Australia: unmaking of a woman prime minister

S P SETH

Last year when Australia’s then-prime minister, Julia Gillard, made a speech in the parliament accusing the opposition leader, Tony Abbot, of misogyny, it went viral over the internet; making Gillard the poster-girl of the feminist world. It resonated with many women all over the world who have been patronized and put down by men in different situations. Gillard had it with Tony Abbot for all the invectives in the world he had used against her in her position as the country’s first woman prime minister. The last straw probably was when he said in the parliament that it was “another day of shame for a government [led by Gillard] that has already died of shame”; seemingly endorsing a jibe by a shock jock (radio host), given to outrageous comments about Julia Gillard, including that her father had died of shame because of her daughter’s lies.

The opposition leader, Tony Abbot, had also appeared in public with his supporters carrying placards with signs saying, “Ditch the bitch.” Another shock jock, sympathetic to the opposition party, had asked her point blank if her male partner, living with her, was gay. His argument was that since her partner was once a hairdresser, he must be gay because they generally are. She was taken aback, and just dismissed the question as absurd.

Australia is a sexist society, and the country couldn’t handle the fact that they, for the first time in the country’s history, had a woman prime minister. Her problems started when she became prime minister in a Labor party coup that removed Kevin Rudd as the party leader and hence the country’s prime minister. Rudd had brought his party out of political wilderness after 11 years of conservative rule under John Howard as prime minister, in which the latter even lost his parliamentary seat. His axing by the Labor party and replacement by Julia Gillard, came as a shock to many people in Australia, especially as the coup was led by a woman. And Julia Gillard never really recovered from it. She became, in some ways, the Lady Macbeth of the Australian politics.

And it didn’t help much when the elections held in 2010, that might have legitimized her, returned a hung parliament with Prime Minister Julia Gillard ruling with the help of a few independents and Greens. Which made her position even more precarious. She was seen as shifting her position out of political exigency (and not principles), and increasingly appeared untrustworthy, further reinforcing the Rudd-betrayal factor. Even though the legislative achievements of her government have been impressive, her political image never recovered. Indeed, it got worse in opinion polls.

Why did that happen? First of all, because of the divisions in the ruling Labor Party. Rudd refused to take his axing lying down, continuing to haunt Gillard by challenging her leadership. Even though losing in early leadership challenge he kept up the flag of revolt, finally wearing her down and winning the leadership by a convincing margin; and returning as Prime Minister to prepare for the new elections in a few months. Gillard, as prime minister, was in a constant state of fighting off not only Rudd and his supporters within the party, but also the opposition that was constantly hammering the message of her untrustworthiness and incompetence.

At the same time, she was also managing a minority government, responsive to a handful of independents and Green MPs pushing their own political agenda. And all this, even while suffering the slings and arrows only a woman prime minister had to suffer. Some of the invectives, slander and insults hurled at her were never experienced by a man as Australia’ prime minister. For instance, at a Liberal party (opposition) dinner in a Brisbane restaurant, the menu contained a special dish with servings of Julia Gillard’s sexual parts. It is gross and revolting but was explained away as a private joke between the owner and his son.

Politically ensnared on all sides, she was constantly experimenting with all sorts of messages for a breakthrough, only compounding her image of being shifty and incompetent. Towards the end she tried to rally women voters around her. At a women’s forum she dwelt on the spectacle, time and again, of a revolving door of Australian politics where men in blue ties continue to replace each other. And it backfired with a 7 per cent fall in opinion poll among men voters, and a negligible increase among the women.

Increasingly, one opinion poll after the other was suggesting a virtual wipe out of her Labor party in the elections a few months away. She was simply failing to connect with the voters as they appeared to have switched off in favour of the opposition led by Tony Abbot. Even as she looked like leading her party into virtual oblivion, her nemesis, Kevin Rudd, appeared to be the only one with the necessary popular appeal to retrieve the situation, possibly saving the party from a political catastrophe.

In a graceful short speech following the loss of her leadership, she didn’t over-emphasize her gender as a factor in her political demise. She said that being a woman didn’t explain all her political problems, though her gender did explain something about her situation. In other words, it certainly contributed to her political demise, though analysts would debate its relative role in the time to come.

