words by Stephen Pendlebury

The most important man in Australia is called Kevin. Arguably the second most important is called Wayne. Isn’t that just marvellous?

Ok puerile and childish, I’ll give you that, but if you factor in a big chunk of traditional British snobbery, then you can’t help but snigger a bit at the fact that this big old country is run by Kev and Wayne.
I mean, back when I was running around the playground swapping football stickers, Kevin was an insult round my way. At the time, I didn’t delve too deeply into why bellowing ‘Kevin’ at some poor scrote was the pre-pubescent equivalent of a Wildean put-down, but with hindsight I suppose it was down to the low social status of the parents who decided Kev was a suitable moniker for their boy-child. Either that or it was the fact that the dribbling, mumbling drunk who was often chased away from the school gates by our surly caretaker was called Kevin.

And as for Wayne, well, we don’t really have to go there, do we? Harry Enfield did enough damage to that particular name with his once-ubiquitous Slob character. Young Mr Rooney iced the cake, but, even so, Wayne has long been associated, in Britain at least, with coves who are, well, not particularly blessed with grey matter or social elegance.

So hoorah for easy targets. The nose-in-the-air crowd who like to still imagine Australia as a country of leather-skinned, long-socked, corked-hat wearing bushmen with a pair of kangaroo testicles in one hand and a Hogan-esque machete in the other get to have a field day with the news that this big red land’s Prime Minister is called Kevin and its Treasurer is called Wayne.

The thing is, though, that this obvious jabbing point belies the fact that Kevin Rudd and Wayne Swan are, in truth, the figureheads of a vibrant political revolution in Australia, one which already is having at least as much effect here as those balmy days when Tony Blair led the chorus of ‘Things Can Only Get Better’ back in 1997.

The parallels between Tony’s rise to power and Kevin’s ascent into the limelight almost exactly a decade later are myriad. Both come from the same side of the political spectrum – while Blair reinvented the British Labour party with the injection of the word ‘New’ and the triple repetition of single words, Rudd shook up his Labor party to make it an electable force.

And both finally swept away a monolithic right-wing leadership that had made its mark on the country through a seemingly never-ending succession of re-elections. Blair ousted John Major and the ghosts of Thatcher and, in 2007, Rudd saw off John Howard, the Liberal leader who had imprinted his own brand of conservatism on Australia since 1996. And they both used the radical tactic of taking off their ties to secure their move into the big chair. In fact, some might say that the only difference between the two parties was the lack of a ‘u’ in Rudd’s version of a reinvented, liberal, centre-left political power.

The difference between Howard’s Australia and Rudd’s vision for his home country, however, is considerable. Howard was tough on immigration and dismissed multi-culturalism as a dangerous waste of time. He espoused the ‘Australia will help those who help themselves’ train-of-thought and, it’s said, left those on the lower, outer fringes of society to sink or swim.

Rudd changed all that overnight. Within months of taking control in the November 1997 election, he’d apologised to the Aboriginal community for the atrocity that was the Stolen Generations. It’s hard to think that this was a bad idea. While we may have mulled over whether Britain should have officially said sorry for a slave trade that was eradicated a century and half ago, the Stolen Generation system – a frightening concept whereby Aboriginal children were plucked from the bosom their families to go and live with ‘good white folks’, leading more often than not to all kinds of hideous abuse – was still going strong well into the second half of the 20th century. Kevin decided something should be done, so stood up, bowed his head and apologised on behalf of wrong-thinking authorities that had gone before him.

He was also strong on Aboriginal land rights and environmental issues, welfare for the poorest, education for all. With exciting speed, Australia went from a land where life was good for the hard-working and the lucky and hard for those who fell by the wayside to a country that, in theory at least, wasn’t going to leave anyone behind. One of the few areas that Rudd and Howard seemed to agree on was relations with the US – Howard sent Aussie Diggers into Iraq and Afghanistan and Rudd isn’t bringing them back in a hurry – but all in all, things are already very different since the 2007 sea change.

In the eighteen months or so that Rudd has been in power, he’s taken a Labor party born through the struggle of  the workers and pushed its equalitarian principles out so that they touch everyone, even the Aboriginals. The unions are still strong – much, much stronger than the TUC could ever dream of – but there is, as there was with Blair’s set up – a softer element to this new-look Government. His cabinet is happily bereft of dour shop stewards, instead he has the likes of Julia Gillard as his Deputy Prime Minister, the charismatic Penny Wong as his Minister for Climate Change and Water and, taking the new Labor new trendiness tag to its extreme, Peter Garrett as his Minister for the Environment, Heritage and the Arts.

