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Clive Palmer - the billionaire miner owner- is capturing headlines all over the Aussie political terrain. His is a moderately interesting act. He founded the Palmer United Party and has three senators and himself in the lower house at the Federal level and in the Northern territory he has three Aboriginal members of the assembly. In Qld there are two members of parliament in his "army". He makes policy up on the run, shoots from the lip and sues at the drop of a criticism. His lawyers must be the richest and happiest in Oz. He does not have a party in any conventional sense. His is an electoral machine where he outspends the Labor Party for instance. He appears to have gone into politics primarily to get a repeal of the Carbon Tax which was costing him millions. He has now shifted into a populist mode and demanded that the repeal be linked to the passing on of savings to consumers, something the power companies never intended. He also voted against giving the government supply over the budget. One of his colleagues, Senator Lambie, went on TV and talked of taxing the profits of the banks: truly the breaking of a taboo. The result of this shift into populist mode has been that Palmer is picking up on the popular rejection of austerity that the government has tried to impose. The Murdoch media have attacked him and so has the state owned ABC. The leader of the Labor Party Bill Shorten has complained that Palmer's popularity is making life difficult for sensible, moderate members of the political class. As a member of the capitalist class, Palmer is free to say the kind of things that Shorten and Christine Milne, the Greens leader, cannot, even if they could conjure them up in their imagination. That means Palmer is commanding ever growing popularity. The bubble will burst, though, when Palmer has to choose between his class and the people. In the meantime, he is the latter's champion, especially in his home state of Queensland, where he currently has some 15% of the vote in the polls. There are two pieces of art that I think help us understand something of the dialectics of populism. Firstly there is Orwell's "*Shooting the Elephant*". The white colonial official and narrator is compelled to shoot the elephant, even though he does not want to. The people expect it and even though they are politically beneath them he feels obliged to do it. His power is circumscribed by the popular desire. That for me means that to be a popular leader, which Palmer now is, means to feel obliged to concede at times to the wishes of the people one leads. That helps to explain why Palmer appears to be moving to the Left in his opposition to the budget. The second piece is Orson Welles' film *Citizen Kane*. There Kane the billionaire takes up the cause of the people, but as his friend, Jedidiah Leland, points out, Kane wants to patronize those sections of the working class that he feels sorry for. Kane has no sympathy at all with the working class organized and militant. Should a militant working class ever emerge in this conjuncture, then Palmer's populism will vanish quicker than a bubble bursting. In the mean time the people enjoy the show. comradely Gary ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.csbs.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
