It's the sweaty, shitty start of another sudorific year in beautiful Brisbane, and some of you will be all set to start first-year Uni. Nicely done, even for those of you intending to major in Sociology or Peace and Conflict Studies or tripe like that. University is a place of light, liberty, learning and all that high-flown stuff you'll hear at your Graduation from a guest speaker who's been to the Russo Institute of Nuclear Physics and Photocopier Maintenance . Unfortunately, University is also a place of loonies, layabouts and Lefties, and of people who manage to combine all three of those sterling qualities. Those people end up, more often than not, rising to the top of the leaky, malodorous septic tank that is Student Politics.
You will soon encounter the stereotypical campus Lefty dickhead.
You may even remember a few from school: those screechy, no-friends buttwads who were co-chair-human of the Senior Formal Environmentally-Friendly Bread Roll sub-committee, and who roamed around the dunnies at lunchtime dobbing in smokers. You know the type. And they'll still be brassed off with never being elected School Captain, or with being rejected by the footy in-crowd. In revenge against the evils of capitalism, or of Mum and Dad, or both, they've traded in their old uniforms for new ones: nose-, eyebrow- bellybutton- and naughty-bit rings, smelly, tie-dyed clothes, long, filthy, unnaturally-coloured hair for the blokes, or not much hair at all, for the womenfolk. On their heads, at any rate. The standard look for many Lefty girls is to walk about looking like Gumby carrying two Yorkshire terriers under his arms. Just like "hippie" types have since the dawn of time. Or the '60s, or whichever came first.
To set off this awesomely foul get-up, they have kiddy school ports with just enough room for the unread copies of "Green Left Weekly" they'll shove in your face as you walk into the Main Refectory. Don't expect to find any textbooks in their bags, though. I've known socialist numbskulls who were enrolled with me in my first Undergraduate subjects, and are still in first- or second-year. I'm finishing up an MA.
And think about this one, folks. These fools wander around wearing the raggedy clothes and fatuous, drugged-up expressions of Woodstock participants. Woodstock was nearly 30 years ago. As P.J. O'Rourke (whom I would urge you all to read, at gunpoint if necessary) once stated, it's amazing how behind the times the avant-garde has actually become. Imagine the '60s if the supposedly bright young things had gone around dressed in the height of '30s fashion; wearing fedoras, spats, cheesecutter caps and zoot suits with foot-wide lapels and white kipper ties. Well, at least they'd feel obliged to wash, wearing all that expensive clobber.
If you think I'm speaking in stereotypes, look around. It's almost like there's a New Lefty showbag being offered at O-Week Market Days, which comes with a Lefty body-piercing kit, some soap which encourages dirt and grime, and a sachet of hair dye of a colour Not To Be Found In Nature. And one of those copies of "Socialist Worker" with the paragraph on the inside cover about how nasty old Stalin has nothing to do with caring, bunny-hugging, compassionate Socialism. (There are about 50, 000, 000 Russians who'd disagree, but they're all dead and can't answer back).
It's the inherent nature of the Left, though, to produce an infinite number of offshoots, factions-within-factions, and squabbles incarnate. Heinz Baked Beans has 57 varieties, and the Left combines more to produce much the same gaseous effect. For instance, there are the Green Left, the Labor Left and the Socialist Left, and quite possibly the Left Aside, the Left Behind , the Left Hand of Darkness (a faction led by Ursula K. LeGuin), the Left Turn Only If Safe, and the Right Left Right Right Left, a faction believing in compulsory marching duties for all citizens.
Nobody's yet been bored, listless and mean enough to catalogue some of these internecine Lefty gangs. Until now. What follows is based upon my own experiences as one of a much shat-upon-by-Lefties right-of-centre Student Union team, and those of my friends from the same team. (If there are more than a few left after all these years).
1. The Coffee-Shop Left: The most numerous Lefty faction on Campus, the Coffee-Shop Left are the ones who are responsible for the "running" of the Student Union. These people can be found swelling the crowds at one of the various campus coffee-shops after about ten each morning. (Instead of being in the air-conditioned comfort of their offices, in which work may sometimes have to be done).
