out of the public sphere and its demographic base declined in importance.

What does this have to do with Obama and Asia? Fullilove wants to make an analogy between FDR’s ‘pivot’ and Obama’s tilt towards Asia. But he ends by reminding us that China’s rise “is in no way analogous to the rise of the Axis regimes”. Of course it isn’t: FDR made war against Germany and Japan; today’s Western leaders want to appease China. Raising the spectre of 1939 and 1941 is a rhetorical trick designed to equate opponents of China with Charles Lindbergh.

The regime in Beijing kills dissidents, uses state power to prevent its workers from organising, employs smokestack-chasing economic policies to steal industry from the West, marginalises its racial and ethnic minorities, and is presently trying to outdo Cecil Rhodes and King Leopold II in its efforts to turn Africa into one giant raubwirtschaft. Let’s save the pivoting until after there’s been some regime change in Beijing.

Voting Rights and Wrongs

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Shelby County v. Holder, in which a 5-4 majority comprising the usual suspects effectively neutered Section 5 of the Voting Rights Act.

Enacted in 1965, Section 5 requires certain jurisdictions (including Texas, the Deep South, Alaska, Arizona, and three New York boroughs) to obtain ‘preclearance’ from the Justice Department or federal judges in D.C. before making any changes to election law; such proposed changes have been vetoed 2400 times in the last four redistricting cycles. While the Court’s ruling didn’t strike down Section 5, it nullified another section of the law, rendering Section 5 void until Congress passes fresh legislation determining which jurisdictions will be covered, legislation which most observers consider unlikely to pass at all for some time.

The case originated from a 2008 municipal election in the city of Caldera, Alabama, held using district lines not precleared by the Justice Department, and which resulted in the city’s only black councilman losing his seat. Backed by the conservative Project for Fair Representation (the same group behind the recent challenge to the University of Texas’ affirmative action policies), the county, which has had 200 proposed voting changes rejected, sued to extricate itself from the provisions of the Act.

In gutting the Act, the GOP-appointed Justices and the conservative activists pushing the case may have done the Democratic Party a huge favour.

The best-known consequence of Section 5, and the one at issue in the case, is the creation of majority-minority districts. In the early 1990s, the (First) Bush Administration consciously used the preclearance power to its partisan advantage by disapproving congressional district maps lacking the requisite proportion of black-majority seats. The creation of such heavily Democratic (and often oddly-shaped) districts meant that surrounding districts were purged of African-American voters.

When elections were held using the new maps, the Congressional Black Caucus (and its Hispanic counterpart) saw its numbers swell, but the dramatic reduction of southern seats winnable by white Democrats helped the GOP sweep to majority status in the region and the nation in 1994. Today, Democrats hold 40 House seats in the eleven Confederate states, down from 67 in 1991, and similar reductions were seen at state and local level. With the Republicans benefiting from it, and the Democrats unable to risk the seats of minority congresspeople and legislators by challenging it, racial gerrymandering has become entrenched, and ensures that the redistricting process in most of the South is structurally biased in favour of the GOP.

As long as Section 5 remains inoperative, legislatures can still be forced to create majority-minority districts, but through a more time-consuming legal process. Democratic legislators in states covered by the Act can use their influence to draw districts favourable to their party, without being forced to pack super-majorities of Democrats into majority-minority districts. Without the preclearance weapon, a Republican Attorney-General appointed in 2020 won’t be able to shape the new decade’s congressional maps in the way his predecessors did.

Much of the media coverage surrounding the ruling has focused on the potential for states to enact a new wave of voter ID laws. This focus ignores the facts that the vast majority of preclearance decisions under Section 5 concern redistricting rather than laws on voter registration and identification, and that last year’s push by Republican legislators to suppress voter turnout was concentrated in presidential swing states mostly outside Section 5’s reach.

When President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act into law, he is said to have remarked that he was ‘signing away the South for a generation’. By putting the redistricting process in the region back on a level playing field, the Supreme Court may have put an end to the GOP’s takeover of Dixie.

