National Conferences

Clive Hamilton’s Quarterly Essay, “What’s Left? The Death of Social Democracy” provides a searing critique of the ALP, and of the politics of “aspiration” and endless economic expansion that have come to dominate the political field of thought and governance.

Hamilton argues forcefully that the “model of deprivation” which fuelled social democratic thought for much of the 20th century is now irrelevant, as a result of widespread affluence and the marginalisation of poverty to a minority of about 20 per cent of the Australian population.

And yet while absolute poverty is no longer as common as it once was, our new-found wealth, Hamilton argues, has far from made us happy. Indeed, he suggests consumer culture creates a profound crisis of alienation where “shopping has become the dominant response to meaninglessness in modern life”. Alienation, rather than injustice, is seen as the core social problem confronting affluent societies, and it is from addressing alienation by curbing the excesses of the market from which Hamilton sees the “new politics” as deriving.

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The theater piece is over. I take my wife Carols hand, and we bow. Almost in unison, the audience members stand to their feet, applauding. Some are crying. The feeling in the room is electric, grateful. We take another bow. And I am thinking to myself, What is this? What has just happened here? The scene I describe was our first performance as Acts of Renewal, a husband and wife theater team. And we were not prepared for the overwhelmingly positive response. We had just performed The Prodigal, a modern adaptation of Christ’s parable. Carol had written it just two weeks prior to the performance. People came up to us afterward, often in tears, trying to express what this 15-minute theater piece had meant to them: It suddenly hit me. I have to forgive my Dad.

I want to let God love me like that. How can God forgive me?
And then there was the speaker who addressed the audience after we performed. He gave a very, warm moving talk. But before the event, he had been distant, even rude to us. His wife later told us that he had been going through a very hard time spiritually. He was emotionally disconnected and angry with God. She had been praying that he would reconnect his heart with God before his talk. During the performance of the theater piece, he did. Six years later, Carol and I are preparing for a phone interview with a Seattle talk show. The woman who conducts the talk show suddenly says to us, You know, I saw you perform The Prodigal at the National Association of Christians in Recovery Conference six years ago, and I need you to know that God used that piece to get me back into counseling. During the performance, I started becoming aware of repressed sexual abuse memories. I was unable to finish the conference. I checked into The Meadows in Wickenburg a few weeks later. And as a result, the core of my healing was accomplished during that period.

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