In the meantime, Kevin Rudd’s return as Prime Minister has electrified the Australian political scene with his own personal popularity gaining by a 22-point over the opposition leader, Tony Abbot. And, according to a recent opinion poll, the two political parties, the ruling Labor Party and the conservative opposition, are now pegged at 50 per cent each on Australia’s preferential voting system. And if this upward trend continues it won’t be surprising if the Labor Party were to romp once again into power, as it did in 2007, under Kevin Rudd as Prime Minister.

What is it that makes Rudd into a game changer? To put it simply, he has a charisma that exudes optimism in another wise relentless atmosphere of political negativity. And people relate to it, because they are sick and tried of being fed negativity. His problems will start after the elections if he is elected Prime Minister because, as happened not long after his 2007 win, while he is good on the message he is not so good at translating it into action. He is a one-man show, not good at delegating. He is also over-bearing, as many of his cabinet colleagues testified after he was axed in 2010. But Rudd is promising to be a changed man but that would remain to be seen.

     

Egypt’s deepening crisis

S P SETH

Egypt is once again in turmoil. The large scale popular protests,  said to have been bigger than those against Hosni Mubarak, sought nothing short of Morsi’s removal. As one protester said with jubilation, after Morsi’s removal, that, “he (Morsi) was Mubarak with beard.” What she seemed to mean was that he was simply seeking to establish dictatorship of the Muslim Brotherhood to replace the Mubarak’s system. This was the biggest fear of the people opposing Morsi. But the military’s intervention to remove a democratically elected president sets a dangerous precedent for the country’s evolving democracy.

Egypt, the Middle East’s largest Arab country and the epicenter of its culture, has been turned upside down in the last two years. What started as an inspiring revolution against the country’s three-decade old dictatorship of Hosni Mubarak seems to be losing its way, not knowing where it is headed? This is not unusual, though, because history tells us that revolutions rarely follow a straight line. A revolution generally springs from a spontaneous people’s movement with disparate leadership and a smorgasbord of causes. Hence, it is not always possible to channel or dictate its course.

This is what we find in Egypt today. A people’s movement against a much-hated dictator, Hosni Mubarak, was sought to be controlled and channeled into Islamic politics of the Muslim Brotherhood through its Freedom and Justice Party. They won the elections last year, not by a large margin, and felt that they now had the mandate to run the country to their Islamic prescriptions. They railroaded a new constitution to reengineer the country’s politics and society against much opposition. They started putting their opponents as well as critics in jail. They started stifling the media, and put their own people in charge of institutions to advance their political agenda. They found themselves at odds with security agencies, judiciary and bureaucracy. And increasingly the country lost its revolutionary élan and cohesion, polarizing people into Muslim Brotherhood supporters and the rest. Which burst out into a spontaneous people’s movement, this time focused on President Morsi of the Brotherhood who seemed to have turned many people against him in one year that took Hosni Mubarak over 30 years to accomplish.

An important reason for this was that the Muslim Brotherhood and its Freedom and Justice Party, having won the elections, believed that they had overcome the legal hurdle of being a proscribed movement for much of their existence over the decades; and now had a mandate to re-create Egyptian society and polity into their Islamic image. And they were in a hurry to do this after having gone through so many sufferings for their beliefs, with their leaders hunted down, jailed and tortured over the years.  In their hurry, they failed to realize, or didn’t want to realize, that the Egyptian revolution against Hosni Mubarak was a spontaneous popular movement of disparate causes united only by a desire to get rid of the hated dictator. Therefore, any political alternative by way of democratic elections, whatever the results, had to be a consensual arrangement, a broad church, if you like. The Muslim Brotherhood was against sharing power, as it would have involved compromising their ideology.

While the Morsi regime was busy entrenching itself in power, the economy was in free-fall; with inflation up, investments down, unemployment up, foreign reserves reaching the bottom of the barrel and the list goes on. An important source of income and employment for people in the tourist sector has virtually dried up. In other words, the Freedom and Justice Party has nothing positive to show. No wonder, the popular protests in Tahrir Square and elsewhere in Egypt’s main cities were reportedly even bigger than that against Hosni Mubarak.

