Aussi aussi aussi hoy hoy hoy

January 1st (5 July?, 9 July?)

01/01/1901 Federation of Australian Colonies (i.e. date of proclamation by the first Governor General. The Commonwealth of Australia Constitution Act 1900 (UK) was passed on 05/07/1900 and given royal assent by Queen Victoria on 09/07/1900.)
First January is a good date for a national day, because Australians would celebrate their nationalism while nursing a hangover, as would be entirely apt†. OTOH 01/01 is already a holiday.

†We're a nation of fecking dipsos, is the point I'm making here.

11 December

11/12/1931 Statute of Westminster Act passed by UK parliament (date of royal assent) giving British dominions legal independence from UK parliament.
Not ratified by Australia's lickspittle imperialist government for eleven years. Bit close to Christmas. Not really Australian.

9 October (3 September?)

09/10/1942 Statute of Westminster Adoption Act 1942 passed (royal assent - commencement retroactive to 03/09/1939 [outbreak of World War II])
Only a partial r[R]atification of the Statute of Westminster Act did not, however, make Australia entirely independent*. Also the official commencement date would be an odd thing to celebrate. 9/10 is close to NSW, Qld, SA, ACT versions of Labour Day. Also, the Act was only passed to retroactively validate wartime Australian law that conflicted with UK law.**

4 December (17 February?, 3 March?)

04/12/1985 Australia Act (date of royal assent [GG] - ratified by UK Parliament [royal assent by ERII] 17/02/1986 - commenced 03/03/1986)
Yay! No longer a vassal state of the British empire. Now we're free to focus on being a vassal state of the American empire!
Local assent is a bit close to Christmas (OTOH from Easter to Christmas is a bit of a public holiday wasteland in Oz, depending which state you're in); commencement date is close to Labour Day (and variants) in Vic, Tas, WA (very), and Adelaide Cup Day - also we only had to delay the commencement date so that the Brits had time to say "yeah, alright then" which also seems odd to celebrate.

As I tell people when they ask, I would prefer to leave the flag, anthem and date of Australia Day unchanged, because it is so helpful in impressing on people, especially young people, that nationalism is childish and stupid, to have a duff national flag, a duff national anthem, and an entirely duff national holiday.

If we do change the flag, it should be replaced with the Eureka design, and people can choose their own colours.

*...s 4 of the Statute only affected UK laws that were to apply as part of Australian Commonwealth law, not UK laws that were to apply as part of the law of any Australian state. Thus, the Parliament of the United Kingdom still had the power to legislate for the states. In practice, however, this power was almost never exercised. For example, in a referendum on secession in Western Australia in April 1933, 68% of voters favoured seceding from Australia and becoming a separate Dominion. The state government sent a delegation to Westminster to request that this result be enacted into law, but the British government refused to intervene on the grounds that this was a matter for the Australian government [after 18 months of committee hearings]. As a result of this decision in London, no action was taken in Canberra or Perth. - Wikipedia.

**According (again) to Wikipedia: "The immediate prompt for the adoption of the Statute of Westminster was the death sentence imposed on two homosexual Australian sailors for the murder of their crewmate committed on HMAS Australia in 1942. Since 7 November 1939, the Royal Australian Navy had operated subject to British imperial law, under which the two men were sentenced to death. It was argued that this would not have been their sentence if Australian law had applied, but the only way for the Australian government to get the sentences altered was by directly petitioning the King, who commuted them to life imprisonment. Adopting the Statute of Westminster, so that Australia became able to amend applicable imperial law, avoided a potential repetition of this situation. The men's sentences were later further reduced."

(Amendments 26/01/2023 as indicated, including second footnote.)

Astronauts

There was a time when going to Mars made sense, back when astronauts were a cheap and lightweight alternative to costly machinery, and the main concern about finding life on Mars was whether all the trophy pelts could fit in the spacecraft. No one had been in space long enough to discover the degenerative effects of freefall, and it was widely accepted that not just exploration missions, but complicated instruments like space telescopes and weather satellites, were going to need a permanent crew.

But fifty years of progress in miniaturization and software changed the balance between robots and humans in space. Between 1960 and 2020, space probes improved by something like six orders of magnitude, while the technologies of long-duration spaceflight did not. Boiling the water out of urine still looks the same in 2023 as it did in 1960, or for that matter 1060. Today’s automated spacecraft are not only strictly more capable than human astronauts, but cost about a hundred times less to send (though it’s hard to be exact, since astronauts have not gone anywhere since 1972).

The case against a manned mission to Mars.