Match review: Albury v. North Albury at Albury

For much of Australian history, the RSL and its allies in the anglophile Tory establishment conspired to make Anzac Day the most boring day of the year. No sport, no shopping, just standing around unquestioningly honouring Australian deaths fighting Other Countries’ Wars. The only consolation was that two-up was legal – which wasn’t much of a consolation because no-one plays two-up the other 364 days of the year, nor knows how to play it, nor remembers why it’s illegal in the first place. Since the mid-1990s, however, Anzac Day has become the occasion for the annual grudge match between two of the fiercest cross-town rivals in Australian sport – Essendon and Collingwood Albury and North Albury.

Football has been played in Albury since 1824, when a lack of Qantas flights forced Hume and Hovell to walk to Melbourne for the Grand Final. Since then, the Queen City of the South has been a veritable footballing mecca, producing two of the five New South Welsh Brownlow medallists and being the fulcrum of the finest league in country Victoria – the Ovens and Murray and Football League, or ‘O&M’ as she is known locally.

In the early days, football in Albury was a sectarian affair, as the city’s two O&M clubs were aligned along religious lines. The rivalry between (Protestant) Albury and (Catholic) St. Patrick’s ensured a bi-annual Old Firm Derby Down Under. By 1929, we had all melded into one big shiny, happy ethnic group called Anglo-Celtics, so Mayor Cleaver Bunton arranged for the two clubs to be replaced by geographical ones, West Albury and East Albury, who then merged four years later to create the present Albury Football Club. As Albury expanded northwards, there was a market for a second local club, and North Albury joined the league in 1947. In 1962, the city annexed itself some lebensraum from Hume Shire called the Black Range, renamed it Lavington, and watched it fill up with people after Mr. Whitlam designated the hyphenated metropolis as one of his growth areas. Lavington’s football team joined Albury and North Albury in the league in 1979, but not before a bare-knuckled fight between the VCFL (which supported Lavington) and the Victorian O&M clubs (who resented the adhesion of another club from the State of Pokies).

In recent years, the O&M has served as a retirement home for aging ex-AFL players who find that country footy is good for keeping fit in between episodes of Dancing with the Stars. Yarrawonga waltzed away with last year’s premiership with the help of former Carlton and Brisbane forward Brendan Fevola. Wangaratta Rovers are home to Big Bad Bustling Barry Hall, Albury enjoyed a brief visit from the only man in history to hold aloft both the AFL premiership cup and the Sam Maguire Cup (Tadhg Kennelly), and North Albury have this year secured the services of 2001 Brownlow medallist Jason Akermanis as playing coach.

Your humble correspondent trekked to the hallowed turf of the Albury Sports Ground, a poorly-drained, picket-fenced venue nestled between the Riverina Highway and the municipal pool, to take in this year’s event. Albury (the Tigers) had won three premierships in a row before succumbing to Fevola’s Pigeons by two goals in 2012, and had made a good start to the season, defeating Lavington, Corowa, and Wodonga. North (the Hoppers) finished last in 2012, but had won two of their first three matches, including a 117-point routing of Wangaratta the previous Saturday. Entry to the only venue in country NSW to have hosted a VFL/AFL home-and-away game (North Melbourne v. South Melbourne, 1952) was twelve dollars, and a crowd of approximately five thousand settled in for a cracking contest on the sunshine-bathed oval.

The match began in the usual fashion with the Last Post, a minute’s silence, and some local performer murdering the national anthem. Neither side wore its traditional guernsey – North’s bottle green has been replaced by peppermint and Albury were decked out in some monstrous grey and white number. Albury began the match strongly, piling on a 23-point lead by the first change. They extended their lead to thirty-three at half-time. The first two terms were marked by Albury’s dominance in the midfield, North’s reliance on their star recruit, and the mismatch between North’s forwards and Albury’s backs – themes which would be apparent for most of the match.

Then came half-time and one of the weirdest things witnessed at a country footy ground. In order to determine a winner for its raffle, the Albury Football Club in its infinite wisdom hired a helicopter to circle the Hallowed Turf late in the second quarter. After landing in the centre square to collect a box of golf balls, it returned to the skies to drop the balls onto the field; the entrant whose ticket number was on the ball nearest a flag deposited in the centre circle won the raffle. If there was a point to it all, the announcer’s explanation was drowned out by the helicopter’s blades.

