The Land of the Fair Go (A Lament)

We were never innocent — let that be said —
the red earth still holds
what we tried to forget:
the missions, the dormitories, the children
taken before dawn,
the long silence of country
absorbing what we’d done.

But something worked, or tried to.
The factories hummed in the western suburbs,
the state school had a library,
the university didn’t cost a decade of your life,
the publican watered his beer
but the round still got bought,
and the man on the corner
who drank too much and loved badly
still believed, in some bruised and genuine way,
that the kid down the street
had a chance.

That was the myth, yes.
But myths, when honest,
are the maps a people make
to find the better version of themselves.
We had the map.
We were reading it, slowly,
with argument and error,
the way democracies do.

Then came the manager.

—

He was not a monster.
That would have been easier.
John Howard possessed a cold political intelligence,
which is a different thing,
and more dangerous —
a man who looked at a country
in the turbulence of economic change,
at workers whose factories were closing
not because of malice
but because of mathematics,
the long indifferent arithmetic
of globalised capital,
and made a choice.

He could have said:
the world is reshaping itself,
and we will reshape with it,
and no one will be left
to absorb the cost alone.

He chose the simpler blade instead:
be afraid of each other.

It was a masterstroke of political management.
The factories were already going —
the ships of manufacturing
had been sailing out of every harbour
in the industrial world.
Howard didn’t sink them.
But he decided which story
we would tell about the wreckage,
and whose names would be written on the hull.

He gave the private schools
what the public schools had built,
called it choice,
and watched the word ‘choice’
do twenty years of dirty work.

He gave the landlords negative gearing
and the shareholders a refund
and told the redundant man
that efficiency was history speaking,
not cruelty —
that the market had found his hands
wanting, and moved on.

He gave the bureaucracy a new vocabulary:
work for the dole,
mutual obligation —
the language of self-reliance
wrapped around small cruelties
too small to photograph,
moved the wealth upward
and called the direction ‘reform’
and waited for the commentariat
to polish the word until it shone.

They did.

—

And then came Pauline —
fish-and-chip grease and grievance,
a woman with a forest for a chip
on a shoulder barely wide enough to hold it,
speaking for people whose fear was real
even when her answers were not.

Howard did not create her.
The fears that fed her
were older than his government —
the dread of change arriving faster
than a community could name it,
of streets that sounded different,
of a country becoming something
its own people felt they hadn’t voted for.
Those fears deserved a serious answer.
Howard had one available.
He chose a different door.

He didn’t light the fire.
But he read the smoke,
left the window open,
let the warmth of it
drift into the room
where his numbers were made,
and called it
a matter for the Australian people to decide.

He passed the gun laws.
He eventually disendorsed her.
He was not her, and the distinction matters.
But he understood that the temperature she raised
kept certain other conversations
from getting cold,
and he was comfortable
in a warm room.

‘Hansonism,’ he said, ‘is a passing phenomenon.’

It was not passing.
It was learning the building,
finding which doors were left unlocked,
and moving in.

—

Now look at us.

The two great parties
in undignified pursuit,
racing toward the bottom
like economists in a mine shaft,
each one shouting
I can go lower, watch me, vote for me,
I’ll close the borders tighter,
I’ll make the language harder,
I’ll give the cruelty
a parliamentary imprimatur
and call it common sense.

And let this be said plainly:
the people who voted this way
were not all manipulated.
Some were afraid, and the fear was earned —
housing they couldn’t afford,
wages that didn’t move,
a culture shifting faster
than any of us had been prepared for.
Fear is not stupidity.
Bad answers to real questions
are still bad answers,
but the questions were real.

The fair go is a museum piece now,
behind glass in a gallery
where the entrance fee
depends on which school you went to.

The universities sell themselves
to whoever has the money
and the tuition debt
is the new indenture.
The factories are memory.
The publican is a franchise.
The round never gets bought.

And the country that argued its way
toward something better —
loud, profane, occasionally generous,
capable of shame, capable of change —
has traded all of that
for the comfort of a closed fist
and the small, mean warmth
of knowing who to blame.

—

I have not stopped loving this country.

That is the wound
that does not close —
to love a place
that is choosing, deliberately,
with its eyes open,
to be less than it was,
less than it could be,
less than the red earth
and the long sky
and the first peoples’ dreaming of it
ever deserved.

We were never innocent.

But we were, once,
at least ashamed of it.
At least trying.

—

And some still are.

That is what the grief
must not be allowed to swallow —
that inside both tents,
in the season of the race to the bottom,
there were people who stood
and said: ‘not this. Not us.’

Petro Georgiou, Liberal member for Kooyong,
broke with his own government
over children in detention,
put a human face
in front of a policy
and refused to look away.
Judi Moylan stood beside him.
Carmen Lawrence told her party
that asylum seekers were people,
not a wedge,
and paid for the honesty
in the currency of her career.

They did not win.
The tide was running the other way.
But they planted something
in the record of this country —
a refusal entered into Hansard,
quiet, inconvenient,
available to anyone who wants to know
that it was possible
to know better, and say so,
inside the machine, in real time,
at real cost.

The better impulse was not extinguished.
It was outvoted.
There is a difference.

The map is torn.
But the country it described
has not stopped existing —
in the nurse who treats whoever arrives,
in the teacher who stays late
for the kid with no English
and no one home,
in the ones who stand in the rain
outside the detention centre
with a handwritten sign
that says ‘you are not forgotten’
and mean it.

They are not a government.
They are not yet a movement.
But they are the fair go
in its only honest form —
not a slogan,
not a golden age that probably wasn’t,
but a practice,
stubbornly maintained
by people who decided
that the kid down the street
still had a chance,
and act on it,
in the rain,
with the long memory of red earth watching.

© Bakchos 2026 | Blak and Black est. 2010