Millennials Changing America - Blog - Millennials' State of the Union: Tom Dawkins, Australian Expatriate

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Jan262010

Millennials' State of the Union: Tom Dawkins, Australian Expatriate

Tuesday, January 26, 2010 at 07:56PM

Tom Dawkins is an Australian living in Washington, DC. He works as the Social Media Director at Ashoka (and organization for which his is not - in any way - speaking on the behalf of in this interview).

His perspective is an interesting one, as he speaks about the past year as an outsider speaking from the inside, and because he moved here out of fascination with American politics (and the 2008 Presidential election in particular). We discussed many things at great length, but focus here on the American health care debate in particular.

Points of particular interest:

On the debate:

Tom says that "there is a massive media failure [with regard to reporting on the health care debate]."
"What constitutes for even-handed journalism in America is to provide a platform for people with different perspectives to say whatever they want, unchallenged. You can get up there and say whatever you want, and I can get up there and say whatever I want and that's even handed, when in fact you might have been making something up completely and that goes more or less unchallenged."
"I can't help but to think that if something similar [to this debate] happened in Australia - It's as wonky as a debate and issue as you can get, and the fact that it's devolved into screaming mobs just kind of fascinates and repulses me. I feel like in Australia - if it were a similar debate at home - it would be a very academic debate. That would certainly exclude a lot of people, and a lot of people would be like 'Hey - What's going on? I don't know how I feel about this.'"
However, he doesn't think there is a greater level of understanding in the States. "There's a much greater level of certainty in what they think they understand."
"The whole country has lost any sense of perspective on what it considers the political spectrum. You're thinking about changes to your health care system and there'' all these other countries that do different things with health care and you could just sit back and passionately observe them" and pick out different parts from different systems "but there's almost none of that that's gone on."
"It's almost entirely sound bytes and slogans with a result where people are currently saying that the Massachusetts election is payback for Obama for governing from the 'Far Left.' Of course, the health care bill that passed in the Senate is a Center Right bill. By any notion of political science and what constitutes Left or Right - obviously these are muddled and disputed terms - but to the extent that they mean anything at all, it's a center right bill. There's no government option, so the insurance industry is entirely private. There's no competing government actual delivery systems, all the hospitals and actual service providers are private. All it was going to do was change the rules for some of those private industries."
"You can imagine how on the Left wing, if you had a fully socialized system - more like the English system where the doctors are public employees and the hospitals are run by the government, and there is a single, central nationalized insurance provider. Maybe on the far right you have a purely capitalist system with no Medicare, Medicaid and so on - the legislation proposed was well over [to the right] and yet that's called Socialist and Marxist and so on. And these things that call for any sort of a reasonable debate - around what would constitute a proper mix… nobody's currently arguing that we should do away with Medicare, so if you accept the fact that it's a mixed system, then all we're arguing about is the mix."

On millennial engagement within the debate:

It was a "huge strategic mistake" that millennials were not included into the dialog about health care as millennials have more to gain (we're more likely to have part-time jobs, insecure jobs, jobs without health care).
Equally, millennials are altogether healthier, and thus it doesn't become one of the generations' most pressing issues. "We don't think about it in our every day lives."
"I don't spend much time in my day contemplating that I'll be much less healthy."
"The tragedy was how the people who currently benefit from government provided health care were so resolutely opposed to change. In a way, it's like kicking away the latter when you're on the upper level."
"Most people who are on Medicare like Medicare. Most people like their Veteran's health insurance. Most Senators are not complaining about the publicly provided health care they receive. It's a shame that those people are not prepared to think about extending those benefits to everyone else."
Millennials, Tom claims, could have been better involved by having those conversations with our parents, which he says is how they were well utilized during the 2008 election.

Alex Steed |

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