Recognise that name? If you’re Aussie, you definitely will, but Brits may need to be prodded a bit to pick up on Peter’s past. Peter Garrett? Bald chap? Midnight Oil? Yes, that’s him, the one that belted out ‘Beds Are Burning’ way back then. Peter’s now a politician, which is probably the equivalent of Liam Gallagher going to Number 10 to work rather than to promote Cool Britannia. And he’s trying his best – but increasingly is coming under a lot of flak because the reality of politics doesn’t quite live up to the tub-thumping he was allowed while just a muso. Recent difficulties have seen him be not quite so tough on Japanese whalers and the causes of Japanese whalers as many lentil-eaters would have liked him to be. The chorus of ‘sell-out’ from various quarters may be why he hasn’t as yet disbanded the band. In fact, he got up alongside the likes of Coldplay at the Sound Relief benefit for the victims of the Victorian bushfires. There, I suppose, is a difference between British Labour and their counterparts down under – it’s hard for one to picture Jack Straw fronting a rocking five-piece at a charity gig.

All in all, then, the political importance of Kevin and Wayne, both here and internationally, makes the digs at their names a tad childish. They’ve dismantled a monolithic right-wing powerhouse and reinvented Australian government, giving them the opportunity to usher in their brave new world.

Here, though, it’s probably best to take a quick look at the political set-up in Australia, because for all the ground-breaking repercussion of Rudd’s new order, the way things work down here will always mean that he can’t have it all his own way.

At first glance – or at least at a blinkered glance that only looks to Canberra and Rudd’s Federal Government – it all looks very similar to what goes on back home. The Commonwealth of Australia, which was founded back in 1901 is, a two-house affair that recognises the British monarchy. Rudd’s government and the Liberal coalition monarchy sit in the House of Representatives – think House of Commons – making the laws and the Senate – think House of Lords – which ratifies them. There’s a speaker in the House of Representatives – Harry Jenkins – and parliament recognises the Queen, who is represented in this big red land by the Governor General. Right now, Rudd is in power because Labor holds a majority of the 150 seats in the House of Representatives. Malcom Turnbull leads the Opposition, a coalition of Liberal and National and Country Liberal MPs. The Nationals and the Country Liberals are, in essence, the party of the country, the bush, if you will, and naturally tend to side with their more centre-right colleagues in these things. There are some Greens in there, a party called Family First and some independents too – notably, in the Senate, Nick Xenophon, a senator who prides himself on thinking for himself and often finds himself pivotal in whether legislation goes through or dies. Kevin, like Gordon Brown, picks his cabinet from both houses – Penny’s a senator, for instance.

All in all, then, despite a few differences, including proportional representation at elections, quite similar to back home. The big difference in Oz, however, is the presence of the states and territories.

 It was the six states – Western Australia, Victoria, New South Wales, Tasmania, South Australia and Queensland – that agreed on the constitution back in 1901 which led to the creation of the Federal Government. In those days, they were six, separate self-governing colonies and they were adamant that they weren’t going give up their power and hand it over to the new boys. As such, to this day, Australia has seven sovereign parliaments – the states and Canberra. When all’s said and done, you have to give the Federal Government the nod as to which holds the most cards, if only because it’s Kevin who gets to meet Barack Obama at the White House, but if you take international affairs out of the mix then they’re all about equal.

So the trick is to not get lulled into a false sense of rank, here. The state parliaments are not county councils, not even the unitary authorities of the big metropolitan areas back home. No, these are powerhouse governments with their own Premier, their own laws and their own ways of doing things. Yes, they work in conjunction with their federal cousins, but in the main they do things their own way. The states can offload powers to Canberra, but also can take them back if they feel like it, so they always remain masters of their own destinies.

So, there’s your seven big boys, but there’s also a handful of territories – the big ones being the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory, which are self governed, but have their powers delegated to them by the Federal Government. Norfolk Island, also looks after its own affairs, but the likes of Jervis Bay and Christmas Island – home to Australia’s lavish refugee holding pen – get told what to do by Canberra. Basically, then, if you’re a self-governing territory, you can do what you want unless Rudd and Co don’t like it, as the Federal Government retains the right to transfer back and forth.

