It’s now a statement of the obvious that Australia’s political system has evolved into dysfunctionality. We used to be one of the world’s most successful democracies. Now we’re an international laughing stock. We may not have produced a Trump, but we’ve produced a less personalised version of the same thing, chaos. So now we’re all scrambling to explain why.
I recently published a book, The Mess We’re In, trying to explain why democratic politics is so terrible. My main worry while bashing it out last year was that the mess would resolve itself, that my view that it was an unprecedented period created by long-term forces would prove to be wrong because things would sort themselves out.
Yeah, nah, turns out I needn’t have worried.
So here’s a quick sketch of why I think we have just gone through the most disastrous leadership crisis yet.
The collapse of neoliberalism
I bang on and on about this but it is fundamental: our economic system stopped working in the interests of voters and only delivers benefits for corporations and the rich. The five years of wage stagnation we’ve endured while banks and energy companies stole billions in profits starkly demonstrated that. And the electorate has had a gutful. The result: even a government that has delivered some of the strongest jobs growth in Australian history lost dozens of polls in a row.
Tony Abbott witnessed the start of this disaffection; his failure to see the ground shifting under him in the toxic reaction to the 2014 budget was part of his downfall. Turnbull initially thought he could solve the problem by being Keating Redux and leading a new era of intelligent neoliberal reform. It took him less than a year, and a near-defeat in 2016, to make him change. But he could only do so in fits and starts and reactively, pushing for company tax cuts while intervening in the energy market and reluctantly allowing a banking royal commission.
It’s unlikely that any leader could have addressed the deeply entrenched disenchantment with our economic paradigm. Turnbull had a go, but failed, and thus was doomed to always struggle with poor polls.
Our political system isn’t trusted by voters
The level of support for minor parties is on the rise. So are other forms of resistance by citizens to politics-as-usual — non-registration, refusal to vote, voting early. Across the West, and here, something broke in terms of democratic participation after the Iraq war, for which no leader was ever held accountable.
Here, there isn’t even a federal anti-corruption and misconduct body to police politicians and public servants. There’s little transparency: FOI laws, donation disclosure laws and diary laws are weak or non-existent. And our political class is increasingly composed of careerists whose job is politics, meaning they make decisions influenced by their own career needs as much as perceptions of the public interest.
But this isolated, unaccountable and non-transparent system has become self-perpetuating: we force people to vote, we force them to preference so that their votes flow back to the major parties, we fund parties for each vote they get. Politics-as-usual can continue without being affected by voter disenchantment.
The internet has wrecked public debate
The internet is rewiring our minds, our communications systems, our economies. It’s doubtful we have any proper understanding of what it is doing to us. One result: we no longer have a unified media environment in which we share the same facts and values. Now we have a media space that is fragmented. Where mass media once atomised individuals, individuals now atomise the media, carving out their own space with their own facts and values. Governing, which entails effectively communicating about complex issues, becomes far more difficult in such an environment, unless your only message is relentless negativity.
And the internet is killing the mainstream media, one of the safeguards of democracy. Worse, one of the few strategies to prolong the lives of those outlets is to become more shrilly partisan to appeal to consumers on the Left and the Right. And the fragmentation has delivered a platform and a community to older white people, especially older white males, who see themselves as under attack because the privilege they have traditionally enjoyed has been undermined by both neoliberalism, which doesn’t care about colour, gender or sexuality and sees your personal worth as strictly related to your economic value, and by the removal of blatant inequality. This fury of mildly diminished privilege targets anything deemed insufficiently reactionary, and has been a potent force in the anti-Turnbull lunatic fringe at News Corp, Sky and 2GB where angry old white men, and the very occasional woman, foam at the mouth and savagely kick downward.
None of these forces are going away; if anything they’ll get worse. Labor insists it has learnt the lessons of the Rudd-Gillard years. We’ll see. My fear is we’ll be going through all this again in a couple of years.
*Ban the publishing of opinion polls.
*Stop all elected members using twitter, friendface and other social meeja as methods of communicating to the electorate .
*Any by-election caused by a change of party leadership to be fully funded by that party and not the taxpayer. *Any parlimantarian who quits before their elected term is over (excluding illness and genuine family responsibilities) to lose all superannuation earned for that term and any pension they might have been entitled to.