Where will it go from here? If the Muslim Brotherhood’s public pronouncements, and the protests to bring back Morsi, are anything to go by, one might expect more trouble ahead. They strongly believe in the legitimacy of their president and do not seem in any mood to accept the military-decreed new political order. And this time it is the Muslim Brotherhood staging protests. Its supporters feel cheated of their rightful democratic victory last year. And some of them, among the throngs of its supporters, have dire warnings that the military might have unleashed a new al Qaeda-kind movement in Egypt. Some of the protesters in Sinai even carried the al Qaeda flag.

A new democratic dispensation following elections, with the participation of the Muslim Brotherhood, might bring about some semblance of order. But with the ongoing crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood, with Morsi and much of its leadership being rounded up, it would appear that the military has no such plans for the near future; even if the Muslim Brotherhood were willing. In other words, the military has created a political nightmare for the country, even though the Muslim Brotherhood contributed in a big way to the country’s non-governability.

Egypt’s conundrum is that with or without Muslim Brotherhood, the country is in a dangerous political vacuum. Many Egyptians, possibly majority, are opposed to Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood.   Ideally, they want a system that will resolve all the country’s problems and contradictions with the people at the centre. But what that system is or should be, and how it would be achieved, is unclear. They certainly are for democracy but not the kind that has thrown up an Islamist leader wanting to re-engineer society as prescribed by his organization, the Muslim Brotherhood. It is a regimented prescription where minorities, many women and youth will feel excluded. It is not inclusive and is based on accentuating differences and contradictions rather than bridging them.

In the case of other parties and political personages, they are either tainted as remnants of the Mubarak regime, lack mass base and/or have spent a big chunk of their lives outside of Egypt. And in the case of the many of the country’s youth, they dislike and distrust politics and politicians, identifying them with the old Mubarak school of venality, thuggery and worst. At the same time, they neither have the inclination nor the skills to organize politically to create a new order. The country is, therefore, lurching from one protest to the other.

The revolution against Mubarak finally succeeded when the military gave notice to the dictator that his time was up. And it made the army the darling of the people, until they sought to usurp power to rule in their own right. Which put an end to the brief honeymoon with the military, virtually forcing them to call elections. That brought the Muslim Brotherhood’s political movement, Freedom and Justice Party, to power with Morsi as the country’s president.

And we now know what happened with the Morsi presidency, with his removal by the military and installation of an interim civil administration. Which is effectively a cloak for military rule. And that won’t last, as we saw when the military tried to usurp power after Mubarak was dispatched to the purgatory. In other words, Egypt’s crisis is likely to deepen.

Contact: sushilpseth@aol.yahoo.com 

A brave new world of espionage

A brave new world of espionage

S P SETH

George Orwell’s novel, 1984, imagined a surveillance state where Big Brother was watching everything that its citizens did and nobody could escape its prying eyes. This is just a very broad outline of a very complex story. Orwell wrote his novel in 1948, presumably as a cautionary tale about what could happen in future with too much concentration of power in Big Brother (the ruler) and his small state apparatus. In this state, all the citizens lived in a state of fear and terror.

Since then 1984 has come and gone. The collapse of the Soviet Union and its satellite states, where there were stories of a powerful Party and ruling apparatus snooping on citizens, made George Orwell’s account chillingly scary but hopefully a thing of the past. Until that is the American whistle blower Edward Snowden leaked the details of a vast US operation of data-mining its citizens’ and foreigners’ alike from tapping phone, internet and social media sites to apprehend terrorists and their contacts, or anyone or everyone suspected of such activities.

The 29-year old Snowden was at the time working for a private contractor at a US National Security Agency (NSA) facility in Hawaii. And like Bradley Manning, who is facing trial for leaking huge amount of classified information to the WikiLeaks, was haunted by the breadth and scope of what he was handling affecting the private lives of millions of his compatriots and foreigners at the whim of a new Big Brother that might even be potentially more dangerous than his 1984 Orwellian counterpart, with its omnipotent electronic eyes. Snowden’s conscience was outraged, leading him to spill the beans on his government’s hacking of people’s private communications at home and abroad.

