Nope. Not going to do job numbers. The Bureau of Labor Statistics can put the rosiest smile on things, but the fact remains that more people left the work force than got new jobs, and those that did get work got it part-time.

I am not going to deal with the G20 conference in St. Petersburg, and I am not going to analyze whether the President got into Mr. Putin’s face or not. At this point, to borrow a phrase, what does that matter?

I am particularly going to stay away from the foreign policy nonsense, except to wonder in passing if the arms-transfer operation that was going on in Benghazi has a role in who had what to throw at whom in poor bleeding Syria.

So that does not leave much, or rather it means there is everything else. Here in the apartment, sea-bags are stacked by the door to accompany my sailor. He is departing in a few days for life underway a half a world away.

I was thinking how much I am going to miss him, and have savored the last few days spent generally hanging around, doing not much, and just enjoying his presence. But the distance he will cover next week is almost as far as the sun-drenched shores of OZ, magical Australia, where something remarkable happened today.

It is always risky to have public opinions on the internal affairs of other nations, even those with whom we are divided by a common tongue, so I will only report the events at a high level and stay away from the nuance outsiders cannot understand.

The last time I spent any significant time in Oz, Conservative John Howard was Prime Minister, and the rule of the Labor Party had not begun. But I have followed with daily interest, since I have an Expat pal who is making a life there, and the Climate Change debate there is much discussed around the world.

They are having Spring now, after bitter wars about the last Angry Summer, which may, or may not have actually been anything of the sort. Emotions run high there, as they do here, and it is interesting to look in at how some of the experiments in public policy have worked out.

I follow Australian events in a certain context. The Green movement is strong down under, and they were a critical power-broker in the Australian Senate.

(Liberal PM John Howard in 2006)

When I was there, the Age of John Howard was clearly ending, and people were ready for change. The whole Chinese thing was stoking anxiety about the new Pacific order, and about illegal immigration as people sought to get away from it. In fact, that was the whole reason I was in Canberra and talking to officials responsible for dealing with the tidal wave of people seeking asylum from the storm.

There are multiple political parties on the Australian landscape, and being a bi-polar American, I get lost easily. Liberals are not, Labor doesn’t, Green is, and so on.

Anyway, Labor came to power in November of 2007, unseating the coalition Liberal-led government that had been in power since 1996.

(Labor PM Kevin Rudd).

Kevin Rudd, a mercurial mandarin-speaking Progressive, started off the turbulent six years of Labor rule before being deposed by Julia Gillard in a 2010 Labor Party back-room coup. She was the first woman to take the Prime Minister’s seat in Australian history.

(First female PM Julia Gillard).

Among other things, she presided over the imposition of Rudd’s hated Carbon Tax in the apparent belief that taxing the Australian people would somehow reduce Chinese emissions. Dissatisfaction was evident from the beginning, as leaks sprung from confidential Cabinet meetings.

The leakers revealed that Gillard had pre-channeled Mitt Romney’s “47%” remarks, questioning the cost of the pensioners’ increases- the Aussie version of Social Security- on the grounds that “old people never vote for us.” She also opposed a parental leave scheme on the grounds that people beyond child-bearing age would resent it, as would stay-at-home mothers.

She reportedly argued that the parental leave scheme was “politically correct” but not politically helpful to the Labor Party.

Over time, even her supporters agreed that she had become a liability, and restored Rudd to the Prime Minister’s office in a desperate bid to cling to power.

This morning, voters repudiated the whole mess. Liberal National Coalition leader Tony Abbott was swept into office in a landslide win as voters punished the outgoing Labor government for six years of mismanaging the economy and failing to exploit the country’s mining boom. The House appears to be solidly in his column; there are different and preferential rules for the Senate and we will not know how that works out, possibly for as long as a week.

(Newly elected PM Tony Abbott)

Mr. Abbott continues a tradition of dynamic Australian leadership unseen in the States: he is a former boxer and Rhodes scholar who trained as a priest. These days, he is a volunteer life-guard and triathlete who is often pictured in trim Speedos.

I don’t know if his promises will work out; as we have discovered here, running the affairs of a nation state are a little more complex than they appear, and we have had our own six-year run of interesting and muddled events. But Mr. Abbott has promised to “restore political stability, cut taxes and crack down on asylum seekers arriving by boat.”

We might want to try that here some time. For good or for ill, we do not have a Parliamentary system, and there are forty months to go on our collective adventure in Hope and Change.

Copyright 2013 Vic Socotra
www.vicsocotra.com
Twitter: @jayare303