Blog

A LOOSENING OF THE TIES THAT BIND

(the internal forces undermining Australian Democracy – and how to reverse them)

In troubled times like these people hit the streets in protest. They have plenty of reasons to do so. We (and specially and always the young) believe we live in enlightened times, times of unparalleled access to news and information, remarkable new technologies, a thirst for and right to perpetual progress, ever expanding human rights and ever higher standards of living. We believe in Progress, an always better future.

Our hubris is such that the lessons of history are largely dismissed, deemed irrelevant because they merely example how badly humans behaved in times past, times more primitive than ours. We’re not like that anymore! (No way!, we reassure each other).

So it has come as a shock to find our modern world in a mess and democracies, including ours, are under threat.

BLOODY WARFARE

Vicious wars pockmark the planet. The civil wars of Africa roll on. The bloodbath in Gaza shows no signs of abating. Putin’s colonial war against Ukraine intensifies. There are wars in Myanmar, Haiti – and drug cartel wars in Mexico and Ecuador. We are relearning the hard way that violence begets violence….and that open warfare is threatening our country more so than at anytime since World War Two.

ECONOMIC WARFARE WITHOUT

The ever-present undercurrent of economic competition between trading nations has once again, erupted into a mammoth, world encompassing and destructive trade war thanks to Trump and his irrational belief in tariffs.

Our high standard of living in Australia depends on us being able to buy our cars, computers, clothing, movies and TV shows, manufacturing machinery, medicines and vaccines, petrol and diesel fuels, wind turbines and solar panels from overseas. To import all that, we need to sell exports to pay for them. Currently we sell iron ore, gas and coal (raw, mined materials) to generate most of our export income.

Our biggest economic client is China, the nation that is in fierce competition for worldwide hegemony with the nation we rely on for our defence. Our economy is caught between a rock and a hard place. China holds all the economic cards, the US many of the defence cards. We can’t afford to upset either. Australia’s room to move is severely restricted by this geo-political standoff. Nor can we opt out of this global power game by simply by declaring we are a ‘neutral’. We can’t just step out of the ring because we don’t want to fight. Sooner or later Australia will have to commit to one behemoth or the other. We haven’t the luxury of positioning ourselves as a nice-mister-in-between.

ECONOMIC COWARDICE WITHIN

Unfortunately our economy also suffers from internal, that is, homemade, weaknesses.

The world wants little else from Australia beyond what our mines produce. Sure, we sell farm produce and university degrees, but not to an extent that goes anywhere near supporting the living standards we’ve so historically enjoyed – a standard of living we still expect should always continue to grow. As our population grows our per capita GDP has fallen more than in most OECD countries over the past five years. At the moment we are still going backwards relative to most of our peers.

We have a service economy where we sell goods and services to each other without making much ourselves. Manufacturing generates under 6% of our GD, agriculture just over 2.5%.

Maintaining productivity growth in people – servicing – people economies (where a big majority of people are employed in education, health, retail, banking, public service etc.) is notoriously difficult. No more so than in welfare – state economies where ‘entitlement’ demands are insatiable. (Those demands are expressed as ‘rights’ to free health services, free schools and trade apprenticeships, more lenient uni loans, more childcare support, expanded maternity leave, an ever growing NDIS, more access to mental health services, free vaccines, more subsidised medicines, subsidised housing for essential service workers, more public housing, higher age pensions etc. etc.). We are locked into a viscous circle where ever more demands for more of this and more of that outpaces a government’s revenue growth.

It’s cold comfort to say that many western democracies find themselves in similar situations.

When voter expectations exceed a government’s capacity to deliver, discontent and anger spread prompting governments (who are always trying to stay in power) to attempt to placate disappointed voters by giving out little sugar hits, little nothings, pacifiers that at best temporarily band-aid problems rather than solve them.

A thin lick of glossy paint (consisting of virtuous words, promises and pocket-money handouts) may make things look better for a little while but it never fixes the structural cracks that lie beneath.

