For those who follow politics with the same intensity as most people follow TV mini-series thrillers, the real smoking gun in this election has been Parakeelia. That is a beauty — a company nestled within the heart of the Liberal Party, run by the Liberal Party, its clients the Liberal Party, using the taxpayers funds gained by the Liberal Party. The longer it went, the bigger it got, until the party has a multimillion-dollar company at its heart that has not had one dollar from the private market paid into it. The public’s reaction to it? Just about zip.
That may change as the full story is elaborated. But for the moment it’s yet another example of the Hollywood Effect — what people expect, demand in blockbuster movies (“well, of course the syndicate ran him off the road at night; he was a journalist with the files about the syndicate”) they will reject or not notice in real life. Untold monies being siphoned off by a party? In the movie, tired journalists stand around as an editor barks down the phone “Print!” A montage sequence follows, in which the bad guys are led out in handcuffs. In real life? [Name redacted here] goes to lunch again.
The reason Parakeelia hasn’t made the impact that the political/media bubble hoped/thought it would is because few people understand how the party funding system works. Many Australians genuinely do not know that political parties get government funding, matched to their primary vote — a form of funding, in other words, that favours existing market forces and excludes new entrants and smaller players. That’s on top of the regulation-free private donations system we do have — the least regulated in the world.
[Election deciders: the moneybags]
The funding system connects with what I noted yesterday and have before — our ridiculous multiple-lock system, developed in fits and starts, which maintains major parties in power, as quasi-state apparatuses, their vacancies overwhelmingly filled by student politicians from the sandstone universities.
The system has been perfected over the decades, and at this point it has reached its apogee. That’s why this election has such a strange, uncanny feel to it — we all know there are major policy differences between the parties, we know we are going into a future that is more uncertain than the recent past has been, yet the whole thing is failing to grip. The whole thing has an amnesiac quality. Something hoves into view — a big thing, like recognition, the treaty and indigenous Australia — sticks around for 24 hours, and then vanishes again, with nothing resolved or even much debated. After 24 hours on treaties and recognitions, we were onto Muslim clerics and dinners. At the end of the week, waiting like a painted grin on the door of the ghost train ride, is Joe Hildebrand, ready to do a Facebook Live debate.
Consequently, just as this system has been perfected, it is starting to come apart. One sure sign of this concerned the return of Rob Oakeshott to the fray in Cowper — a move that looked quixotic and not a little sad when he announced it. Now, with polling showing him in striking distance of the seat, people in the major parties must be starting to panic a little. Winning the seat from a standing start may still be beyond him, but the fact that it can even be considered is a measure of the volatility around. With eight or so viable independents and Greens running, and the unknown factor of NXT in South Australia, it is clear that the party system is under its most sustained assault in the lower house since Federation.
Could that bear fruit, now or in 2019 (or whenever the next election is — 2018? 2017? July 9, 2016?)? If a recession intervened and the major parties continued to be as unresponsive as they are, then the system could break apart entirely. There’s no reason why the NXT party could not become the major holder of South Australian seats, relegating Labor and Liberal to scraps — and it’s not impossible that it could extend its reach to Victoria, where its centrist policies connect well with “Hamer” liberalism.
[NXT stop: the balance of power]
A West Australia First party could emerge. Jacqui Lambie, if she stays in the Senate, could run a lower-house team and take one of Tasmania’s forestry-centred seats — conservative Labor who vote Liberal to occasionally punish the former. Through rural NSW and southern Queensland, a progressive rural movement/network could develop, linking half a dozen candidates from the Hunter Valley up through the Liverpool Plains and Byron/Lismore, to the Queensland gas/killing fields, and built on the social coalition created by the Lock the Gate movement. Bob Katter, if he could stop behaving like a fuckwit for nine minutes, could grab a second northern seat.
There are other, less imminent possibilities — an Aboriginal Peoples Party could bury left/right differences and take one of the NT seats, a Party of the Poor could leverage a Senate seat or two — but let’s leave it at that. The key point is that even the mighty power of the “multiple lock” is starting to yield to the various forces now arrayed against it — class/region shifts, the increasing education levels of society, the rise of social media, and much more – though it is has immense power to slow this process and continue to ensure that we are ruled by a bunch of people who knew each other in six student unions 25 years ago. Once secondary parties become viable, the exhaustive preferential system does start to shift a little.
If there are four viable parties and some smaller ones competing, you can take a seat with a 22% primary vote. If NXT and the Greens developed a working alliance — in respectful competition, preferencing each other — then they could cut a swathe through the inner and “inner-middle” capital city regions. People keep looking for “our” Syriza, “our” Podemos. If they try to find it on the left, they’re looking in the wrong place. We’ve been prosperous for so long that our “anti-political” movement comes in centrist form, balancing class demands within it.
