Private property affords some their earthly slice of paradise, especially in the vastness of Australia. Owning your own home, whatever its size, often represents the peak experience of freedom for those fortunate enough to achieve this. What about when agents of the state coming knocking upon your door and demand to be let in? Is it a case of the invasion of the serenity snatchers temporarily dispelling the illusion of the castle? For some, I am pretty sure, this must be an unsettling experience or, at least, this is what it looks like to me.
My Home Is My Castle & Serene Is My Idyll
As a member of the orange army going around the neighbourhoods of south-east Queensland I have been privy to a few confrontations of this nature. Standing on the verge, outside their homes, with my brother and sister biosecurity brethren we seek to eliminate a persistent pest from the soil beneath our feet. A small minority of property owners do not share our view of this community service. No, for them this is an invasion of their sanctuary by orange clad demons hell bent on poisoning and shattering their paradisical privacy. It can get nasty on the nature strip, as two opposing perspectives come up against one another under the wide skies of this great southern land.
Post Pandemic Pests In The Island Of Australia
Whether it be a consequence of the post-pandemic lockdown world, where a few of us have taken extreme views about the role of the government within our lives or something else? Wieambilla was, perhaps, the apogee or nadir of this recent development. Sovereign citizens who see their lives as secessionist islands unmoored from the rest of Australia in terms of the laws of the land have emerged in greater numbers. These folk don’t want to lower the drawbridge to their castles and let us in to treat their properties for the shared pestilential problem facing us all. The ideal of the idyll is bright in their eyes. Too bright, perhaps, to be rational about such things as pests.
Civic Duty WTF?
The idea of civic duty has faded from the minds of many modern Australians. It is all about me, me, me in the era of ‘user pays’ and the transfer of wealth to the private sector. Does anybody even remember the concept of the public good? We used to share a stake in the many assets once owned by the state. These have been sold off to the benefit of a few billionaires to whom we now pay an endless array of fees, charges, subscriptions, rents and rates. The privatisation and corporatisation of these formerly public assets was done under the promise of cheaper bills for energy and a host of other previously provided government services. These promises have not borne fruit in the main. Neoliberalism has not delivered its trickledown effect, only made a few very wealthy instead.
“Historically in Australia, all levels of government created collective wealth by owning and operating infrastructure, and managing natural assets, key public goods and essential services while being answerable to the public. This strong state tradition was challenged in the 1980s when privatisation became a widespread government approach globally. Privatisation involves displacing the public sector through modes of financing, ownership, management and product or service delivery. The Australian literature shows that negative effects from privatisation are not spread equitably, and the health and equity impacts appear to be under-researched.”
Australia & The Loss Of Civic Pride
The upshot of this grift by big business upon the Australian people is not only an economic rip off but a more profound loss of civic pride in our institutions and governments. Politicians and elected officials have become mere shadow puppets for vested corporate interests. Thus, it is easier to understand the attitude of some toward the state on this basis. It does not forgive the behaviour of extremists and Christian terrorists, however. Australia remains a mixed economy, where market and planned economies operate together. Planned economies feature government intervention via things like universal healthcare systems and public education. Politically, those on the right have supported more market fundamentalism with less state regulation upon markets. Their mantra has been – the market knows best. Of course, this is not always true as seen by the Global Economic Crisis of 2008 and various other market crashes over the years. Indeed, the fact that we have a housing crisis in Australia at the moment is another clear example of the market not providing for the basic needs of the population. Yes, a third of the country has grown wealthier due to rising house prices but at the expense of the rest of the nation – who cannot afford to rent or purchase a house. If a nation cannot provide affordable shelter to large swathes of its people the economic system is failing those Australians. The RBA, our central bank, is not economically representing those Australians who are not property owners, rather they skew the economy toward the wealthy and big business. Similarly, governments via the ACCC and ASIC have failed to halt the overconcentration of corporate control of markets in Australia.
Competition and consumer power are missing in action from our markets in most every sector in Oz. Duopoly is a term now very familiar to many Australians in the 21C.
Rabbit Holes & Extremist Right Wing Views
No wonder there is a growing resistance to things like state funded community service programs and their access to the private properties of Australians. The rise of social media and the Internet have played their part in this trend. Especially, as Americans tend to dominate large parts of the digital world. Most Australians are not trained to qualify the information they glean online, as many do not comprehend source trails. Where information originally comes from and what agenda is being pushed, as they do not dig down into the source material online. Even the mainstream media in Australia is dominated by Rupert Murdoch and his News Corp – a rabid right wing publisher going further right by the day. Fox News and Sky News Australia are blatantly biased in their coverage of the news. The Australian newspaper, Daily Telegraph, Sun Herald and Courier Mail are all way right of centre. Op/eds are the order of the day, opinion pieces instead of any real investigative journalism fill these papers and programs. Facts have bitten the dust many moons ago under this business model. Readers and viewers blithely accept anti-woke stances, beat ups about gender identity, and consistently negative reporting about renewables in the energy debate. A culture war has been running as a campaign attacking progressive views. People who consume this distorted and one sided Fox New’s style rendition of issues can easily fall down rabbit holes where paranoia reigns supreme. If you knock on their door and ask to go on their property it can be a potentially tricky confrontation. Enraging viewers as a marketing technique has consequences and News Corp should be held responsible for the lies and exaggerations it spreads to its audiences. Donald J Trump is the monster such diabolical misuse of news can produce. Australia is not there yet but we are heading down this path in our own laconic way.
