Rudd's Vision Of The Family Needs Work
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday October 29, 2007
KEVIN RUDD has placed "working families" at the centre of his campaign. For those of us who have been lobbying in favour of unregulated child labour for years, the popularisation of this vision of a society in which every member of every family will "work", not just the parents as in the bad old days of the Howard Government, has been a considerable boon.
But Rudd's pitch, for all its intrinsic moral logic, ignores a simple truth about Australian society: most families don't, in point of fact, work. Life in the average dysfunctional family is not about harmonious trips to the seaside and restorative picnic lunches. It's about emotionally distant parents, sibling blood feuds over misplaced hairbrushes, adult relatives who fight over money, and teenagers who don't talk. Rudd speaks of a "positive vision for the nation's future". For the most part, this involves answering a relatively banal set of questions about the future of the economy and climate change. Labor would do better to concentrate on the questions that really matter, such as, who's going to pay for the wedding? Did I get everything I should have out of the will? Why has that cousin been invited to the lunch? And how often do we really have to visit them in the nursing home?Of course, it's not just dysfunctional families who have been cut out of Kevin Rudd's Australia. Working singles have also been given the arse. These are the self-promoting young idiots who are out there doing it tough. Unlike "working families", though, they're doing it tough on disposable income, struggling to meet the demands of a $500 weekly entertainment budget and fighting hangover-related challenges every Saturday morning. They're burning the candle at both ends, then replacing it with a $10,000 Danish wall lamp from de de ce. You might scoff, but if you were earning more than 60 grand a year and had 14 brunches to attend every weekend, you'd understand some of the difficulty and pain of life as a working single. Bringing a child into the world may get the plaudits, but maintaining a decent vinyl collection takes a dedication the equal of anything any nappy changer has ever shown.Will these people be left without representation, Mr Rudd? You can put out a T-shirt range, you can create the world's most undiscriminating Facebook friend acceptance policy, you can trim the fringe and you can suck the gut into a pair of electorally appealing chinos, but ultimately, until you've got the Danish wall lamp collectors, the shrill, self-caricaturing mothers-in-law and the perpetually disappointed dads of Australia on side, your vision for the nation's future will be fatally anaemic.
© 2007 Sydney Morning Herald
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