So next time I would think, if at all. But if it is this time, if there is a hung Parliament in the lower house, then the crossbenches should make a compact and hang the Parliament until it is blue in the face. It should simply refuse to offer even the slightest endorsement to either party until they have agreed to what would effectively be a constitutional convention, a rolling two- to five-year process, dedicate to thoroughly considering, debating and renovating the system with regard to:
- federal voting system, single v multi-member electorates, proportionality, preferentiality, the whole damn thing;
- public funding of parties and a genuine system of monitoring and capping public donations;
- a federal ICAC and the constitutionality and operation of the AFP, and intelligence agencies;
- federal v state carve-ups on water, land, and mining regulation, and on health and education provision;
- media ownership and control, and government co-subsidy of media outlets;
- indigenous sovereignty possibilities, such as a Nunavut-style autonomous province, or a new de facto indigenous-majority state carved out of Northern Australia, and other moves connected to a treaty with real content;
- a federal bill of rights; and
- national libel law reform, so that the use of libel as threat to choke free speech is removed.
That’d to be going on with. I’m not coming down on either side of all of these questions (I’m pretty wary about a bill of rights for example) — and the crucial points remain the first two. But it’s really time to stop simply putting patches on patches of a system whose design was commenced close to 150 years ago. The process could be started by the independents simply refusing to grant any party the stability to carry on with business as usual — now, or next time. I suspect no one will pay a blind bit of attention to this. Unless I am driven off the road on the weekend (“Yr truth is too dangerous, Mr Rundle — zee sheeple must never know!”) at which point everyone will say, “oh, what a terrible accident”.
“Parakeelia”? Sounds like some parasitic infestation in the right wing of the body politic.
Oh! You mean it is?
It benefits both itself and the right wing. The host it feeds on would be the taxpayer.
‘Bob Katter, if he could stop behaving like a fuckwit for nine minutes…’
Agreed. Katter’s latest effort denying any knowledge of the Orlando carnage is well beyond his usual self-parody.
Also true about the public not understanding how the major parties are funded – or, for the moment, even giving a toss. ABC’s Vote Compass has just revealed that a significant number of voters don’t know what negative gearing is – especially those under 34. What hope, eh…?
Oh I dunno, the Caterwauling “chaff bag” Catamite on 2GB following his Friday morning ‘Comment/Editorial’ read a ‘poem’ with great gusto and approval calling for all our politicians to be lined up and shot.
Not that I disagree with one of Wobblelance’s most quoted characters, Dick the Butcher – “the first thing we do, let’s kill all the lawyers”.
Why assume “not one dollar from the private market is paid into…” ?
Parakeelia is a private company managing a massive database of personal information, including anything gleaned from the Electoral Roll, Postal Vote Applications, court proceedings, letters to the editor, personal contact with constituents, and and anything on Facebook etc that can be found by political staffers with a few hours to kill on a computer. This database is in the private sector, so it is immune from the Privacy Act, and voters have no way of knowing what “information” is held on them (or used against them by the unscrupulous).
It is a treasure trove of marketing information of significant commercial value to the private sector that can be flogged off to multinational database giants with the profits returned to Parakeelia and the Liberal Party.
Google ‘Packer, Axciom and 1984’ to see where all this started ..
James, I think a Bill of Rights will just add yet another layer of State-sanctioned instrumentation between democratic electors and elected. That it would be dressed up as the precise opposite is what makes it so corrosive. You only have to examine the way the US Bill of Rights actually functions in the world of realpolitik. It’s more properly the ‘First Ten Amendments to the US Constitution’, and you need to look no further than the second of these – the Gun Rights one – to understand just how the codification of supposedly ‘individual’ rights into the context of the broader State structures of power (by, of course, the State itself, by any other name) not only tends to neutralize them but sooner or late enables them to be twisted into their exact opposite. The vast majority of (individual) Americans desperately want ‘the State’ (they mean their elected democratic reps, of course) to do something about gun accessibility; yet their reasonable (individual+individual+individual+etc) rights and expectations that the wielders of State power (they mean their individual reps+reps+reps+etc, of course) heed this are thwarted by…their very ‘own’ US Bill of Rights, in the hands of aggressively distorting interest groups and weak and/or cynical reps.