Normal service resumed when the two sides returned to the field and continued much as they had in the first half. The Tigers steadily built up a lead which briefly erred on the side of ten goals mid-way through the third quarter. There then followed a purple patch for the men in peppermint. Albury’s lead was quickly reduced to thirty-five, as North kicked five straight goals, two of them scored by the Lithuanian Marvel resting in the forward line. At one stage, North got within twenty-eight points of the home side, and the Hoppers faithful started dreaming of a comeback of North Melbourne-Essendon-2001 proportions.

It wasn’t to be, and the number of visiting fans dwindled in the final quarter as they packed up their fold-out Bunnings chairs and headed home to avoid the tinny strains of ‘Yellow and Black!’ coming from the speakers. (Albury takes its club song from Richmond, not from those other Tigers downstream [Glenelg], who once celebrated victories to the refrain of ‘we’re dashing, we’re gay / we’re the pride of the bay’, until the language of Shakespeare had so evolved that ‘gay’ had come to mean something else entirely.)

A post-siren behind by Matt Fowler, the only surviving veteran of the Tigers’ mid-90s threepeat, gave Albury the win by a margin of forty-three points, 19.15.129 to 13.8.86. Thus concluded an enjoyable if mostly one-sided spectacle, and a much better way to spend Anzac Day than tossing coins in the air and filling Bruce Ruxton’s coffers. It was a commanding performance from the home side, who look Premiership Material™ after only four rounds. Boosted by reigning Morris Medallist and connoisseur of that sorely-lacking ingredient in modern football – The Biff – Joel Mackie, and lifted by a best-on-ground performance from Chris Hyde (ex-Richmond), the Tigers simply had North’s measure. As the Border Mail put it, “[t]he Tigers just don’t lose when it counts.”

For North, Akermanis was certainly one of the best players on ground. Unlike a certain other ex-AFL player in the O&M who stands in the goal square and expects the ball to be delivered to him on a silver platter, Aker gets stuck in. Jason Gram (ex-St. Kilda) went into the game with an injury and scored nothing at full-forward, Kane Godde was the match’s top scorer with five goals, while the Hoppers’ Territorian goalsneak Jethro Calma-Holt, not content simply with having the coolest name since Che Cockatoo-Collins, showed flashes of brilliance in a losing cause. The coach has attacked unnamed teammates, suggesting that the Hoppers have only four players who performed – himself, Godde, Calma-Holt, and the other one, as Lord Palmerston said of the third person besides a dead man and a madman who understood the Schleswig-Holstein Question, I’ve forgotten.

The win puts Albury second on the ladder and equal on points with Fevola-wonga, who won their Downstream Derby against Corowa by 134 points on Saturday. North, who fancied themselves after last week’s demolition of the Magpies, were brought down to earth in a big way and sit fifth, with Lavington and Wangaratta Rovers filling the places in between. The smart money would be on a fifth consecutive Albury-Yarrawonga grand final pairing, but North, Lavington, and Rovers are also contenders.

This, Mr. Demetriou, is what footy is about – twelve dollars for admission, manual scoreboards, golf balls raining down like hailstones on the centre square, drunkards yelling ‘Go Hoppers, Go, Go, Go!’, and not a calf’s blood injection in sight.

Pimp My Parliament

On September 14 this year, Australians will elect the 150 members of the House of Representatives, a number unchanged since 2001, and which has only increased by two since 1984, and by twenty-nine since 1949. By contrast, our fellow Westminster democracy across the Pacific will increase the size of its House of Commons from 308 to 338 in time for its next general election, so as to accommodate the rapidly-growing suburban areas of Ontario, British Columbia, and Alberta. On the measure most often used by political scientists to estimate the size of a country’s legislature, the cube root rule, Australia is an outlier in terms of its ratio of population to seats, and our current parliament looks even less adequate when one considers the difficulties of representing super-sized electorates such as Durack, O’Connor, Lingiari, Grey, and Kennedy.

The size of the House is a function of the size of the Senate; the constitution requires that the Representatives from the states be twice as numerous as the Senators from the states, but gives parliament some leeway in determining what formula to use. The size of the Senate, however, is entirely at the mercy of parliamentary legislation, with the proviso that the six Original States must have the same representation and at least six Senators each. On two occasions, preceding the 1949 and 1984 federal elections, parliament has increased the number of Senators per state, causing a commensurate enlargement of the House.