They are generally associated with the campus Labor clubs, and aspire toward the great example of its UQ Branch Patron, His Holiness Lord Mayor Surly Jim Soorley the First. In the manner of that Great Leader, they combine sanctimony and Puritanism to great (or little, depending on how you look at it) effect. For example, when in charge of the UQ Student Union, they play along with the University's bizarrely restrictive alcohol regulation policy, ending such monumental piss-ups as the Toga Party, while at the same time promoting drug use by funding the irresponsible "High Society", with its smoke-ins and "Hemp Olympics". 1997's Lefty UQ Student Union President also took off down to Sydney on a "fact-finding mission", touring Student pubs and clubs with a view to, apparently, creating a "New Rec. Club" on campus. This is a regular Lefty election promise, which seems to be an excuse for Union Presidents to shout themselves a long weekend Down South. Of course, as Peter Beattie has stated (while no doubt keeping that cheesy, electrocuted-chimp smirk on his face to let us know he's not a complete boofhead), the ALP has nothing to do with any Student Unions in Queensland.
Control tower to pig, prepare for take-off.
The Coffee-Shop Left are sanctimonious prissies with a vague idea at best of their own ideological position. To compensate for this lack of a considered outlook, they are obsessed with loose, unfathomable notions of "equality" and "inclusiveness". (In practice, inequality and exclusiveness, as any normal-looking lady who's tried to enter the Student Union's "Women's Room" will know). Anything, in fact, that can't actually be assessed, pointed to or spat upon; "the achievement of Steve Vizard at the Constitutional Convention", for instance, or "the profile of Cheryl Kernot in Dickson". These Lefties are thoroughly bland nonentities who maintain the Lefty "look" until graduation, when they enter the middle echelons of the Public Service, Brisbane City Council, ACTU, ALP politicians' political staffs, etc. Keep your suitcases packed for when they start running the country.
2. The Yeti Left: So named due to the physical resemblance between many of its abominable adherents and the hairy, unwashed, howling Abominable Snowman of Tibetan myth. There the resemblance ends, however. The Tibetan Snowman is reputed to be a shy, retiring creature whose malign activities are limited to eating oxen whole and making mountain climbers shit themselves. The Yeti lefty is a loud, clamourous, wholly unpleasant person whose malign activities are varied and ever-expanding.
Hated even by their fellow socialists, the Yeti Left see nothing wrong with shrieking nonsense about the overthrow of the ruling classes, by which they can only mean Mum, Dad and teacher. The appeal of Yeti Leftism to a certain kind of personality-type is quite obvious: it provides the I-want-to-shoot-everyone nerd with a soapbox to rant from, and endless opportunities to do so. Yeti Lefties' constant and risibly earnest bullshit-sessions (around the same mouldy old commie topics they've been sent from Party headquarters since the time of the First International) are advertised on "Socialist Worker" posters. One famous example is the 1997 debate called "The Russian Revolution: Workers' Power or Bolshevik Coup?", the intergalactic stupidity of which I will refrain from playing up, as it speaks for itself (that question having been answered by historians around 1917). Other topics advertised for debate by the Socialist Worker Student Club include: "What would a Socialist Society look like?", a question answered by historians around 1917, and "Who was Karl Marx?"; a question answered by anybody who ever trod in some.
The Yeti Left, when it gets the chance, loves what the late Sir Kingsley Amis described as "non-violent, i.e., fairly violent" protest. These protests involve much self-righteously indignant shouting through megaphones and disruption of the Main Refectory area for an hour or so, when the Yetis and their groupies march off to do some damage to something and try to get themselves arrested. The last fairly-violent Yeti sit-in in Queensland occurred in 1996 at Queensland Uni, and was directed at a group of people including the current author, who will bang on about it all day if given the opportunity. The grotesque, comically revisionist rhetoric and violent tactics of these people are indistinguishable from those of neo-Nazi groups. It takes a certain kind of nerdy, self-obsessed cot-case to join the Yeti Left, but I suppose it cuts down the numbers of new skinheads.