The democratic battle we’re now deeply engaged is, or I think should be, a desperately (and an authentic) libertarian action, probably rearguard. The encroachment of the State into all aspects of our lives accelerates, and the vicious vanguard of its brutal advance is now, in this sophisticated late phase, no longer in the form of the old and easily-recognized bogies, such as unchecked (by parliament) executive power, old-style corporate and financial interests, and identifiable press thugs like Rupert, as noxiously anti-democratic as ever they still are. The final assault on our individual human agencies, the part that will really do for us (because it’ll eventually vanquish our intergenerational species-memory of our natural-born capacity and entitlement – as genuinely free), is coming in these wolf-as-sheep guises: so, a Bill of Rights (but I don’t NEED to be ‘allowed’ by the State to have rights); including the ‘right’ to free speech and full public debate (but I don’t NEED an anonymous/subversive SM account or Apple or Google or, for that matter, the Press Council or the ABC or Julian Burnside defending me pro-bono in a defamation case, or god help us, Kim Kardashian’s proudly-exposed big butt as feminist-free speech) to safeguard and exercise my capacity and entitlement to stand in public and say and do whatever I like – and accept the judicial and moral and maybe even physical consequences, too, btw); my ‘right’ to trade my labor and goods freely (but I don’t NEED to be an informed little shareholder with a CommSecc account and AGM voting rights to be entitled to decide where in the marketplace my labor-wage (including that currently stolen by the State, as compulsory super) is invested, and where it’s not; my ‘right’ to freedom of ‘identity’ in racial/class/religious/ge-…oh, stuff it, the list is too long now (because I don’t NEED, or want, either the Church or the LGBTI lobby or any other eroticism-destroying Identity Politics theist and/or thesis-ist in between to codify my (and my ten-year old son’s, eventually) joyously limitless entitlement to define myself however I choose (and, with luck, be politely ignored, as slightly gauche and narcissistically-boring for doing so, by everyone else with grown-up manners), nor my ‘right’ to wield my human rude bits with any other consenting adult in any way that should please me; my ‘right’ to security and safety (oh, but I certainly do NOT need or want the State to defend my human entitlement to either, whether it’s against a homicidal nut with a suicide vest, or a homicidal nut with a police baton, or a homicidal nut with several blue water fleets and ten thousand armed drones at her disposal). If I need to, I’ll call the cops, and when I do I’ll expect them to enforce the extent, limits and spirit of the laws we both, collectively – individual+individual+individual+ etc – have agreed upon, through our elected reps. Not as a ‘right’, but as a matter of banal pragmatic imperative, and by the way, thank you very much, ‘Guv. I do hope they’ll know how to shoot very straight and hit very hard on my behalf when absolutely necessary (and especially know how to ajudge exactly when that is, and is not), but my prissy preference is for a very short, simple and uncluttered list of said laws; perhaps:
1. Don’t hurt anyone.
2. Don’t steal anything.
3. Don’t be a d**k.
Am open to other suggestions, though. Very soft-core libertarian, me.
But the one hard bit at my ideological core is that…I don’t NEED any State-sanctioned or approved mechanism within which to…be a Man. Because…I am a Man. I already am. And that comes with all rights and privileges and obligations of being a Man firmly and irrevocably attached, and absolutely no requirement or request of the State (or anyone else) to hold my Manly hand; to ‘defend’ my said Manly status. It’s not within anyone’s power to do a thing about it, either way, anyway. So kindly off the f**k out of it, Statey-Watey.
Seeking a Bill of Rights (especially as a ‘defence’ of any right) simply surrenders the terms of debate about inherent (self-evident) human rights…to the State. And that in turn just means that the State – which in turn x 2 just means individuals operating within it who are so inclined, for whatever reasons – has yet another instrument by which to screw me, sooner or later, by its cynical subversion and then its antithetical application.
So no Bill of Rights for this little black duck, James. I just do not want to relinquish to the machine whatever little shred of human-ness I can still retain. Leave me alone, all that jazz. To me this is the defining fight of our age. It’s almost invisible to the eye, of course – we’ve never been free-er, right? – but that’s how the spiral into barbaric decadence always gets ya.
Um, Jack Robertson, wow! and Touche!
Well said, it’s commonly held that every law enacted has been the death knell of what it was trying to protect.
I like the 3 laws, sort of mirrors the 3 laws of robotics. Where do sign.
Agree that this is possibly the best opportunity in a long time for the independents/minor parties to use their voting clout to push for real reform, but I am puzzled by your wariness about a bill of rights. Perhaps you can explain how Australia is somehow better placed than every other western democracy in not having a bill of rights. There are a whole raft of fundamentally undemocratic pieces of legislation passed in the past 15 years or so that would have been eminently challengeable with a bill of rights along the lines of the Canadian charter, the NZ Bill of rights, or the European Convention on Human Rights.
With the Labor and Coalition parties singing from the same “national security” song sheet our democracy is being progressively eroded, with scarcely a fight. The latest in a long line of legislative outrages was the Border Protection Amendment Act of last year. As a journalist you should be profoundly disturbed by that legislation.
Guy…of all the possibilities you raised, the rise of NXT seems the most likely in the near term. The ‘mob’, as Graham Richardson loves to call the general populace, is clearly in the mood for a parliamentary group with the ability to ‘keep the bastards honest’ once more. In fact, they’ve been feeling that way ever since Little Johnny used the demise of the Democrats to foist Workchoices on us. That piece of hubris convinced the mob that Senate constraints on the major parties were an absolute necessity and they thought they’d found what they wanted with PUP, but with that group dead in the water, NXT are perfectly primed to occupy the quasi-centrist role that the Dems enjoyed until they committed suicide by backing the GST in direct contradiction of their election promise. In combination with the independents who get through, NXT can wield some pretty heavy influence for the next (pun intended) 3 years, and crucially they can win support across the board from voters who normally reside anywhere from the ALP right across to the Lib wets, in a way that the Greens will never achieve.