One Year On

I've just realised, comrades (well, Channel 7 has just reminded me - `Meet the Press' isn't on because of the Bathurst brm-brms), that it's exactly a year since the election that wasn't. Holy cow ... haven't seen Sunday Sunrise for some time since they turned it into the Kath & Kim of Sunday current affairs shows. It really is a piece of vacuous crap, isn't it? It's like Entertainment Tonight for pollies.

Has there ever been a year in which so much has changed in Federal politics? You would possibly have to go back to the Whitlam era to witness a time in which a government has pursued its agenda with such single-minded zeal. Supporters of either side will argue whether or not the Howard or Whitlam governments were given a mandate for the widespread reforms they brought in, but the fact remains that, as Bob Ellis put it in his book `Goodbye Jerusalem' (ironically enough, to John Howard's brother, a respected left-leaning Australian university academic), it will take 100 years to undo the structural, and perhaps more imporantly, the cultural reforms the current government has brought in. How long will it take to change the culture of individuality that has overtaken not only Australia, but other Western countries?

Professor of Cognitive Science and advisor to the US Democratic party George Lakoff is currently attracting a lot of attention via his theories of the conservative framing of issues. This article, while a few years old now, is still very relevant (and intriguing), and outlines many of the theories expanded in his more recent book Don't Think of An Elephant!: Know Your Values And Frame The Debate.