Author has swinging voters on his mind
By Andrew Fraser
Political Correspondent
Canberra Times 16 June 2007. P 13.
More Australians are swinging voters who increasingly make up their minds closer to election day.
Mike Clancy wants to change all that–or at least to make those decisions better informed.
Mr Clancy, who moved to Canberra from Sydney halfway through the life of the Howard Government, sold his information technology business a year ago to write a 150 page book, Howard’s Seduction of Australia.
This examination of the reasons for the success of the Government, and evaluation of its record has seen Mr Clancy “pounding the pavement” in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra to get his work in the book stores.
Not a member of any political party until a year ago (he has joined the Greens, but insists that he is not an “active member”), Mr Clancy says his work, published in May, is not for a scholarly audience, but for voters trying to work out where the country is heading in this election year.
“It written for the average guy in the street…I was feeling a lot of stories weren’t being told. He wanted to ‘get behind the success’ of the Prime Minister.
The book aims at objectivity, with Mr Clancy saying he drew from a number of researchers and went to others for help with his manuscript.
And it urges activity.
“It really is about people getting more involved, getting off their backsides and taking more of an interest in what’s going on”.
Chapters cover Australia’s involvement in the Iraq war, treatment of minorities, the economy, the environment and ‘corrupt American-style capitalism’.
In this area, of which Mr Clancy sees worrying early trends in Australia, has made for growing inequality across the Pacific and the ‘privatisation’ of the President of the United States.
The project was halted for three months while Mr Clancy underwent another round of chemotherapy, which he has endured every two years of six years since being diagnosed with lymphoma.
A worker previously in the community sector, Mr Clancy set up OnLine English in 1995, one of the country’s first internet businesses.