And then some little thing triggers the explosion

I was driving the GoGet! south on City Rd opposite Sydney University mid-morning the other day when I ran into a random breath-test operation and got pulled over. I couldn’t believe it. It had been years since I’d been asked to count into the breathalyser and this was the second time in 24 hours.

The cop was a pleasant-looking young bloke with a short reddish beard and a smile in his eyes.

“Gee-wizz”, I said, laughing. “I got pulled over yesterday. I’m starting to get paranoid.”

“We’re targeting you, sir”, he said, dryly. “Count to five please.”

I counted down.

“It’s okay again,” he remarked.

“So where are you going to be tomorrow?” I asked.

“Wherever you are, sir.”

I laughed and drove off. It was nice to meet a cop with a sense of humour. Most never attempt it and you can see why. There’s too much risk of misunderstanding.

As I drove through Newtown the sun was shining and the folks drifting along the footpaths looked happy enough, but I wondered how I might have taken my encounter with the cop if I’d been some poor little bloke, living desperately, on the edge. Somebody like Mohamad Bouazizi, the street vendor whose self-immolation, following a humiliating series of encounters with police and minor officials, sparked the Tunisian uprising and the so-called Arab Spring, currently morphing into a dark and bitter winter.

And now it’s Turkey’s turn, and Brazil’s. And it isn’t only the poor and marginalised, it’s the professional middle class as well. All the small hurts, anger over corruption and frustration over stupid policies suddenly coalesce.

What’s common to Turkey and Brazil is that the events there have been triggered by the governments’ indulgence in mad vanity projects while people go hungry, schools go unbuilt and hospitals languish. Circuses before bread. And then some little thing, some small indignity, or silly bit of overreach triggers the explosion.

In Turkey it was a dumb plan to build over a much-loved open space with a shopping mall and a theme park dedicated to the Ottoman Era – a time when the Turkish elite thought they ran the world and everybody else thought they were a byword for backwardness and corruption. In Brazil’s case it’s been the madly self-indulgent effort to host the World Cup soccer final in 2016. The government decided to spend $450 million on a stadium while millions go hungry and uneducated. And then they decided to put bus fares up by 10 per cent and everything went to shit.

The greedheads who promote a city’s candidacy for hosting the Olympics, or the World Cup, always trot out this little fable about how much the city and nation will be put on the map; how its tourism profile will be raised; how the benefits will be huge and on-going … blah. The reality is that tourism tends to build to a climax leading up to the event, and drops back to normal right afterwards – or even declines, since anybody who’d ever wanted to come your way had arrived at once. There’s nothing so yesterday as yesterday’s Olympic experience and when everybody sobers up, the realisation dawns that it would have been better to build a few dozen new high schools and hospitals instead. But all you’re left with is grandiose, underutilised sporting facilities, huge maintenance bills, and debt.

So who’s next? How about South Africa? How are the masses feeling now, with 25 per cent unemployment and President Zuma building himself a lavish $16 million estate? When South Africa explodes, it’s going to be ugly.

You see the thing is, the market fundamentalist yarn about improving the lot of the masses by wealth “trickling-down” has run into the sands. It was based on unsustainably cheap credit and cheap, abundant, oil and gas. It was never going to work in South Africa, or Brazil or India. It failed horribly in Ireland and Greece. The US is a basket-case and China an accident waiting to happen. In rich, advanced, historically-privileged countries, like Australia, trickle-down worked for twenty years, in a half-arsed way. Living standards sort of rose but income inequality increased. We ended up with Gina Rineharts at one end and people sleeping rough at the other.

If trickle-down – the mainstay of social control since the time of Thatcher, Keating and Reagan – is cactus, where does that leave us? Seems to this old possum that wealth redistribution is right back on the agenda.