Polemos

When Howard got in in 96 it was obvious to me his dry liberal economic ideology was going to push us as a nation towards a ‘user pays’ system which now looks like a two tier elite private and impoverished public uni system, much like he’s doing to healthcare, legal aid, aged care, welfare and the rest of the education system. I had no clue it would last over a decade though. My guess is that while liberal economic ideology generally doesn’t see why rich people (represented by government) should fund (i.e., ‘interfere with’ ) poor peoples lives, our aspirational middle classes who mistake unsustainable lifelong mortgage and credit debt for prosperity are too busy getting ‘rich’ (indebted) in the current decade long low interest environment to bother voting against this ideology.

John Howard is known for his admiration of the Menzies era and we seem to be well on the way to returning to the fifties when, as my mum found out to her disadvantage, only rich people’s kids got to go to uni. The Libs have senate control next time the Federal Parliament meets and Nelson is set to ‘revolutionise’ the tertiary education industry by funneling research funding to private and elite universities leaving the rest to scramble for a shrinking federal budget supplemented by student fees. I think Howard is set to put his generational stamp on Australian society by wiping out the social reforms laid down by Whitlam 30 years ago and there’s probably not a lot we can do about it. The unions are gearing up but their membership is at historical lows and Labor was politically castrated at the last election while the current generation of youth seem to have largely grown up in a political vacuum.

My peak oil forecast for future political change is the coming economic recession fed by rising oil prices ($US100/barrel +) pushing up interest rates and bursting the gigantic credit card and mortgage debt bubbles that help drive the domestic and global economy, probably within the next 5 years. Only then will the aspirational middle class mass of consumers wake up to the fact that enduring prosperity is founded on frugality and real savings rather than ballooning credit fuelled consumption. Trouble is they’ll wake up in the social wasteland they helped build, trapped in their suburban slums just in time to come to grips with the emerging self evidence of terminal energy decline and an era where publicly funded education, health and welfare will be a nostalgic memory. This Howard government is an ongoing national disaster.