A prayer for Van Badham

The last five months has been very difficult for a certain kind of person in Australian public life. As Palestinians in Australia and their supporters receive death threats, have their businesses burnt down, find homemade bombs mounted on their cars, face coordinated harassment campaigns, are vilified in the media and criminalised by politicians, a much more serious problem is facing the nation’s left-of-centre opinion columnists, think-tank directors, senior union officials, nonprofit directors, high-profile creatives and vaguely prominent media personalities — how to say as little as possible about Gaza without pissing anyone off.

On the one hand, these people have spent their professional lives cultivating images of themselves as stern and relentless fighters for truth, justice and freedom for all. On the other, the institutions on which they rely — for a paycheck, for career advancement, for a whiff of prominence in Australia’s puddle-deep media, political and creative scenes — are either supporters of Israel’s ongoing genocidal project in Gaza or have been co-opted into staying silent.

It’s a tightrope that’s proving harder and harder to walk. Over the weekend, Guardian political columnist, author and playwright Van Badham became the latest person to fall off it. On Saturday, comedian Aamer Rahman criticised Badham’s silence on Gaza since October, calling her “a shill for the ALP and the Democrats in the midst of a genocide”.

(I promise this newsletter isn’t just a chronicle of beefs between Australians on Twitter even if it does sometimes feel that way.)

I don’t want to focus too much on Badham specifically, other than as a case study of the eternal dilemma facing Australia’s professional progressives — those who work for most trade unions, liberal news publications, left-leaning nonprofits, and a whole range of places that outwardly express a commitment to social, economic, environmental and/or racial justice.

Sooner or later, many people who work in these sectors are faced with a choice: to hold onto their principles and keep toiling away in poorly-paid obscurity, or to ditch them and begin the climb towards becoming a well-paid functionary of a mainstream “progressive” movement that has spent the last 35 years doing more to prevent the establishment of a fairer and more decent society than bring one about.

Unsurprisingly, plenty of people choose the second option. In many ways it’s the smart choice. The jobs pool is shallow and there’s only so far you can go before institutional pressure brings itself to bear. If you have dreams of one day owning a house, or at least paying off your student debt, you’ll need a decent-paying job of some seniority.

For others, the attraction lies more in becoming one of the approved dimbulbs in what passes for Australia’s firmament. It’s not fame by any stretch — I doubt most people know who Badham is, for example — but if your ambition and your self-image outweigh your talent, it opens doors for you that would otherwise remain closed.

If you’re some kind of creative, you’re much more likely to get glowing write-ups in the media, approval for your latest round of grant applications, and supportive pull-quotes from Labor ministers on the cover of your next book. If you’re a journalist or an editor, it leaves you the option to do highly-paid comms, advisory or consultancy work in Canberra. If you’re an activist or a union official, it can be your ticket to preselection, an executive directorship at a think-tank, or at least talking-head status on The Project.

This goes a long way to explaining why so many of the people who are insistently held up as our best and brightest feel like practical jokes at our expense. Why else do you think our newspapers can’t go more than four days without running another fucking interview with Tim Minchin?

The asking price is that you stop making noise about any of the issues that these institutions have quietly deemed too inconvenient or embarrassing to talk about, for fear of drawing attention to the ongoing failure of such institutions to substantially address the crises they supposedly exist to solve. Gaza is just the latest in a long line of unofficial topics — the endless decline of our neutered union movement, the ongoing privatisation of everything, the devil’s bargain that is our alliance with the United States, words like “poverty” and “class” and “welfare” — that are off-limits.

Lying atop these sectors like a giant, suffocating blanket is the Labor Party, where real change and those who seek it go to die. For professional progressives, becoming an external cheerleader for Labor is the final humiliation. Forced into logical and moral contortions that would make any reactionary proud, all that’s left is to punch down.

I can speak to this with some knowledge because I’ve done it. I was an employee of Schwartz Media for more than two years, writing their morning email newsletter and regularly publishing articles in The Saturday Paper and The Monthly.

I knew that the company had an unofficial policy of not reporting on Israel and Palestine, but I took the job anyway. I took it for the reasons I imagine most people do. It was more than a steady paycheck and the chance to write good work. I enjoyed seeing my byline in print, getting invited to speak on panels at writers’ festivals, and the general feeling, however unearned, that I was someone halfway important. For more than two years, I managed to stuff my professional and personal ethics in a box marked ‘too hard’ and hide it away.

After I left, and Israel was bombing Gaza again, I finally dragged that box out of storage. I looked through what I had given up, and what I’d gotten in exchange. There’s a reason I don’t write for Schwartz Media anymore.

Sadly for the progressive ladder-climbers, the good times are over. Labor governments are in power everywhere and doubling down on most of the policies of their Liberal predecessors, so eyerolling at Mark Latham doesn’t get you as far as it used to. Even Q+A isn’t the Holy Grail for centre-left clock-punchers that it used to be, now that its ratings are comparable with Sky News’ more popular programming.

For these people, Labor no longer being in perpetual opposition is the worst thing that could possibly happen. Now that the good guys are nominally in charge, they either can’t deliver the progressive change they spent ten years promising — the advertising ‘experts’ and focus-group evangelists who ran the Yes campaign into the ground is the worst example — or it’s become obvious they never meant any of it in the first place.

Which is how we’ve ended up here — an ecosystem of supposedly left-wing establishments punishing their own members and supporters for asking them to recognise that genocide is bad.

The war on Gaza has exposed the hollowness of our political and cultural gentry, but it didn’t invent it. For rank-and-file unionists, left-wing activists, and people of conscience everywhere, the question of how to topple this bunyip aristocracy has only become more urgent. The thought of avoiding another Humphrey’s Wedding should be motivation enough.

What I’m looking at

• Arundhati Roy on Gaza: N̶e̶v̶e̶r̶ Again

• The book world doesn’t know what to do with all these heightened sensitivities

• Lord Palmerston