Barrels and Bong Hits on the Campaign Trail 

Few pastimes expose you to the brutal truth of politics and economics like surfing. Anyone who has been on the end of a shovel, a hammer, a keyboard, a steering wheel or a till on a day of pumping waves will have developed the purest distillation of the system failures that prevent him or her from getting barrelled. It’s really not that hard to figure out. We live in an age of artificial scarcity and withheld abundance because the forces that run the world are terrified of the global working class having too much time, freedom and money on their hands. Their power relies on our subservience, and in a democracy this is best achieved this through crippling debt bondage and a series of other financial scams aimed at robbing you of your time and money. For in capitalism, time is money, money is time, and if the powerbrokers can rid you of either, or both, they’re one step closer to maintaining hegemony. 

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A healthy addiction to good waves forces you to confront these system failures and for over 50 years surfers have been trying to figure out a way around them. A quick look at the history of surfing reveals countless pivotal figures in the culture who were hell bent on avoiding the crushing vice of debt and working class drudgery. Not because they didn’t want to contribute but because they didn’t want to contribute their precious time on earth to the mindless, material excesses of a morbidly decadent consumerist, capitalist elite, who, despite having everything you could have in this material reality were still leading loveless, miserable lives couldn’t do a fucking bottom turn to save their life. 

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Take the Morning of the Earth crew, who built treehouses and moved into dilapidated farm shacks to grow their own food, make their own boards, and live a largely subsistence lifestyle that allowed them to surf when they wanted to. Despite being viewed with fear, loathing and suspicion by the establishment at the time, the regions popularised by that film and those surfers are today amongst the most expensive in the world to buy real estate. The many surfers that do live in these areas are forced to work obscene hours to service their mortgage debt, to the point their often too stiff and out of synch to surf to at a passable level when the waves do turn on. Money and security? Or surfing ability? For the average working person, it’s generally a choice between the two. 

Other surfers trafficked drugs, built surf brands out of the back of their cars (often funded by trafficking drugs), or set up surf camps or charters at their favourite waves thereby killing the goose that laid the golden egg. 

In an age in which the richest man on earth (Jeff Bezos) makes $USD4.5 million an hour; when CEO pay has increased 937% versus ten percent for average workers; when automation has created obscene gains in abundance and productivity that have not been passed back to the worker; a time when we were supposed to be working 15-20 hours a week, which, in the words of a report by the New Economics Foundation in London, “would address a range of interlinked problems (that) include overwork, unemployment, over consumption, high carbon emissions, low wellbeing, entrenched inequalities and the lack of time to live sustainably…” at this time we continue to find ourselves bogged down in the grind, barely able to find the time to care for our families and get to the ocean when it’s pumping. There has to be a better way. There is a better way. 

It was with this in mind that Vaughan Dead and myself hit the campaign trail in the lead up to the Federal Election, banging a gong and ripping a bong for anyone posing a threat to the entrenched political and media elites. 

In the seat of Cowper, on the mid-north coast, we met the working class hero, nurse, mother and Independent candidate Caz Heise, who was fully on board with shaking down the billionaires, oligarchs, and no-tax paying mining companies for a better deal on behalf of the people. 

Then it was off to McKellar, the seat adjacent to Warringah, which kicked off the Teal rout in 2019. There we met Sophie Scamps, a former elite sportswoman with all the appetite for truth and accountability you’d expect from someone who spent decades analysing biomechanics, time splits, nutrition, preparation, psychology and performance. Sports legends make sick politicians. They hail from a culture built on brutal truth telling, accountability and performing well for the team or having your career immediately brought to an end. Just ask David Pocock or former Labor candidate, Rabbit Bartholomew, who met next in the seat of Mcpherson, better known as the Gold Coast. 

There we also found the ultra marathon runner, Erchana Murray-Bartlett preparing to try and unseat a slick-haired corporate-backed reptile. Finally we headed to Lyne, the home of Forster and a host of fun albeit sharky beach breaks. Here we found small business owner and independent candidate, Jeremy Miller, who called on workers to realise their combined power and rise up against the nihilistic, parasitic bourgeois elite. 

“The trick they play is they make you think you have no power. They make you think there is no difference, it’s all boring, politics is boring, I have having to vote. So you turn up that day and because you think you have no power, you draw a penus on the ballot paper and you get out of there,” he says. 

“But you do have power. Surfers for Climate have shown us that. Getting rid of PEP11 was impossible. There was no way that was going to happen. But they showed people they had the power, people turned up because they could see they could make a difference, and they bloody well stopped it. That’s what happens when join together. So don’t fall for the trick that you don’t have power,” he says. 

The Australian Federal Election is on this weekend, May 3rd.