Alarm

In 2015, the handful of “hard Left” MPs of the Socialist Campaign Group, who fell well outside this consensus, were largely considered mildly entertaining Seventies throwbacks. The election of one of them as party leader was therefore treated—both by the party establishment and their allies in the left-of-center media outlets like The Guardian—as an embarrassing accident that had to be immediately reversed. Corbyn was declared “unelectable.” In order to demonstrate this, dozens of Labor MPs initiated an immediate campaign to render him so, via an unceasing barrage of press briefings, leaked documents, attempts to create false scandals, and a campaign of sustained psychological warfare directed against Corbyn himself—essentially waging an active and aggressive campaign against their own party. Tony Blair even openly stated that he would rather see his own party defeated than come into power on Corbyn’s leftist platform.

The problem was that the party quickly began to change, as tens of thousands of older leftists who had quit the party under Blair and hundreds of thousands of young people began to swell the ranks of local chapters known as “Constituency Labor Party” (CLPs)—inspired by the call from Corbyn and his circle to turn the party back into a social movement. This meant making local CLPs forums of democratic debate, and imagining ways to coordinate between the “extra-parliamentary left”—the peace movement, the housing movement, the climate movement—and those working within the system. It was, in short, an attempt to move away from the politics of personality to one of bottom-up, grassroots democracy. As such, Corbyn’s own lack of conventional charisma was an asset. Suddenly the left was not only teeming with ideas and vision—four-day work weeks, new democratized forms of public ownership, green industrial revolutions—but there was also a feeling that at least some of these things might, for once, actually happen.

For most in the Parliamentary Labor Party (PLP), these developments turned what was at first seen as a ridiculous accident into a genuine cause for alarm. It is important to emphasize that there is nothing like the American primary system in the UK; once selected as an MP by the party leadership, one is, effectively, a candidate for life. The only way to get rid of such a representative, short of an election loss, was through an elaborate process of “deselection.” Even the suggestion that those actively campaigning against their party’s leader in the face of protests from their CLPs might face deselection (and, as a result, the equivalent of a primary challenge) was treated, in the press, as tantamount to some kind of Stalinist purge. Corbyn’s partisans never actually attempted it. However, since so many Labor parliamentarians now found themselves so out of step with their CLPs, they had good reason to see any effort to democratize the internal workings of the party as a genuine threat to their political careers.

Still, I don’t think this quite explains the vehemence, even passion, that marked so much of the internal opposition to Corbynism. Centrists, after all, consider themselves pragmatists. For forty years the center had been drifting steadily to starboard. So what if it jumped a ways to port? It might have been abrupt, but it’s not as though anyone was proposing the abolition of the monarchy or the nationalization of heavy industry. They could adjust. A handful even did. The panicked reaction of the majority, however, only makes sense if the threat was on a far deeper level.

Most sitting Labor MPs had begun as Labor youth activists themselves, just as most centrist political journalists had begun their careers as leftists, even revolutionaries, of one sort or another. But they had also risen through the ranks of Blair’s machine at a time when advancement was largely based on willingness to sacrifice one’s youthful ideals. They had become the very people they would have once despised as sellouts.

Insofar as they dreamed of anything, now, it was of finding some British equivalent of Barack Obama, a leader who looked and acted so much like a visionary, who had so perfected the gestures and intonations, that it never occurred to anyone to ask what that vision actually was (since the vision was, precisely, not to have a vision). Suddenly, they found themselves saddled with a scruffy teetotaling vegan who said exactly what he really thought, and inspired a new generation of activists to dream of changing the world. If those activists were not naive, if this man was not unelectable, the centrists’ entire lives had been a lie. They hadn’t really accepted reality at all. They really were just sellouts.

One could even go further: the most passionate opposition to Corbynism came from men and women in their forties, fifties, and sixties. They represented the last generation in which any significant number of young radicals even had the option of selling out, in the sense of becoming secure property-owning bastions of the status quo. Not only had that door closed behind them; they were the ones largely responsible for having closed it. They were, for instance, products of what was once the finest free higher education system in the world—having attended schools like Oxford and Cambridge plush with generous state-provided stipends—who had decided their own children and grandchildren would be better off attending university while moonlighting as baristas or sex workers, then starting their professional lives weighted by tens of thousands of pounds in student debt. If the Corbynistas were right, and none of this had really been necessary, were these politicians not guilty of historic crimes? It’s hard to understand the bizarre obsession with the idea that left Labor youth groups like Momentum—about the most mild-mannered batch of revolutionaries one could imagine—would somehow end up marching them all off to the gulag, without the possibility that in the back of their minds, many secretly suspected that show trials might not be entirely inappropriate.

I was glad to find this again, apropos of winkling out an explanation for this. I can't recall why I didn't post it the first time I found it some months ago, as it is such typical brilliance from the late Mr Graeber.