VIRTUOUS TALK, LITTLE EFFECTIVE ACTION

Our last seven Prime Ministers (including the current one) have behaved more like vote brokers than true leaders. What we used to call ‘statesmen’, leaders of the calibre of a Churchill, FDR, Lincoln, Zelensky are a rarity. We’ve certainly seen no statesman or stateswoman in this country this century.

Our leaders have proved too timid to lead, too weak to address the big economic problems, too accommodating of the lobbyists representing the oligopolies and near monopolies, too terrified of scaring off the multinationals and their precious capital.

As a political class they’ve also proved either too visionless to progress any strong course of action or too incompetent to successfully implement any cause they profess to believe in. The list of issues that have long been sitting in the ‘too hard’ basket include Tax Reform, The Voice, Renewable Energy, Housing, climate change and, AUKUS. Our governments have been content to tread water in attempts to protect their own short term electoral prospects rather than doggedly pursue the nation’s long term interest.

MEDIA MOLOTOVS

The mass and social media have made the situation worse. Both thrive on negativity. Both employ sensationalism, emotional stirring, gossip and exaggeration. They consciously highlight the dysfunctionalities and divisions in our multicultural society. They live off friction.

Everyday, like Chicken Littles, both mass and social media hit the airwaves screaming “the sky is falling”, hoping to attract as many eyeballs as possible to their newspapers and tv channels or (in the case of social media) boost their status as influencers.

Do I exaggerate? Where’s the evidence? Here’s some.

Everyday that serious newspaper, The Sydney Morning Herald, publishes the top-ten read stories in the newspaper (you can find it online hidden away at the bottom of the Target Time quiz). Invariably what tops that list are personal horror stories (murder, car accidents deaths, domestic violence, gang warfare and drug busts), entertainment and ‘star’ goss, weight loss and beauty stories, corruption in government – or dissatisfaction re local issues about roads, or Council building/development policies etc.

It’s rare for any serious story – the bigger, more ‘serious’, detail, in depth stories and opinion pieces – about politics, economics, migration, housing – to rate in the top ten. When they do they are usually toward the bottom of the ‘most read’ list in ninth or tenth place.

Australians respond to gory news (what happened) reporting, not why is it happening (and what it means) journalism. In other words the mass media is more about titillation and attention seeking than anything else. Social media does the same, on steroids.

Both media (mass and social) throw fuel on any event to attract attention to themselves. They are sources of division and distortion, not cohesion yet alone enlightenment. They encourage people to split into ‘them’ (the baddies) and ‘us’ (the goodies) groups who blame and denigrate each other for all that goes wrong or fails to meet their expectations.

As recent US history more than amply exemplifies, this confrontational style of public interaction dissolves the glues that hold societies together. It’s a style that fosters ethnic and racial divisions, hostility toward immigration and the implementation of policies that run contrary to the pious mantra of virtuosity and equality we preach as a democratic nation which prides itself as being the exemplar of ‘a fair deal for all’ ethic.

An example ?

Some argue that because Israel, our ally, is the only democracy in the Middle East it must be supported at all costs; that Israel the state, is justified in inflicting genocide in Gaza both in revenge for October 7 and as a protective move to ensure that its citizens are forever protected from yet another holocaust in the future. Anyone who doesn’t accept this interpretation of events (including some Australian Jews) is branded antisemitic, a racist, a Jew hater, a supporter of terrorist organisations – someone who should be restrained and punished by law in the interests of Australian multiculturalism.

Many forget a democracy does not entitle a state to do anything it wants to other peoples because it’s in that democracy’s own interests to do so.

Others argue that Israel (and before that Jewry) has been relentless in its attempts to dispossess Palestinians of their land, livelihoods and human rights for over a century. They argue Israel has repeatedly (and successfully) used force (including, historically, its own home-grown terrorist organisations such as Irgun and the Stern Gang) to achieve its aim of controlling all of Palestine from the river to the sea – to behave as if Palestinians don’t deserve the very same rights that the citizens of Israel demand for themselves.