* Fix whatever the fuck is wrong with the senate (see Malcolm Roberts and Fraser Anning)
Banning opinion polls would just make us all even more vulnerable to the media setting the agenda and telling us what’s good and broadly acceptable to our fellow citizens. No thanks.
Barring MPs from communicating over social media – what, politics is to be left to old fogeys who still write longhand letters?
Don’t mind the byelection and super changes.
The Senate represents the people. There’s a few percent of Australians who are Roberts/Anning level fuckwits and sure enough, they get a couple of representatives. I can’t really argue that’s actually something wrong with the Senate.
As I said in an earlier post (23/8) Dutton could win the next election for the LNP, because many voters will be attracted by his non nonsense style, his black and white attitudes to complex topics, his decisive model of leadership, all of which will be regarded by many voters as “common sense.” What is coming out of the three years of Turnbull’s disastrous reign at the helm of the country is the growing gap between the intelligentsia–those who analyse political history in terms of a moderately long durée and with a set of defined rational principles which expose contradictions–and the rest who do not, preferring the superficial image of personality and politics and absolving themselves of any responsibility by saying “all politicians are crooks.” The latter have to be educated in appropriate analytic techniques.
I think Bernard’ three points are clearly right, but neoliberalism has merely institutionalised the individualism associated with the atomisation guaranteed by digital technology and the non-refereed nature of much of the material found on it. When everything is privatised and the government exists to sustain the private sector–oligopolies and otherwise–then instability will become the norm until a strongly authoritarian strong-man takes over. Turnbull has definitely facilitated this through his nihilism and self-authentification simply by being PM.
Thanks Bernard and Gregory I agree with your analysis. BK’s points about the internet are spot on. Once upon a time, to express my views in a hard copy paper, I would have had to sit down with pen and paper, write a letter and get it in the post. If I wanted to abuse or threaten someone anonymously, I’d need to go to the trouble of sending a poison pen letter the same way.
Today, I’m using my phone and have the instant but dubious gratification of seeing it on the page straight away in all its idiocy. Good points about Julie Bishop, she is a great show pony, perfect for foreign affairs in more ways than one. Yesterday, I heard a woman in a vox pop somewhere declare her approval of her because “she dresses well and is so nicely groomed”. It’s all good.
Malcolm wears nice suits and sends middle aged female journalists giddy.
Kevin Andrews hair is blacker than a North Yorkshire black pudding.
Tony Abbott has a collection of 47 blue ties in his flag box; lures for old Tory bigots and forelock tigers.
“Once upon a time, to express my views in a hard copy paper, I would have had to sit down with pen and paper, write a letter and get it in the post.”
And most likely they wouldn’t publish it, especially if it was outside their bandwidth of acceptable opinion. This very undemocratic idea that people expressing their views is dangerous is … dangerous!
Ho ho ho ho. No more than a dozen or so opportunist axe-grinders – Abbott, Abetz, Spence, Bolt, Credlin, Hadley, Jones, Markson, Kelly, Kenny, Sheridan, Shanahan – dupe a third-rate lemming-cascade of time-pressed, space-filling Gallery hacks into stampeding an only-moderately-fragile government into an insane suicide…and it’s a ‘crisis in democracy’ at the hands of Teh Evil Interwebz, is it BK? It’s ‘us voters’ losing faith in ‘our’ systems and ‘our’ representatives, eh?
Well, I can only speak for myself. But I’m with our pollies, matey. Every time. Even the ones I totes hate. ‘Coz they put skin in the game, BK. They stand up and try; they have a go. We get to vote them in, and we can vote them out. They are us, and we are them. So…soz, but I refuse to join the pile-on just now. Too easy, too opportunistic, too craven. We elect them. They’re us. We’re them. Every single one of our elected reps has at least my meta respect and my meta support. As does our least-worst democratic system.
So…kindly don’t you effing verbal me, Mr Bernard Keane, professional political journalist.
Don’t you tell me what ‘I’ think about ‘our democracy’, pal. You? You’re just another jobbing political word-producer, one more unelected, unaccountable, self-advertising, self-exculpating democratic tyre-kicker among the expanding battalions of vapid chattering faux-‘objective’ main game wannabes who are apparently increasingly intent on usurping the conversations between me and the people I elect.
