Scared, F**ked off, and “Not racist but”: Lessons from talking to residents of Notamajorcity.
Seven days into my journey and I had just met what seemed to be the 10th person in a row who was voting for Pauline Hanson, that’s 10 more than I had ever met in my entire life.
I knew I was in a distant land. A land called Notamajorcity.
Over the last month I’ve spent 10 days finding out how the citizens of Notamajorcity are thinking and feeling when it comes to this year’s festival of the ballot. In most cases, however, all I had to do was pop my dipstick into their entropy wells to judge levels of apathy. Friends, it turns out we are topped right up.
Aside from the prevalence of people who don’t vote, or “tick a box” so they don’t get fined, or “draw a mouth and penis on the ballot because politicians can go eat a dick”. I can draw some nuance from #twitchike2016.
The one major caveat I must highlight here is that my data set was not statistically significant. I interviewed 40 people at random from the the bottom of Notamajorcity, to the top, by hitchhiking from Hobart to Airlie Beach, staying away from… all the major cities.
We live in a big country, it’s huge… but just like how the #Brexit result caught wealthy middle class city dwellers flat footed, it’s important to realise that our country is more diverse than brunch on sundays, yoga on tuesdays, soccer on saturdays, and double shot macchiatos monday, wednesday, friday.
In order to do that. You need to get out of Notamajorcity.
The characters in Notamajorcity are some of the most archetypal Australians you'll ever get to meet. As they say, stereotypes are stereotypes for a reason.
It’s not until you drive through Central Queensland where the unemployment rate is significantly higher than the capital cities, that I actually saw in the wild , with my own eyes, even shook hands with a “dope smoking, dole bludging, mum on welfare, popping kids to get a bit of extra cash”. I actually met one of them. It was awesome. She was wonderful. Sure a bit racist, but who isn’t.
I’ve always heard about them since I was kid. On this very trip I was warned about them, I just brushed it off like it was a myth, as if they were some kind of Australian Leprechaun.
In Sydney where I live, the price of living is so high, that the idea of having kids to get ahead is like drilling holes in a row boat to stay afloat. But in Sydney…. there are jobs…in Notamajorcity there are not.
The pressure points are different in central Queensland, it’s cheap to live there, even I, as a sparsely employed comedian/journalist could buy a house, this week if I wanted to, but good luck finding a job.
Because there’s no work.
However an easy, and fun source of income is having kids. You can justify it as work by claiming you’re creating the taxpayers of the future.
People are simple creatures, we move in the direction of least resistance.
One of the big issues people of Notamajorcity have this year is a fear of immigration.
But this fear of immigration is largely rooted in two myths.
One that brown people are going to come to their white ghetto and force white people to be brown. Make them wear a hijab, eat spicy food pray to a strange spiritual being.
Where as many of those fearful of brown people in Notamajorcity haven’t really met brown people, and would rather the brown people eat mystical meat pies with tomato sauce, wear hi vis shirts and pray to rugby league like the rest of us.
The second myth around immigration is once again.. JOBS.
For dwellers of Amajorcity it’s easy to scoff “Phhh… yeah I’d like to see someone from overseas come and do my job… no one can evade Trish from HR like I can… good luck Mustafa”
The reason why people who live in Notamajorcity worry about immigration is that there are simply not enough jobs to go around in Notamajorcity. So the jobs they do have, they want to keep, and the contraction of the mining boom, means that jobs are getting scarcer in their neck of the woods.
Let’s not forget the kinds of jobs in Notamajorcity also don’t require the complex skills to avoid Trish in HR either.
What’s largely interesting is the overwhelming indifference that the natural born Australians I met had to the political system. Right across the board, from Hobart to the Whitsundays, Notamajorcitysiders are bored and fucked-right-off with the major parties. Dare I say that maybe some residents of Sydney, Melbourne and Brisbane are too.
When you talk to Notamajorcitysiders, the source of this fucked-right-offedness appears to be the constant leadership change of the major parties. Many residents of Notamajorcity are under the impression that when they vote at each election they are voting for a Prime Minister. When I tell them that that’s not necessarily the case, then they just get even more fucked-off.
“But we vote for them!” they protest with all the cognitive meltdown of someone who has been told they actually have to pay to check bags on Jetstar.
Most Notamajorcitysiders claim that all politicians are the same, they lie, and they don’t deliver what they say.
For the average salt of the earth Notamajorcitysider this is the opposite of what they’re all about, the opposite of a fair go, fair deal, blood oath, true blue or whatever means equity in Notamajorcity.
With every leadership change, people appear to notice a decisive downturn in their economic fortunes. This is something that Malcolm Turnbull, who overall Notamajorcitysiders seem to think is better than Tony Abbott, didn’t count on.
Uncertainty is rife. The length of the election campaign appears be putting on the brakes when it comes to jobs & growth, small and medium sized businesses have closed the cheque books and stop spending money until “we know what the fuck is goin on*” *paraphrase.
Small business owners who can’t get clients through the door, truck drivers who aren’t being booked, and people chucking sickies to moonlight freelancing at other jobs, many claim that this flaccid economic climate is due to electile dysfunction.
One realisation hit me hard. Now, this is nothing profound for the average thinker, but when it was pointed out to me, I had a mini aneurysm in Airlie Beach.
I spoke with a 20 year old filmmaker from Townsville who highlighted the fact that the karate chopping off of Prime Minister’s heads has become the norm for a whole generation of voters.
A whole generation… OF COURSE! It’s the new normal.
This was as sobering as Kebab with the lot, then having a bit of a spew.
Stability to a whole generation would be an alien concept.
Tell someone this age that rotating Prime Ministers like goon bags on a Hills Hoist is not normal. No matter how hard you hang onto your idea of what’s normal, the world has moved on. It’s pointless nostalgia just like the reboot of Full House.
There is immense dissatisfaction with the major parties across the board, most of the drivers who picked me up, have had enough of them, and or just don’t care enough for them.
Judging my from my tiny, tiny data set….will this mean that the minor parties and independents will once again rise from the ashes, proving the entire point of the Double Dissolution null and void? Perhaps.
While on my journey I did meet a handful of drivers who were engaged with the political process, knew who they were voting for and why, it’s just that these people were in the minority. Car after car, ride after ride, the more familiar story was the“I just draw a dick on the ballot… get my name ticked off so i don’t get fined…. donkey vote… not enrolled… who cares” kind of voter.
The only sliver of hope throughout my #twitchike2016 trip were from new Australians.
Every Driver who had become a citizen in the last decade was engaged in the issues, had read up on policy, had put thought into their vote, and was genuinely excited to participate in our electoral process.
Because generally in their country of origin, voting is corrupt, politics is ineffectual, and voice of the people means nothing.
Here in this country it isn’t. Your vote actually means something, and it’s something new citizens consider sacred.
I wish more natural born Notamajorcityciders were as engaged with the political system as the people they’re trying to prevent from coming here.
