Ian Warden: At least Daleks appreciate the arts

Now some more quintessential Liberal government Dalekerie (Dalekissimo? Dalekdom?) is on all thinking minds with the issuing of the report of the royal commission into the Robodebt scheme.

The scheme and its administration were a creation and an achievement of Liberal governments and everything about the Robodebt scheme is eerily Dalekesque.

The brilliance of Terry Nation's conception of the Daleks (they first appeared in 1963's Doctor Who and have gone on to be voted the greatest monster-villain-fascists in all science fiction) lies in his imagining of their inability to feel any emotions other than hate.

Without this emotional impregnability, the Daleks (squid-like mutants encased in metal containers, gliding to and fro on rollers) would be rather lacking in menace.

But as it is their inability to feel emotions, their inaccessibility to all pleas for shows of compassion of any kind, makes them, just as it makes unfeeling, unhuman humans, terrifying in the extreme.

Normally warm, naturally kindly people, feel a shocking, powerlessness dismay in our dealings with cold and callous people and institutions. They are another, chilling species.

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There is a supercallousness about the Daleks. The Kaled government of the planet Skaro, feeling Kaleds had become warm and effete, created a master-race of Kaleds, "improving" them by stripping them of such "weaknesses" as a capacity to feel empathy and by stoking their instinctive capacities for furious aggression. These improved, emotionally-streamlined mutant Kaleds are the Daleks.

A fair-minded and compassionate columnist, I realise at once with a pang of guilt, that my comparison of Liberals with Daleks is unfair.

It is unfair to the Daleks.

Yes, both Liberals in government and Daleks at large are terrifyingly, disgustingly terrible but the Daleks do have one or two redeeming qualities one never finds in Liberals. These include, as portrayed in spin-off Doctor Who novels, a love of poetry and an appreciation of Shakespeare. Liberals hate the arts.

I have sometimes wondered, and with Robodebt am wondering afresh, if the Daleks are even on occasions Liberals' conscious role models in policy matters.

It would explain a lot, including and especially Howard government heartlessness and cruelty towards refugees as manifested in the shocking-to-the-compassionate Tampa and Children Overboard imbroglio-catastrophes. On those occasions, did the government, feeling indecisive at first, ask itself "What would the Daleks do?"

This columnist has often asked why so public a "Christian" as Scott Morrison so seldom as a minister and a prime minister ever seemed to ask himself "What would Jesus do?"

Here we are again with this enduring mystery. As social services minister from December 2014 to September 2015, Morrison was responsible for the Robodebt scheme. When the possibility of hounding welfare recipients in robotic ways emerged, he seems not to have asked himself "What would My Redeemer do?" but instead took a Dalekelliavellian, persecution-based approach.

In recent days, Education Minister Jason Clare has said, "Scott Morrison will have to live with the impacts of Robodebt on his conscience." But just as one would never bother appealing to a Dalek's conscience (knowing it doesn't have such a thing), one doubts that Morrison's conscience is a burdensome piece of his scant moral luggage.

And, before any of us get too carried away with righteous indignation over the sins of Robodebt's users, we should ask ourselves searching questions about whether our own inner-Dalek enabled a government of our election to unleash the hounds of Robodebt.

Passionate chronicler of the whole horror, journalist Rick Morton, said on ABC radio on Monday that "we do have a nasty mean streak in the Australian psyche".

He diagnosed that in this case our nastiness was brought out by the mean suspicion that welfare recipients were taking something they didn't deserve, somehow at the expense of those of us who are deserving and righteous.

Ominously ominous for those of us dreaming of a "yes" in the Voice referendum, in his sober essay, A Referendum in Trouble, and in his discussion of it last weekend on Radio National, history professor Bain Attwood sees a similarly mean streak (my words for it, not the professor's) working against a referendum "yes".

He compares the 1967 referendum, when Australians wholeheartedly voted in "fair-go" ways to uncontroversially give First Nations people rights to be enjoyed by all Australians, with this 2023 referendum.

This time, he diagnoses, lots of Australians feel "challenged" and "unsettled" by the thought of giving First Nations people a right, the Voice to parliament, unique to them, the Aborigines.

Asked to do something to relieve the particular historical and continuing "loss and suffering" suffered by the First Australians, these "unsettled" non-Aboriginal Australians, professor Attwood fancies, think of their own losses and sufferings over the last 30 or 40 years "as the result of social and economic policies of the major political parties". Thus "unsettled", these souls, he finds, "feel very reluctant to embrace the 'yes' vote".

Those of us without a well-developed inner-Dalek will struggle to understand how any non-Aboriginal voter can have such nastiness and meanness in his heart and mind, how she can imagine her losses and sufferings compare with Aboriginal losses and sufferings. But that is what the professor soberly diagnoses is going on and is helping to put a "yes" in dire trouble.

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