Seriously, man: don’t you dare set yourself up like some kind of fraternally lamenting fellow-traveller of us voters outside the bubble in this. If there’s a ‘crisis’ in democracy you’re a part of the problem, Bernard, not the solution, no matter how many hand-wringing words you churn out. The problem is…precisely too much of that: too much unaccountable talk, from precisely too many unaccountable political operatives, precisely like…well, you, dude. (Yes, BK, you are a political operative: have the honest and decency to own it, at least). Too much analysis, too much comment, too much gossip, too much blah blah blah. Not from Teh Webz. Not from us pisspoor amateurs. (You can’t simultaneously laugh at us as irrelevant zoobs AND blame us for the totes collapse of your precious realm.) This latest meeja-contrived leadership fiasco has zip to do with us, sonny. It’s of course all come as usual from you Legacy ‘professionals’. You lot can’t talk your way out of that reality with…yet more talk, Berns. Blah blah blah. Blah blah blah. Nup. Ain’t gunna fly.
Hey – Wotcha gunna blah about politics tomorrow, BK? And the next day? And the next? The next? Then, the day after that? Then what? More words, telling us Australians what we think about our oh-so-awful politics? What about the next day, though, once you’ve said that (yet again)? Say it again? OK – what about the next bit of blah after that? The next? What about in three months, when Dutton’s about to be rolled? Or later next year, when Shorten’s honeymoon period is over, and Rupert’s decided he’s for the chop now, too? Blah blah blah, again? ‘Time for healing?’ ‘Reconciliation’? Or another ‘time for change’? Then another ‘death of democracy’ chin-stroking lament?
Another book?
You guys. You…political word guys. You legacy meeja 24-7 content monkies, with your vast blind spot, your utter absence of insight into your own destructive complicity, your helplessness to stop yourselves even if you do recognise it, like Ulhman. You just can’t stop blah-ing…or you’re out of the great game. Right?
So…why, eureka! Blame it all on Teh Interwebz!
Um…you mean this one we’re both writing our words onto, do you, BK? Mate: it’s just another page. Just another place to park some writing. You might as well blame the English alphabet itself, for the endless words you – and your fellow journalists, alone, BK – choose to flood suffocatingly and paralysingly out into our polity. Watching your Legacy lot on the ABC feed right now…blah, blah, blah. Three blokes and a couple of chicks in suits, whose collective professional expertise and life experience lies in nothing but talking about politics, into a camera. My god, the breathless self-importance, the narcissism, the rolling monumental self-regard…you all…choose to keep on embracing, exult in, glory in, at times like these.
Choose, BK. No-one forced you lot to give that laughably pathetic, incoherent, transparently petty, minuscule mini-putsch the slightest bit of traction outside post 6 pm Sky, a few daily hours on 2GB & the now fully-unhinged Oz Op Ed page, dude. You each did it all by yourselves.
Fricking lemmings. Look at you herding the rest of us over your own pathetically contrived cliff.
Oh well. On with the blah, eh! Yep…it’s ‘on’, apparently. Great.
Sooo…Tell me again what I think about our democracy, BK. Oh, please, Mr Political Journo: do. Oh, please do. Please, yes. For: God forbid that the people we actually elect should ever be allowed to get a word into our public conversations without our Fourth Estate’s democratic permission, editorial oversight and imperious explanatory condescension, eh.
Ho ho ho. Funny? Nope. Not at all. Not one bit. I give whoever wins the ballot today three months max.
Geez Jack, why don’t you tell us how you really feel?
“…a third-rate lemming-cascade of time-pressed, space-filling Gallery hacks into stampeding an only-moderately-fragile government into an insane suicide…”
If the government is stampeded into “an insane suicide”, how is that the fault of the press gallery??
Don’t the Liberals believe in personal responsibility, rather than “the media made me do it”??
Peter Dutton never ever remotely had ‘the numbers’. Turnbull did everything he could to bring that bear. The whole thing was a brutally rammed through con driven by a handful of relentlessly bullying information grubs. The fact that the main Gallery saw it for exactly what it was couldn’t stop them from dutifully giving it traction.
