Over the years, I've grown to love the political insight of Australian old boy Rupert Murdoch. Who hasn't? Media pundits attribute some governmental prescience to him when his expertise is in the domain of media conglomeration (which is in turn, this century's version of empire) and in assuming that our prime ministerial candidates should seek wisdom from him suggests something that should make us all feel uncomfortable. Although I agree with Murdoch that the days of partisanship are almost dead in our two party system, especially as  the two parties are now conflated into a flat ugly centrist right, I was somewhat surprised to see why and how Murdoch imagined them and us:

He [Murdoch] warned both were creating a culture of dependency.

"Go to the United States and see the same thing happening," he said.

"It seems that both (political) sides are throwing, are promising, all sorts of financial benefits – which will take huge bureaucracies, by the way, to administer – in order to make people more and more dependant on the state.

"And when people become dependant on the state, the less aspirational they become, and they slow the country down.

"And that is not the spirit of certainly this country when I grew up, or the spirit as I understand it to be.

That Murdoch imagines a society free of welfare demands in his melancholic backward gaze only proves his disconnectedness from the real world. Although he does seem more like Montgomery Burns as the years advance and his wives become more youthful, I can ascertain from Wikipedia that Murdoch is of the twentieth century. In fact, born in 1931, Murdoch would have reached maturity in the post-war era of the welfare state so in ascertaining that state handouts are something pernicious to the 'Australian spirit' is curiously remiss of him. As aspirational as he may have been in his youth, the rest of us weren't entirely independent of governmental 'handouts'. Aspiration took the form of tupperware, second cars and maybe working class kids getting into (potentially) free universities one day.

Just as our political aspirants have been conflated into a frighteningly male/benevolent polycephalic beast, Murdoch has conflated our governmental history with his own career trajectory. As he prepares himself to diversify into that aspirational heartland China, he lays his advanced liberal democratic homelands to waste. Even with a parental word in our own great paternalists', Johnny and Kevo, ear about keeping the gravy train one way (and that's not in our favour folks), Murdoch's power lies in his ability to sustain fear in the heart of his readers as we keep living beyond our means in spite of rising interest rates and credit card debt.

 The systems of bureaucratisation in today's democracy are less defined by the state and instead show a proliferation of administrative agencies. The state can only cohere us through a mutual fear of failing to aspire and an imagined history of prosperity and providence. Absenting history in favour of folkloric tales of Australian prosperity past affords a foil for the reappearance of post-war specters of reds under beds and (gosh darn it) freedom of speech! Murdoch's aspirational Australia has little to do with history or present, and everything to do with the future of our personal debt levels.