3. The Tantrum Left: The most comically ineffectual of all campus Lefty factions are the Tantrum Left. This faction is a loose agglomeration of those perennial teenagers still stuck in the "How many rainforests could we save for the price of a battleship?" mentality. You know, the simple-minded dolts who think the world could be saved if all nuclear weapons were dropped off at a Cash Converters shop and the money gained was used to roll beached whales back into the sea. Exponents of this school of drivel also include the Friends of Albert Park dill who protested against cigarette companies' sponsorship of the Melbourne Grand Prix with the claim that "smoking should not be encouraged in the lungs of our city". (By that, she meant the Albert Park. In case you were thinking she was worried about any people or anything). This is the first time anybody has appeared to claim, outside of jest, that smoking might give trees cancer.
Another member of this shrill band of half-wits once approached
me when I was sitting on one of the benches around the University's
Great Court. As sometimes happens in the Tantrum Left, this particular person was obviously aging in body, and adolescently feeble in mind. Somebody's demented man-hating feminist auntie; who but for the wonderful tertiary education system would have been the local cat lady somewhere in Geebung. I'm sure you get the picture. I was sitting on the bench, reading, minding my own business and having a quiet smoke. It was the smoking that did it. Although I was a complete stranger and engaged in harmless activity, the frazzled Lefty relic proceeded to bellow abuse at me. "I WAS WONDERING", she yapped at the top of her voice (yes? I thought; the way to the Arts Faculty office? The Michie Building? The JD Story walking frame storeroom?), "WHY YOU"RE POISONING US ALL WITH THAT THING IN YOUR MOUTH! I think she meant the cigarette. And I don't know how I refrained from physical violence or even a mild, witty verbal rebuke along the lines of "fuck off, you old cow", but I did. I picked my book up and walked away. "DON'T ANSWER ME THEN, YOU FILTHY MONGREL", raged the loony old biddy. Well, OK, I gave her the forks.
The mentality of this group is best demonstrated by the fact that one of its most visible members, the one-time owner of the biggest collection of "Cure" posters in Hamilton, attended her High School formal in a flannie shirt. To demonstrate her empathy with the workers, you see. And to demonstrate what happens when indulgent parents don't hit their kids enough. (They're probably too busy administering some serious chastisement to mad Auntie Whatsername).
The Tantrum Left is the main constituency of Resistance, that cynical Loony-Left campaign to recruit naive schoolkids to various socialist causes, largely through fluffy, meaningless blather about "Green Issues" and "Fighting the System". The magazine pushed by this bunch of wide-eyed dillpickles, "Green Left Weekly", is a badly photocopied shit-sheet full of revisionist balderdash, wilful ignorance of history, and hairy-scary conspiracy theories. "The Environment" has been absorbed into the list of Left-wing sacred cows, thereby providing the forces of stagnation with a handy recruiting tool, and a solid blunt instrument with which to sanctimoniously thump their opponents. (Forgetting, conveniently, the shocking environmental abuses of their erstwhile Eastern Bloc sponsors). The Environment is the staple "issue" of the Tantrum Left, as it is an easy thing to be John-Denverishly profound about when one lives in a run-down West End Queenslander share house. (And why the bloody Hell do Leftie environmentalists have such malodorous, overgrown, rubbish-filled gardens, anyway?)
Such people are more to be pitied than tolerated. Except at Student Union election time, when they and their two-and-a-half thousand supporters at Uni. (out of about 25, 000 students, I hasten to add) reap the benefits of compulsory Student Unionism and non-compulsory voting in Student Union elections. Yup, that's right. A multi-million dollar gravy train is placed annually in the grubby little hands of a bunch of nitwit ferals by those thick enough to provide them with the minimal support they need. If it somehow doesn't go the way of the ferals (as in 1996), they respond with delaying tactics, stupid censure motions, and violent sit-ins. The word "racket" springs to mind, for some unknown reason. Get on with your studies, folks, they'll be far less depressing than any extra-curricular stuff on campus. Because until we have Federal Voluntary Student Unionism, every living, breathing thing on campuses across the nation will be forking out $250 a year to the troglodytes I've just described. Not so funny after all, is it?
Marcus Salisbury