Fine, whatever. But I hate – I despise – the way the press then has the bloody gall to say it’s all a function of ‘our’ disenchantment with democracy, politics, this or that careerist politician, even the main parties as a whole. That is media push-polling, verballing, absolute self-exculpating garbage.
Such frustrations, as expressed, when the hacks shove a microphone in our faces and get us to reassure them if how much, oh yes, we do hate democracy politics etc etc, are actually symptoms of the real, deeper malaise: with a 24-7 press-political pact that now forms an impermeable, epistemological Praetorian Guard around every last book and cranny of our public square.
We’re just audience fodder for the simulacrum that’s long switched to autopilot, to be patronised, or savaged, according to whether we keep going along with the show, or call b/s on the entire construct.
Ha ha Jack, I always have time for your words. Not your most eloquently rational post, except for the fact that angry derision is probably the only response to this debacle.
Carry on my friend, and have an extra bottle of the brown stuff tonight. I’ll raise a cheers to you too.
Dogs…what can I say. Just a screech if utter outrage at…being patronised, so. It’s the vicious condescension that wounds. But…time for a pause, for sure. Nothing edifying in impotent tantrums.
Warmest, man.
Indeed Jack!
And Crikey’s increasing descent into fluff pieces and rolling coverage and “explainers” that are produced by (probably unpaid) interns is part of the problem.
For me, I am happy to pay for daily (or less frequent), brief emanations from Crikey that are cheeky, insightful and above all, high quality, rather than yet another stall of wall-to-wall fairy floss.
Oh for the daze of “… daily (or less frequent), brief emanations from Crikey that are cheeky, insightful and above all, high quality“.
It’s been wayyy too long – those who want drivel & filler are more than adequately catered for elsewhere.
We PAY, voluntarily and with intent, and are being treated like idiots.
I agree that there are tectonic forces at work, Bernard, but what’s the path by which you’d expect a Shorten leadership to be challenged?
In Rudd-Gillard-Rudd it was a leader popular with voters but an outsider to his party barn-storming into office, only to find himself unable to pass key legislation and suffering a series of escalating brain-farts that enabled factional forces to oust him — as they certainly would unless he was an insider or remained popular with the electorate.
He was followed by a leader who, while successful legislatively, was never liked, trusted or endorsed by the electorate, whose distrust was whipped into sabayon by influential, right-wing media. And she was followed by Rudd in an effort to save the furniture in an election nobody expected Labor to win.
But assuming a government led by Shorten — a union insider who has held the party together in opposition and manages to deliver policy, what’s the pathway by which you expect him to be destablised? How would you know if that pathway were not occurring?
You could certainly argue that centre-right Australian politics is so badly fractured as to be serially unstable, but what are the fracture lines for centre-left?
Absent a testable model, this is just ignorant speculation, isn’t it?
Agreed Ruv. The destabilising forces in both prior instances are much less likely to occur in a Shorten government unless he is a terrible leader. He will never be inspirational, but the evidence is that he is a good manager who gets across detail to serve good policy. We haven’t had one of them for decades.
“He will never be inspirational” – and I think that is a good thing. We need governments to get on with the hard work of public policy development and implementation – of actually governing – and being capable of explaining difficult choices to the people, and persuading them of necessary actions. Shorten’s dullness is his strength.
One small move towards change could be to stop naming new electorates after old politicians, surely a pure vanity project of zero benefit to the voters that instead induces more cynicism. Returning to geographical names might at least spark a sense of place and locality in voters in a dislocating world. Leave the inspirational thing to the vice-regals, that’s why they have the time, splendid uniforms, stately old piles and good ribbon-cutting abilities.
Unlike the LNP which has fallen into a system where people are there to benefit the economy, and the chase for personal benefit and position has created a system of silo thinking where envy and greed have poisoned relationships and trust, Labor has shaped up a system where people actually believe in things and have compatible objectives.
It broke away from neoliberalism some years ago (Tanya Plibersek addressed the MCKELL INSTITUTE in 2014 about inclusive growth. Its core value is that reducing inequality benefits everybody, including the economy) Wayne Swan is also a strong advocate, and much of what Labor has to say, and policy they propose promotes inclusive growth (“hospitals, not banks”)
Add to that, Bill Shorten is much underestimated. His superior negotiating skills is behind Labor working as a team, rather than a rabble.
The glass is half full!