This Family First thing is pretty important, I think, much more than some people are taking it over on the Green Left list. They only got 50,000 senate votes here in Victoria, but then Socialist Alliance people are (rightly) willing to argue that their own very small vote does not reflect their influence. The FF Senator, Steve Fielding, lives somewhere in my suburb and goes to a Pentecostal church out here that has the largest and fastest growing congregation in Australia. Everyone keeps hopefully repeating the mantra that "Australia is a secular country", but the money flowing into and out of these evangelical churches is staggering, allowing them to punch above their electoral weight. Political discourse here increasingly uses degraded religious concepts, with lots of talk about "evil" and suchlike.

IMHO, the weakness of the "axis of feeble" is partially explained by the inability to develop organisational and communicative methods adapted to societies where not just work but urban organisation, leisure etc have been really subsumed to capital. Melbourne (the most suburbanised Australian city, ahead of Brisbane) in particular can be grouped with the cities of the US west. It has an outer suburban band running north-south, 30km outside the CBD, where a sparse subdivided landscape is dotted by massive shopping centres which form the only (commodified) kind of public space. These suburbs house people whose everyday routine involves working in the informational sectors and unproductive labour by day, slogging through traffic jams from 6-8pm before submitting, clapped out, to culture industry brain rot at night. There is little residual Gemeinschaft of working-class community or reciprocal structures of work, family, communication etc. One of the most auto-dependent urban environments on earth, this whole outer suburban region experienced a huge swing toward the Liberals on Saturday. Formerly safe Labor seats are now marginal, and the marginals are now safe Liberal. The public transport infrastructure is woeful and supports a consumerist ideology where car travel is equated with individual independence (for both the working class and local remnants of the conservative technical-professional class). The same increasingly goes for the western side of Melbourne, where newly-built ring roads are designed to facilitate freight movement and influence the location of transport companies, leaving workers to swallow their road rage every morning and night. The spatial form of capitalist cities has real consequences for the type of organising you can do, and employing methods bequeathed to us from the past doesn't help. It's unclear how the latter can be grounded in the everyday experience of certain working class segments. For the moment it's moot, because everyone is concentrating on the inner suburbs instead. Maybe the atomised and pathologically chauvinistic fractions of the working class living in these other areas should not be the focus of socialist organisers right now - I dunno, that seems to be the common assumption. In any case, this seems to create an easily exploitable mass constituency for reactionaries like Howard and FF. Frank Furedi would've had a field day with this election, where people leveraged to the hilt in an asset price bubble (encouraged by negative gearing laws and cuts to capital gains tax) responded to the government's interest rate scare campaign. Eight years ago, John Howard promised a more "relaxed and comfortable" country. The reality is that people are shit-scared, and they probably should be.

Nick