Rural Concerns
The invasion of the serenity snatchers is especially true when visited upon rural idylls. Hobby farmers and those with land for horses and livestock have, often, created these private getaways from urban living. It can be a rude awakening to see an orange clad team of biosecurity agents on your doorstep early in the morning. A shock to the system and one’s comfort zone, where locked gates and barking dogs keep out unwanted visitors from private property realms. Ownership of land beats deeply within the bones of the philosophical underpinnings of Western nations. These territories of colonial expansion in the new world were forcibly snatched from their Indigenous populations. Private property is the bedrock of our whole society and economy. People may have died in the taking of these pieces of land. Blood, sweat and tears were shed for sure in the historical stories behind many rural properties. We live in more enlightened times these days, apparently, but the shadows still linger, however. This is why fences are very important to property owners and locked gates to attest to the significance of private ownership under the banner of the free market.
Keeping The Unwanted Out
Laws, like the Biosecurity Act, can unnerve the unknowing amid property possessors. Suddenly, for a brief time that certainty of barriers keeping the unwanted hordes out is taken away. Strangers descend upon the property with all their unfamiliar habits and swagger. It can be experienced as a kick in the guts for the more instinctive land owner. You see, lording it over your land is a primal kind of feeling closer to the reptilian brainstem than any airy fairy activities of the cerebral cortex. You have your ferocious dogs loudly barking to keep out transgressors. You have your barbed wire fences. In the country, you can never be too careful according to many lords of the manor I have spoken to. All that land can be tough to protect. It is like the challenge of keeping the Chinese out from the prodigious circumference of the Australian coastline. Such things can play upon your mind. The invasion of the serenity snatchers is a real dilemma for some who own land.
Commonwealth = Public Assets
In the end, it comes down to whether you consider yourself and family still part of the Commonwealth of Australia. Commonwealth = the general good, according to the dictionary. That means not just the bits that you agree with but the whole kit and caboodle. Some younger folk only think of the Commonwealth as a privately owned bank, because, yes, that was privatised by the same mob. We need to return to an appreciation of the public good. Culturally, we have been robbed by neoliberalism of our shared assets and of the things that we as a nation could be proud of. We need governments with the courage to actually do stuff and not just be talking heads. The housing crisis is not going to be fixed anytime soon by market forces. Social housing is not going to be built at the level we require it by the market. Governments need to invest and take a stake, on behalf of us, in the property market and build what is so desperately required.
Privatisation Produces A Lack Of Accountability & Transparency
“Lack of accountability and transparency were common themes in the review, including for privatised infrastructure projects, human service provision for community and corrective services, and for privatised employment and outsourced hospital services. In research into the privatisation of electricity and urban rail, and PPPs for road infrastructure in Victoria, Hodge & Coghill noted negative impacts on democratic accountability to citizens and public institutions. The initial divestiture of electricity involved secrecy, and removal of prior rights to information under administrative law by weakening Freedom of Information laws. Following the privatisation of urban rail, accountability to passengers was dramatically reduced.”
- (Anaf, J., Freeman, T. & Baum, F. Privatisation of government services in Australia: what is known about health and equity impacts. Global Health 20, 32 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12992-024-01036-w)
We were promised better deals following privatisation but all we got were a loss of public assets and the omission of accountability and transparency. Those on the right are, in my view, primarily about making money for their business mates. They will counter this assertion by saying it is economically better for the country to privatise these assets. You will invariably see politicians moving into well paid jobs at these same firms post their public service careers. This happens on both sides of the aisle. This should be made illegal as a guard rail against corruption. The gas and mining deals made in Australia with multinational corporations are perfect examples of this. We do not derive enough taxation revenue from the extraction of our resources here in Australia. Why is this so? You have to point the finger at those negotiating these deals at state and federal levels of government. Australia is a safe environment to invest in, unlike Africa, we, therefore, shouldn’t be cutting generous deals for these mining companies. Something smelly has been going on here for too long. Either our resource ministers have been too dumb or small minded or, more likely, have been corrupted opportunistically.
We Need To Promote Community Service
We do not ask enough of each other in terms of civic duties, here in Australia. Yes, we have the volunteer fire fighters who do a tremendous job risking their lives during the bush fire season. What percentage of the population would that be? 0.668% I think.
“There were 193,312 volunteer fire brigade members nationally in 2022, a decrease of 3.7% from the year before, according to a report by the productivity commission.”
There are a good number of older Australians who volunteer in a variety of carer roles, as well. However the great majority of us are in it primarily for ourselves. Feathering our own nests, our own private wealth and assets, and this breeds a lack of community spirit and understanding. It breeds suspicious attitudes toward government programs because these folk do not comprehend such things as community service. The ‘user pays’ neoliberal model undermines the state and betrays it via the lack of respect it fosters for the role of government in our lives. If everything is always about money and what you can get for things, then, we see the dysfunction we saw among some during the pandemic. When Australians were asked to get vaccinated for the good of the nation some refused. During the first and second world wars Australians were asked to make sacrifices and also conscripted to fight. Some things are about the whole and not the parts. At certain times the health of the community is more important than the individual choices of its citizens.
The invasion of the serenity snatchers is not about your small domain it is about the health of the greater community. It is like getting the jab, it may discomfort you for a short time but is soon over and you can get on with the rest of your life.
Robert Sudha Hamilton is the author of America Matters: Pre-apocalyptic Posts & Essays in the Shadow of Trump.
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