As the trucks thunder into Canberra, or try to, it appears they have been blocked somewhere short of Parliament House.
It’s not yet clear why they were blocked, but Alan Jones has just called it “the most disgraceful thing that has ever been done to democracy” and “a total corruption of the democratic process”. Meanwhile, Bronwyn Bishop said “we have a government that is not legitimate”.
With all due respect to Australia’s most popular broadcaster and one of our most senior politicians, those claims are way over the top. They simply don’t have the right to make them. But there are some people on the streets of Libya this morning who do.
Last week, on the news site news.com.au, savvy journalists Peter Farquhar and Simon Black drew a brilliant comparison between the problems in London during the riots and the problems in the Horn of Africa.
While today’s truck convoy in Canberra carries with it a raft of perfectly legitimate and pressing concerns, it’s hard to take them seriously on a morning when one of the world’s longest-serving unelected murderers is on the verge of being turfed out by his people. And really, it’s hard to take them seriously at all.
There is something romantic about truckies which the public can’t resist. When an outbreak of truckie movies occurred in the 1970s, people flocked to cinemas. More recently, the reality show Ice Road truckers is a triumph of the genre.
But today’s truck convoy is, frankly, just another big sook from a disparate array of small interest groups, all of whom are lumping their individual gripes under a banner loosely titled “Gillard government incompetence”.
That’s not to argue that this government is even vaguely competent or electable. It isn’t. It is a rabble worthy of the Australian cricket selection panel, which was mercifully disbanded this week, as our government will be at the next election.
Also, the fact that we have relatively low unemployment and have dodged the worst of the world’s economic woes is almost certainly good luck, rather than the government’s good management.
May I respectfully urge those who would accuse this column of left wing bias to read the above two paragraphs again. Thank you.
The point is, the great protest movements of the world always have one or two clearly-defined gripes. In the case of Libya today, it’s a murderous dictator the people are desperate to overthrow. In the trucking movie Convoy, it was corrupt cops. A cool leader at the wheel, in the form of Kris Kristofferson, only helped the cause.
Today’s truck convoy has no leader, because it has no clearly-defined cause.
It’s called the “Convoy of No Confidence”, but somewhere out there in the crowd there is probably a banner which reads: “Australians united in their general disgruntlement about, you know, a whole bunch of different stuff which we’re blaming the government for.”
Australians are perfectly entitled to express their disgruntlement, or their gruntlement, or whatever feelings they like, about the government. Despite what Bishop and Jones said today, that’s one of the features of our democracy, and something Libyans have been denied for too long.
But when a truckie and a fish and chip owner and a high country cattleman all roll in under the same banner with wildly different complaints about different issues, well… that’s kind of like the first line of a bad joke.
The joke’s even more sick when you shift your view to the other aside of the world, where real people have some exceptionally real problems, and are being shot at for expressing them.
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