If Australia had the same ratio of MHRs to population as Canada or Britain, it would have between 200 and 250. New Zealand, with one-fifth our population, has 70 electorate MPs and 50 list MPs. If we adopted the sliding scale originally proposed for the United States in Article the First, we would have between 350 and 400. And having a House of 500 or 600 members would align us with Germany, France, and Italy – all nations with three times our population but a much more even spread of people.

The small size of our parliament is harmful to our democracy. It forces parties to focus on a narrow set of marginal seats in order to win office, so that every three years we get saturation coverage of the minute goings-on in Lindsay and Eden-Monaro. The small number of electorates to go around means that some are ridiculously large (remember the pre-2010 Kalgoorlie?) and lacking in community of interest (eg. Albury and Broken Hill being united in Farrer, or the Sydney-Grayndler boundary splitting Balmain from Leichhardt and Newtown from Marrickville). The small size of the House also meant that Australia’s parties couldn’t adopt the British tradition of a non-partisan Speaker. Finally, the constitutional requirement that Tasmania receive five MHRs (when its population currently hovers just over 3.5 quotas), means that the mainland states (and the ACT) are slightly under-represented, a problem which would be accentuated if Australia had states with much smaller populations than Tassie.

My proposal is that Australia imitate one of the best-governed little jurisdictions in the democratic world – New Hampshire – and elect a 400-member lower house; getting there would require an enlargement of the Senate or a constitutional amendment to break the ‘nexus’ clause. The advantages of a 400-member House of Representatives are manifold:

* smaller electorates means cheaper campaigns and more chances of winning seats for independents and minor parties whose support is geographically concentrated (eg. the Greens presently have much more chance of winning the state seat of Brunswick than the federal seat of Wills);

* more parliamentary seats means more nominations to go around for female, young, and racial minority candidates;

* smaller electorates means that geographically-concentrated racial minorities have more chance of dominating particular seats – the current federal division with the highest Aboriginal population is Lingiari (represented by white Labor MP Warren Snowdon) where they form less than two-fifths of the enrolment; with 400 seats, majority- or near-majority Aboriginal seats could be drawn in the Territory, the Kimberley, North Queensland, and north-western NSW;

* a larger House means that front-benchers would make up a smaller percentage of its members, and thus back-benchers could exert more power over their party’s leadership;

* more electorates means that redistribution commissioners would be better able to draw sensible boundaries; federal seats would better reflect the natural socio-cultural regions of our cities and states, rather than random agglomerations of different areas named after obscure historical figures.

Of course, such a proposal will always be unpopular with the general public, among whom arguments about better representation can’t compete with mindless anti-politician populism, and with politicians themselves, who would rather have 1/150^th of the federal pie than 1/400^th. Still, one can dream…

Lower the Vote!

Jonathan Bernstein makes some good points here about the proposal to extend suffrage to sixteen- and seventeen-year-olds in Takoma Park, Maryland. He makes three main arguments in favour which I wanted to touch upon here.

Firstly, he notes the oddity that teenagers are allowed to participate in politics by campaigning, lobbying, or donating, but not by voting or holding office. This is especially odd since voting is significantly easier than most other forms of political participation.

Secondly, he makes the argument that since all humans have interests, all humans should cast a vote. I agree with what he is saying, but don’t follow his suggestion that parents could be given extra votes to cast on behalf of their children. The idea of giving parents extra votes would a) cause conflict when a parent has political views different from those of their children; b) cause conflict between the parents as to who gets to cast the vote; and c) orient political debate even more towards the wants of families – every politician would sound like the 2007 campaign trail edition of Kevin ‘Working Families’ Rudd.

(On a related note, if we want to safeguard the political representation of geographical areas with high ratios of children to adults, all we need to do is draw electoral boundaries on the basis of population rather than voter registration. Australia uses the latter method, while the United States’ use of the former is currently being challenged in the courts in a case called Lepak v. City of Irving.)

