Australia: renowned for being home to lovable, lazy, slow-moving slobs. The Japanese, in particular, can’t get enough of our koalas. But another species populating these shores is far less endearing.
Most of the people in the latest Australian Financial Review Rich List aren’t household names. But they should be. We should encounter them on street corners in towns and cities across the country every week. They should stand there for hours, days even, shaking strangers’ hands and saying, “Thank you”:
“Thank you for doing all the work that enabled us collectively to accrue more than $700 billion. Thank you for the extra $39 billion we piled up just this year—a bit more than the amount cut from disability support over the next four years because we say we can’t afford it. Thank you for electing politicians who ensure that we get richer and richer with every passing minute.”
At the very least, you’d think they’d thank their lucky stars that they’ve gotten away with pilfering and exploiting the working class; that they’d just shut up and be content with their enormous privileges. But no. It’s endless complaining that life is just too tough: too much “red tape”, too many restrictions, too much entitlement among workers, too much socialism in government. For them, Australia is like a perpetual war against capitalist sensibilities. Sarah Garnham previously detailed the entrepreneurs’ rebellion against the federal government’s very minor tax changes. But they are just the latest iteration of the whingeing capitalist brigade.
Among the most galling are Australia’s richest and fifth-richest people. Has there ever existed a lazier, whinier couplet than Gina Rinehart and Clive Palmer? Wealthy beyond all imagination by getting other people to dig up the country’s natural endowment so they can sell what ought to belong to everyone, taking the proceeds for themselves. Yet never missing a minute to sook about how shit the place is that allowed them to become among the most pampered slobs in human history.
Not even the Liberal and National parties are right-wing and pro-business enough for them. No, they’ve either got to form their own party, like Palmer, or, in Rinehart’s case, spend squillions backing the odious cane toad Hanson. They’ve got to take out full-page ads in newspapers to cry about the very system that made them wealthy. They’ve got to put out press releases and host conferences about how the country has gone to the dogs for not letting them soak the working class even more than they already have.
Rinehart gave an Australia Day speech this year in which she lamented the degradation of society, and looked back longingly for a time when:
“Even pregnant women were photographed manually tilling the soil, and cutting down huge trees with a hand-held, not electric, saw! ... Children would spend hour after hour, milking cows twice a day, turning handles to separate milk from cream, and then, turning more handles to make butter from the cream, collecting firewood, water, and helping with many other tasks.”
Imagine how much money this 39-billion-dollar battler could make if only she could send children down the mines and abolish parental leave? Alas, woke has gone mad. Wake up, Australia.
Presumably, the good old days included the 1980s when her father, Lang Hancock, could go on TV and advocate for the sterilisation of the “half-caste” Aboriginal people—“who are no good to themselves and can’t accept things”—by doping their water supply.
The world would have been better had Lang sterilised himself and spared us his daughter. Gina’s only “skill” was being born into a shithouse family that fights among itself over who should get how much of what should be the common wealth of all. She stumbled into the family business just in time for the biggest mining and resources boom in world history. It is a sob story for the ages.
Perversely, though, there’s something to all the whingeing: Australian capitalism really is shit. It must be. How else could these modern-day Marie Antoinettes have gained such privilege and power if not for a totally broken system? In Australian capitalism, those who work the most end up with the least. The slobs who work the least end up with the most—but never tire of sooking.