Surely it’s acceptable for Australians to join demonstrations supporting moves to end the injustices Palestinians have long suffered – moves many resolutions of the UN and International Courts have also voiced in attempts to constrain Israel – and do so without being branded and stigmatised as both UnAustralian and/or Antisemitic?

So far there’s little evidence of a pogrom building in suburban Australia.

Yes, there have been disquieting events (threats, slurs, slogans, half a dozen burnt cars and paint-on-walls vandalism) that understandably upset Australian Jews. Some of the most serious incidents have, however, turned out to be instigated by criminal gangs rather than antisemites, – eg those trying to manipulate police for concessions (the Dural Gelignite Caravan plot, Iranian assets hiring local thugs to do their dirty work (the Synagogue fire in Melbourne) or individual attention-seeking crazies.

If anything it should surprise (and please) us there has been so little violence in Australia given the bloodshed and horrors both sides have suffered in this horrific, never-ending conflict. There have been no deaths here in Australia.

Isolated acts of violence frequently occur around the fringes of events where beliefs clash and adrenalin levels rise. The common phenomenon of Football Hooliganism attests to that fact as do the infantile level of ad hominem debates we see in Question Times in our Federal and Stare Parliaments. We too readily divide into self-righteous warring camps, to exaggerate slights and demand ‘the authorities’ take action to constrain and suppress those that upset us. The media also popularises this conflict- model of dispute resolution and behaviour, one that provides role models for the deranged to copy in their ambition to attract attention to themselves.

A NATION THAT FAILS TO PRACTISE WHAT IT PREACHES

This month it was quietly announced that Australia has struck a deal where illegal immigrants (referred to as the ‘NZYQ cohort’ – anodyne talk for former temporary visa holders who have been deemed to have character defects or criminal records that deny them residency here, people whose country of origin will not accept their repatriation) are to be sent to Nauru, a small, high unemployment, poor country of around 12,000 people.

The deal, in brief, is for Nauru to permanently accept some (perhaps nearly all) of 300 to 400 such ‘untouchables’ for an upfront fee of $400 million – plus an annual fee of $70 million. Details are scant as yet. It’s unlikely all in this cohort will end up in Nauru. For argument’s sake let’s assume 200 are sent to Nauru. That translates into a key-money fee of $2 million per head plus a rental/boarding fee of $350,000 per annum per head. Those huge $ figures would be even higher if the number of deportees turns out to be smaller than our ‘assumed’ 200. That certainly seems like a bad financial deal for Australia. From a moral point of view it is even worse.

What Australia has just done is no better than Trump deporting illegals to El Salvador prisons and other nations he himself has publicly described as ‘shitholes’. What sort of life are we condemning these people to?

Will Nauruans gain by being turned into a penal colony? How will these diverse populations live together? How will Nauruans quell the violence that will inevitably erupt from the caging of hundreds of men from diverse cultures – men who have nothing to do or any prospect of eventually leading a fulfilling life?

It’s a bad deal all ‘round. Such thirty-pieces-of-silver approach to problem solving rarely works for any participant yet alone all. In the Garden of Gethsemane incident Jesus was betrayed by a disciple, detained and brought to trial, Judus was disgraced as a traitor and the Jewish community branded as the true killers of the messiah.

Nauru 2025 is but one example of where our leaders have chosen a pragmatic solution that violates the high values they sprout when lecturing other nations about their faults. Our condemnation of China for its treatment of Uyghurs (while failing to advance the interests of our own Indigenous peoples) is another. There are plenty more examples of such hypocritical behaviours both here at home and abroad.

Virtuous words, clever rhetoric and empty promises are no substitutes for true political leadership. These disingenuous tactics have become so transparent that Australians’ trust in our political class now ranks down toward the bottom of the ‘trusted occupation’ scale – alongside real estate agents and car salesmen (Roy Morgan Research).

