Cronyism and bastardry

Julian Barraclough

I think Flanagan would better achieve his aims by using his considerable profile to educate the public about how more sophisticated successive governments have become at controlling information through; stacking the bureaucracy with cronies with ideological congruence, alla Jim Bacon’s rash of secretarial appointments; the funnelling of information through the Government Communications Office and the manipulation of consensus through consultative exercises like Tasmania Together. The common thread here is Linda Hornsey our own director of Propaganda and Peoples Enlightenment who has now taken her considerable talents to Canberra.

I READ Flanagan’s article last Saturday ( Battle cry for our Tasmania ) with the usual degree of pleasure and amusement: his polemics are pointed and his history usually engaging. I fear, however, that in this case he is indulging his romantic sentiments and presenting the Tasmania of the past in an arcadian light. Frankly the cronyism and bastardry that was so eloquently described is the Tasmanian way and not an aberration.

Governments have always had a productivist ideology; remember hydro industrialisation. Academic and noted local thinker Peter Hay has written that Tasmania ‘has an economy devoid of dynamism and a persistent cargo-cult mentality that yearns for a single whopper industry that will turn sleepy hollow into a thrumming engine of industry’. Then as now an acquiescent complacency reigned whereby the electorate was convinced that hydro industrialisation provided by paternalistic Labor leaders such as ‘Electric Eric Reece’ would look after them. ‘Politics joined sex and religion as topics unfit for polite dinner table discourse’ and the spin doctors of the time could claim that ‘if you elect me you can forget all about the distasteful and stressful business of public affairs until the next inconvenient election.’

Similar relationships between the powerful and the polity stretch back to the state’s origins. Lyndall Ryan and James Boyce describe the arrival of the first free settlers in Tasmania bearing letters of introduction demanding land grants, and therefore power, from the compliant governor; local social and racial conditions be damned. The only threat to the productivist hegemony was the brief period of Franklin activism and green parliamentary representation which was quickly stamped out in what Hay has called a ‘constitutional coup’.

I think Flanagan would better achieve his aims by using his considerable profile to educate the public about how more sophisticated successive governments have become at controlling information through; stacking the bureaucracy with cronies with ideological congruence, alla Jim Bacon’s rash of secretarial appointments; the funnelling of information through the Government Communications Office and the manipulation of consensus through consultative exercises like Tasmania Together.

The common thread here is Linda Hornsey our own director of Propaganda and Peoples Enlightenment who has now taken her considerable talents to Canberra.

Julian Barraclough B.A. M.Env.Mgt
PhD Candidate
School of Sociology and Social Work
University of Tasmania