This then, is a hell of a lot of Government, which, on the face of it, could get a bit messy. And occasionally there is friction – the states send bucketloads of cash to Canberra which is then redistributed factoring in issues such as population and demand. This, as you can imagine, is a tough cookie when the likes of mineral-rich WA is raking it in and say, flood-ravaged Queensland ain’t doing quite so well.

At the end of the day, however, it all works, mainly because, as it is in the UK, the emphasis of most politics here is on the ‘centre-’ aspect rather than the left and right, which allows most of the comings and goings to go relatively smoothly.

WA, for instance, currently boasts a Liberal leadership, which rose to power at the end of last year after it all kicked off a bit, election-wise. At the beginning of 2008, the Premier here was the suave Alan Carpenter, a debonair new Labor man who was a darling with the ladies. He epitomised the new millennium evolution of left-wing politics with his open-necked shirts, quick wit, intelligence and grooming. He even had a treasurer who was a bit in the Gordon Brown mode, the brooding financial whizz Eric Ripper.

Alan, although doing well in opinion polls and generally expected to hang in there in Blair-like proportions, was approaching the end of his term in office and talk was beginning as to when he should call the next election. Then, one Troy Buswell, the then leader of the State Opposition became beset with scandal. Nothing of late-night walks on Hampstead Heath proportions, but headline-making nonetheless. Basically, this stalwart of West Australian Liberal politics was said to have pinged some bird’s bra strap and smelt the seat of a chair that another young lady had recently evacuated.

Brilliantly trivial, but the sheer puerility of the allegations made him, for a very brief period anyway, international news. Scandal hunters, by the way, may be led to believe that this points to a lack of

shock-horror politico stories in Oz, but they’d be wrong. Alongside the constant slew of conflict of interest allegations, we’ve had politicians allegedly in nightclub brawls, accusations of un-PC goings on

at Labor party karaoke nights, and, most recently, the emergence of raunchy pictures of controversial stateswoman Pauline Hanson. Pauline, if you don’t already know, is the woman behind the One Nation party who attracted the media glare in the 1990s thanks to her forthright opinions as to where all immigrants – except of course the white ones – should go. She tried to make a comeback, which has coincided with a bitter old flame flogging pics he claims are of her in her late teens doing ‘erotic’ stuff. Some cynical so-and-sos are saying that, due to the fact that she actually looked quite fit back then and nowadays she, well, doesn’t, it may be a ploy to boost popular support. Whatever the reasons, you can’t say that’s not good scandal, can you?

But, anyway, back to WA. After his embarrassing fall from grace, Troy stood down and was replaced by the safe hands of Colin Barnett who came out of semi-retirement to once more take on the leadership of WA’s Liberals. The very next day, Carpenter, unfortunately for him, thought he’d spotted his chance and called a snap election.

What followed, must have been a bit of an eye-opener for everyone at Labor HQ. The landslide they’d hoped for simply didn’t materialise. Suddenly, poor Alan was being described as humourless and arrogant and, when the votes were counted, you couldn’t get a Rizla between Labor and the Liberals. Cue many behind closed doors negotiations with Brendan Grylls, the leader of WA’s National party. Colin and Alan both tried to woo the man from the outback, but in the end he sided with the Nationals’ more traditional ally, the Liberals, after the deal was sweetened with promises of Cabinet positions for key Nats and an absolute fortune to be spent on infrastructure in country WA. Colin took power, Carpenter duly stood down as Labor leader and Eric took up the mantle of the leader of the Opposition. Troy, by the way, is now, among other things, the Treasurer, so he didn’t fall that far after all.

Here, then, we live under a Liberal Government in one sense and a Labor Government in another, which seems complicated, but does work. Look out the window on another glorious WA day, and it’s hard to find that much to complain about, so they must be doing something right.

There is, however, something else you should, as an ex-pat, know about all of this: if you don’t become an Australian citizen, then you can’t join in. Yes, unless you stand in a field somewhere and pledge allegiance on Australia Day, which means you’ll join the likes of Leo Sayer as a naturalised Aussie, you don’t get a vote. Still, they seem to be getting on all right without the ex-pat community’s input, so perhaps watching from the sidelines is actually the best way forward.