Thirdly, Bernstein makes the case that voting will become a life-long habit if people can start younger. I’ve heard of research which backs up this point – in Britain, people who were eighteen years of age during a general election are more likely to continue voting for life than those who are 22 or 23 (the most probable reason is that voting, as a symbol of adulthood, is more precious to an 18yo still at school and living at home than a 22yo living away from home, owning a car, etc.). Bernstein makes a good point that if people begin voting while at university (which in the U.S., more so than in Australia, usually means living in a different place to where they grew up) they will care less about the local issues than if they were voting in their home town.

As for his suggestion of what age young people should be allowed to vote, I don’t see the problem with 12 or 14. But in the United States, where there is a clear distinction between general-purpose local governments and school districts, perhaps we could start by lowering the voting age to twelve for school board elections, and keep sixteen or eighteen as the limit for other types of poll. At the ages of twelve through to sixteen, most interaction that a person has with the state occurs through the education system, and it might solve the problems which plague school board elections in America – such as low turnout and the capturing of school districts by the Religious Right and other special interests.

The objections to lowering the voting age are easy to bat away. If teenagers don’t pay tax, don’t own property, or aren’t fully educated, it shouldn’t matter, because in a modern democracy the suffrage is no longer linked to taxation, property ownership, or education. And any predictions of the partisan effects of lowering the voting age would no doubt be proven wrong; recall that after the passage of the Twenty-Sixth Amendment, the Conventional Wisdom inside the Beltway was that the Youth Vote would defeat Nixon in 1972 (he won it by similar margins as he did the other age brackets).

Lowering the voting age seems not only the right thing to do, but also a way of diversifying political debate away from contests over who can best represent ‘working families’ and Baby Boomers. For that reason alone, it should take its rightful place as the next great battle to extend the franchise.

Elective ministries

In the early decades of Australia’s post-Federation history, one of the most common suggestions for constitutional reform advanced by progressives (i.e., the ALP, Deakinite liberals, the agrarian radicals of the early Country Party, feminists such as Vida Goldstein, and quasi-republican nationalists such as John Boyd Steel) was the idea of elective ministries. Instead of a prime minister commissioned by the Governor-General (or Premier commissioned by a Governor) appointing her own cabinet, each individual member of the executive would be voted on by the entire parliament. The idea is similar to the way the Swiss legislature elects its Federal Council, except that there the members cannot be removed mid-term. Ministers would be personally responsible to the legislature, and would not form a collective body expected to resign upon failure to secure supply, nor would they be expected to resign if they disagreed with a decision reached by the entire executive.

A similar idea would be to establish an executive committee, with the same structure as other parliamentary committees. Whichever party or coalition had a majority on the floor would have a majority in the executive committee, but the opposition would be represented and entitled to issue minority reports where it disagreed with the decisions of the committee’s majority. This would be a modern-day update of how the French Committee of Public Safety was supposed to work, had it not become the instrument of Robespierre’s personal rule. The office of minister, with all its British and monarchical overtones, would be abolished, and the entire executive committee would directly oversee the executive branch.

The idea of an elective ministry was never implemented, though it influenced the pre-Rudd practice of the ALP caucus electing its front bench. A skeletal version has made an appearance in Britain in recent years – the devolved legislatures of Scotland, Wales, and the Six Counties all elect their chief minister, who then appoints her cabinet. But the original idea has been all but forgotten, and critics of the ‘elective dictatorship’ of the Westminster system are focused on various other panaceas – proportional representation, stronger parliamentary committees, and bicameralism.

Recently, Julia Gillard was able to shore up her floundering leadership by daring Kevin Rudd to challenge her in a leadership ballot. When he shrunk from the challenge, almost all of her ministers who supported him either resigned or were replaced. Effectively, this means that as the forty-something percent of ALP MPs who support Rudd cannot serve in the cabinet, Australia is currently ruled by the faction which commands a slim majority of the caucus which holds 71 of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. The ability of the prime minister to use the monarchical powers delegated to her (dissolving parliament, appointing and dismissing ministers, etc.) has ensured that no Australian government has been defeated on the floor of the House since Fadden’s in 1941, and none has been defeated due to a back-bench rebellion since Bruce’s in 1929.

