Jeff Sparrow theguardian.com, Thursday 24 April 2014
Ordinary Australians might not care about the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter acquisition, but the Very Important People do – and that’s what matters
Prime minister Tony Abbott tries out the cockpit of the F-35 fighter plane in Canberra. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP
Yesterday, the Australian federal government committed an additional $12bn fighting climate change. "In view of the scientific consensus, we’d be remiss to do anything else," said Tony Abbott.
Oh, wait. No, that money went on 58 new fighter planes, in the most expensive defense commitment in Australian history. The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter acquisition would allow Australia to participate in future military coalitions alongside the US – the main basis, one would guess, for this extraordinary expenditure.
It’s common today to attack politicians as entirely poll-driven, devoid of principles and taking their direction from the latest focus group results. But that’s not quite an accurate description of how the polity functions, for there’s zero public demand for more fighter planes. "I want Australia to spend billions, ensuring we're in the front rank of wars like Iraq and Afghanistan" … said no normal person ever.
A pledge of an additional $12bn to health or education or infrastructure would have been wildly popular, yet that didn’t happen. On the contrary, those areas are all slated for cuts in Joe Hockey’s coming austerity budget – and, rather than condemn the defense spending, Shorten’s Labor party has thrown itself behind the Joint Strike Fighter.
The bipartisan commitment for the F-35 illustrates how political priorities are shaped by a narrow elite consensus at odds with public sentiment. Ordinary Australians might not care about the F-35, but the Very Important People do – and that’s what matters.
This morning, The Australian’s influential foreign policy editor Greg Sheridan announced a desire to be, um, reincarnated as a Joint Strike Fighter ("lean, sinuous, sleek, intimidating, the best in my class.") Yet even as Sheridan was running around the editorial offices with his arms outstretched, shouting, "I’m a F-35!" and making pew pew pew noises at Chris Kenny, the Oz enthused about what it called "the tough Hockey budget our nation has to demand". It declared:
Rules for receiving income support must be tightened; spending that people have come to take for granted, such as family payments, must be pruned.
Money for guns, none for butter: how to explain a combination that will palpably make life harder for most Australians?
Simply, among the elite, the commitment to the US alliance remains sacrosanct, despite Iraq and despite Afghanistan. The first president of the American Economic Association, Francis Amasa Walker, once wrote that a commitment to laissez-faire was not so much the measure of economic orthodoxy as the test "used to decide whether a man were an economist at all".
Likewise with Australian foreign policy. It’s permissible to argue the nation should have bought a cheaper fighter plane; it’s not permissible (and never will be permissible, even after Iraq), to suggest that we’d be a lot better off with no capacity for what Sheridan calls "interoperability with the Americans".
But perhaps the Very Serious People possess great strategic vision, allowing them to operate according to a longterm perspective not visible to the rest of us?
Well, let’s think about climate change.
Despite the fractious exchanges between the Bolt-driven denialists and their opponents, there’s an elite consensus there, too. Unlike scientists, the Very Serious People might be divided as to whether climate change is real – but they’re united in a determination that we shouldn’t make any fundamental changes because of it.
Had a reforming government pledged $12bn to, say, environmental research in the midst of a supposed budget emergency, it would have faced not only a rejuvenated Tea party-style opposition, but also a proliferation of broadsheet columns decrying its reckless extravagance.
The entire scientific establishment warns that we’re rapidly approaching global tipping points. But, alas, scientists have been demoted from the ranks of the Very Serious People, now that they’re saying things the elite doesn’t want to hear.
As Naomi Klein argues: "climate change is a collective problem demanding collective action the likes of which humanity has never actually accomplished."
In other words, it’s increasingly apparent that genuine action on climate will necessarily have an anti-capitalist edge – and no Serious Person wants even to discuss that.
The Iraq war killed thousands of people, and reduced that country to an authoritarian ruin. But spending billions preparing for the next pre-emptive invasion or overseas adventure is Very Serious in a way that preventing the ruination of the planet is not, simply because the latter threatens profits, and the former does not.