As Snowden reportedly said, “ I don’t want to live in a society that does these sort of things… I do not want to live in a world where everything I do and say is recorded. That is not something I am willing to support or live under.” And he added that he couldn’t “in good conscience allow the US government to destroy privacy, internet freedom and basic liberties for people around the world with this massive surveillance machine they’re secretly building.” He escaped to Hong Kong, which let him fly to Moscow where he is stranded in transit until some other country agrees to grant him asylum. Both Hong Kong/China and Russia have refused US request for his extradition. Here in lies the plot of a John le Carre’ spy novel. But that is a different aspect.

In the meantime, in the US they are baying for his blood, so to speak. The reaction of the US Director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, summed it up. He said, “For me, it is literally--- not figuratively—literally gut-wrenching to see this happen because of the huge, grave damage it does to our intelligence capabilities.” The sad thing is that, apart from sanitizing the nature and scope of such surveillance, the US authorities haven’t made even a gesture of saying sorry to its own citizens and the foreigners under its sweep. Indeed, President Obama reportedly commented that there was no such thing as hundred percent security and hundred percent privacy; hence justifying this huge espionage operation on anyone and everyone.

The US authorities justify it in the name of combating terrorism. When questioned by German reporters on a recent trip there, Obama said that such surveillance had prevented at least 50 terrorist attacks, including in Germany. That might or might not be true. The most worrying aspect is that in doing this; the US is spying on everyone. In the process, the US state would have stored information on almost all of its citizens and many foreigners, with potential for great harm if and when it decided to go after them for whatever reasons. One only has to recall the McCarthyism witch-hunt in the US in the fifties, when so many lives were destroyed because people were suspected of being communists and/or harboring communist sympathies on heresy.

And this is all happening under Obama, the President who was seen by many in the United States and the world as a breath of fresh air after the disastrous Bush presidency. This mega spying of the US people started with the Bush regime’s Patriot Act when the war on terror was supposed to justify all sorts of curbs on people’s freedoms, with the use of widespread wiretapping and other surveillance tools. Since then such snooping has expanded to spy on people’s internet information and what they are saying and talking on social media sites.

 With much of the world depending on US companies like Google, AOL, Yahoo for internet services, and social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and Skype, and these corporations being obliged to provide data when sought by the US government agencies for people at home and abroad; it is quite understandable that the people in the European Union, even Canada, are upset about it and asking questions about the privacy of their citizens and the extent of such encroachment. It is ironic that the war on terrorism that, among other things, was supposed to protect western way of life and its freedoms is turning the United States into a society where its citizens have their privacy and freedoms encroached upon by their own democratic government.

When the terrorists hit New York Trade Centre on 9/11, they were seeking to create panic in the US’s economic heartland. Osama bin Laden-inspired jihadists had no armies to fight the world’s most-powerful country. They had an ideology of hate against the west with a long list of grievances that they believed would start a jihad against the United States among Muslims in the world. They partly succeeded but Muslims, like any people in the world, are not a homogenous entity. Like Christian countries, they have their own contradictions and conflicts. If religion were super glue, the Middle East will not be the volatile region today as all the countries there, except Israel, are Muslims.

The enactment of the Patriot Act in October 2001 started a process of spying on people’s privacy by tapping their phones and other intrusive measures. Which, as Snowden has revealed, has now become a hydra-headed monster spying on people through internet, social media sites and whatever. In the process, the United States’ high moral ground on human rights and as a practitioner and promoter of democracy elsewhere in the world has been seriously compromised. This was happening for a decade or more, after the war on global terror, but Snowdon’s revelations have given a sense of the extent of worldwide snooping that the US has been engaged in.

The US, of course, is trying to put the best spin on its surveillance activities as designed to prevent terrorist attacks. But as Bill Keller, New York Times columnist recently wrote in his column, “ I don’t think we’re on a slippery slope to a police state, but I think if we are too complacent about our civil liberties we could wake up one day and find them gone….”

Note: This article was first published in the Daily Times.

Contact: sushilpseth@yahoo.com.au