If the cabinet system were replaced with an executive committee, the ALP would have 71/150ths of its seats, and the pro-Rudd faction would receive its proportionate share of that tally. We might evolve something like the American system, but without its increasingly imperial and plebiscitary presidency. The distinction between private member’s bills and government bills would vanish, and minority factions of the majority party could combine with the opposition and cross-benchers to pass bills – as has happened in the United States recently with Hurricane Sandy relief and the Violence Against Women Act.

Cabinet government was blindly copied from Britain – just like the monarchy, the Union Jack on our flag, imperial honours, and imperial measurements. It belongs to an age when the duty of parliaments was to secure taxation revenue so that the monarch could go about his business of making war, feathering his own nest, and generally oppressing people. In a true democracy, the members of the executive – be they an executive committee or elected ministers – should carry out the will of the legislature, not the other way around.

In defence of the Second Amendment

Gun control in the United States has historically emerged in three waves. Following the post-Civil War recapture of southern state governments by white planters, Black Codes were passed, limiting the freedom of ex-slaves to reject plantation employment, vote, own land, and keep and bear arms. (This is why it was abolitionists and Union veterans who founded the NRA in 1871 – not Klansmen, as Michael Moore implies in Bowling for Columbine.)

 

The second period of anti-gun legislation was prompted by the increase in organised crime and political radicalism during the Prohibition and Depression era, and spawned measures such as the National Firearms Act. The third wave began in the late 1960s, as part of the ‘White Backlash’ against Great Society liberalism occasioned by the urban unrest of that era. Chicago Mayor Richard Daley, the scourge of anti-war protestors at the 1968 Democratic convention, testified before Congress in support of a ban, and when Bobby Kennedy declared in favour of gun control on the 1968 campaign trail, the New York Times interpreted it as pandering to the backlash, calling him “a reconditioned Barry Goldwater plugging for law and order.” Since then, the Second Amendment, like all civil liberties, has been most imperilled when politicians have chosen to whip up hysteria about crime.

 

The case for gun control rests on a series of falsehoods. Its advocates tell us that the Second Amendment is a ‘collective’ right, conveniently separating it from the ‘individual’ rights listed elsewhere in the Bill of Rights. They tell us that ‘militia’ (a term that the Founders understood as having a precise legal meaning) means the National Guard, which was created by statute in 1903. They refer to the difference between the muskets of 1791 and the semi-automatic weapons of today, but no-one would similarly argue that the First Amendment doesn’t protect online speech. They cherry-pick examples of lax state laws governing the purchase and registration of guns, but ignore the high crime rates of big cities whose gun laws are already draconian.

 

In addition, the modern push for gun control has arisen in the context of the post-1960s rise of militarised policing and mass incarceration. Anti-gun measures are promoted by politicians eager to court middle-class suburbanites with ‘tough on crime’ rhetoric. Bill Clinton’s signing of the 1994 assault weapons ban was part of his attempt to outflank the Republicans to their right on law and order issues – but the increased homicide rates experienced by American cities in the years leading up to the ban were not caused by gun availability, but largely by the War on Drugs raising the prices of cocaine and heroin.

 

The worst argument against gun ownership is the idea that guns are unnecessary, as the police will protect against crime. That’s all well and good for the wealthy, educated whites who dominate the gun control lobby, but should poor African-Americans and Latinos disarm and rely on big city police departments with histories of police brutality and institutional racism?

 

The Second Amendment reminds us that Americans were intended to participate actively in the defence of their country, rather than being at the mercy of standing armies and professional police. Its flowery, eighteenth-century verbiage evokes an era when political debate was framed in the rights-based language of Enlightenment republicanism, not the results-oriented language of technocratic neoliberalism. And aside from its symbolic value, the current Supreme Court has begun putting it to practical use by striking down some of the worst examples of its violation. With Washington debating stringent federal gun laws, the body of precedent established with Heller v. District of Columbia could be the only thing protecting Americans from the fate which befell Australian gun owners in 1996.

 

Now is not the time to nullify the Second Amendment by enacting gun control laws which don’t work and which deflect blame for crime away from the true culprits – social alienation, inadequate mental health services, mass incarceration, and the War on Drugs.