Achi news desk-
Phillip Bigg turned the wheel of his truck, his chest-length ginger beard flying, and we wheeled off the highway and onto a rutted track. There was a new smoothly graded road next to it, but “the owners don’t like us to use it”, he said. We had come out of New Norfolk, a town at the southern end of the Lyons electorate, and were going to Magra, a rural barrier that once had a town of its own. On the bad road to the ghost town – it doesn’t get more symbolic than that.
As we slowly crept up the hill, I realized that I probably wasn’t going to see Phillip, a candidate for the Shooters, Fishermen and Farmers Party, in action, handing out a few leaflets or n talking to the customers, as I hoped. .
“Yes, we had some flyers in the works, but they haven’t arrived.” He smiled. “Hog’s feet, yes.”
Instead, we had stopped off at his place, to collect one of his seven guns for a photo op. Tasmanian bush chickens ran in front of us, shaking their big backs and wings up in a tizzy. A wallaby jumped out.
“Barely,” said Phillip. “I should have brought one of the smaller guns.”
Pigs feet indeed. Phillip is the new state secretary of the Shooters, a party that has been around for a decade in Tasmania without making much of a mark. That, it must be said, is part of the wider failure of Shooters. At one point they had several seats in the NSW lower house and looked like they were starting to offer a real alternative to the National Party. But then the NSW party exploded with a personal breakdown and lack of unity, and its members sat as independents, except for the remaining “leader” Robert Borsak (with a second now).
Could Tasmania serve as a platform for regeneration? Not in 2024.
“We won’t win this time,” said Phillip, as we drove on a road that hangs off the side of a cliff, still going up. “But this is a starting point.”
Phillip is probably number two on the Lyons ticket, and he certainly won’t win. But he was the only one of about nine candidates and party emails contacted that got back to me. His work may be cut out.
“Surely your problem is with the name?” I said, as we pulled up to a high point and I counted my remaining teeth. “You have a full spectrum of policies. Guns are the least of it now…” That’s not entirely true. One cause has been resisting the extension of excessive regulation to antique guns, and the party is also in favor of legalizing silencers, similar to the all-important assassin-for-hire vote. (Okay, technically solid deterrents for game hunting.)
But on the way up, we had talked about many things — sustainable funding, reforming the salmon industry, more support for small communities and small businesses, the black deal that Tasmania’s participation in the national electricity market represents — and it struck me as far. a more thoughtful person than the party name reflects. We agreed to disagree on stories about children identifying as cats – “Phillip, it’s an urban myth!” —and a couple of other things. It was easier, as I mostly agreed with him on cultural policy.
“See, the Greens want…”
“But, Phil, you’re green. Everything you’ve said is green.”
“Well, the green of the party,” he said. “I mean everybody’s green now. She doesn’t want all the other stuff the Greenies were lying about. I mean none of them really go out into the bush now.”
In fact, the shots we then took at the top of the hill, with the magnificent terrain spreading out below, put us back in heavy Wagner territory. But, ehhhh, what are you going to do? The tendency of the Archers – or the tendency of those I have come across – is paradoxically more radical than the Greens in terms of ideas about a way of life that has changed somewhat.
He talks about the idea that a small and marginal state like Tasmania really has to try to cultivate an alternative set of values, compared to the illusory promises of the main parties, about what makes life worth living. This civilizational politics was there at the origin of the Greens. It is now much less possible than it was because the party now represents the knowledge class who like the shiny new world.
That would be the basis for a stable party outside the left-right system. Compared to the Jacqui Lambie Experience, it is halfway there in terms of having real policies and a recognizable worldview. But it has a ways to go, starting with that name:
“I don’t know,” said Phillip, after complaining about a media blackout. “It tells people we don’t give a damn what they think.”
“Yeah, in Tasmania, it’s a bit dark though…”
We drove past the new estates being built outside New Norfolk. “Little boxes,” he thought, echoing the 60s song — “little boxes / on the hillside / little boxes, made of ticky-tacky / and they all look exactly the same…” – nothing but for the New Left’s greatest cry against the standardization of life. It had been an interesting afternoon.
But there is still the taciturn Tasmanian, not to do politics.
“Let me ask you,” said Phillip, as he dropped me off at the bus station. “With 10 days to go, what would you do?”
“Well, I think, I’d go to Officeworks and make 1,000 flyers for 80 bucks, and hit every farmer’s market, every turnip festival, every weekend car show within reach. You only need 4,000 votes to have a chance…” Was I now helping the Archers? Is this why people on the left get ticked off with me from time to time?
“Yeah, maybe,” he thought. I’m not sure what the alternative was. But in the longer term, the party may have another chance. And nobody knows at all what will have happened on Monday. But it will be weeks before we find out who was the shooter and who was the wallaby.