The prime job of our political class is to unite the nation in pursuit of common goals, not to help divide us into squabbling, combative factions. For the past couple of decades our governments have been one of the main forces helping delaminate Australian society. They ought be the main glue maker that bonds us together. As the old saying goes, ‘a fish rots from the head down.’ Australia needs a new political class, a vocational class of talented, capable leaders. The days of the vote-brokers must soon come to an end if Australia is to have a bright future.

FOSTERING TIES THAT BIND

For a long time Australia lived in a Golden Age of economic prosperity that turned the dream of owning a home, better and higher education for one’s children and the promise of a modestly comfortable retirement into a near reality. Many old problems persisted of course, problems regarding gender, sexuality, class, race and economic inequality still blighted the lives of many.

But slowly, and seemingly inexorably, things felt like they were on the up and up. In spite of stagflation in the 1970s, the recessions of the 1980s, the high interest rates of the early 1990s (around 17% at peak), The Asian Financial Crisis and the Great (sub-prime induced) Recession of 2008, the Lucky Country lucked through.

Things were also on the up socially. The Whitlam Government (with Lionel Murphy as Attorney General) struck down ‘at fault’ divorce laws. In 1978 the Police beat and arrested Mardi Gras revellers, in 1998 the Police marched in the Parade. We had a paid parental leave Act by 2011 and same-sex marriage by 2017.

At the beginning of this century a sustained mining boom provided Australian Governments with coffers robust enough to enable them (in the attempt enhance their electoral prospects) to focus on the pursuit of policies of a more ‘individual’ entitlements and personal-rights kind. The electorate had become both more woke and strident in its demands. It also became more impatient. The final chorus of most street march chants became “What do we want….And when do we want it? NOW!

The then dominant argument of progressives quickly became an unstoppable trend, a trend that insisted that the best route to better government was by making our political class more representative – more representative in gender, more representative in age, more representative in socio economic terms, more representative in terms of occupational training and education, ethnic and cultural backgrounds ditto. The broader the representation the better. That proposition was not only advanced on the basis of natural justice it was also posited as a sure fire way of getting better outputs from government.

By 2025 52% of Federal Labor Caucus parliamentarians were women.

There is an equal number of women in Cabinet. The leader of the Opposition is a woman. The leader of the Greens is female. Our first and only female PM (Gillard) was born in Wales our current Minister for Foreign Affairs, a female, has a Chinese Malay father and English mother. Most of our Independent Senators are women. Just under half (around 46%) of senior public servants are women, the second highest % in the G20. The Governor of the Reserve Bank is a woman.

In short, Australia has near gender equality in the Federal sphere and yet, in spite of all the high expectations that such equality would result in demonstrably better politics, more humane and empathetic government, few of the hoped for improvements have materialised in any significant way. In politics it’s business as usual.

“Give it time” is the response of those advocating ever greater ‘representation’. The same advice is proffered in the world of big business.

The growing percentage of women in CEO and boardroom roles (although increasing less quickly than in politics and the bureaucracy) has not, again as yet, led to noticeable improvements in corporate behaviour. Results are hard to get. Organisations tend to hide failure and highlight success. The public rarely gets more than glimpses into female led organisations that fail or behave badly. Crown Casino was the exception that proved the rule.

The fear of being branded a misogynistic organisation tempers corporate PR releases. Some advocates of gender equality go as far as to argue that corporations sometimes consciously employ ‘glass cliff’ tactics – that they only promote women to top jobs when an organisation is in trouble and the risk of failure high. Such ‘poison chalice’ theories are as old as the hills. Business boards and politicians have always used hard times to throw expendable executives, troublemakers and rivals into the lion’s ring to protect themselves. It’s difficult to imagine what advantages could be won by disproportionally selecting women to fulfil this sacrificial role.

Overseas experience in politics and big business provides a bigger data base for evaluating the claims of gender equality. Results are mixed to say the least. There’s little evidence that gender equality alone makes a difference in business outcomes. About a third of a worldwide studies report a positive difference, about a third show no difference and a third negative results.

Other forms of equality in representation are also (as we’ve seen above) advocated.

First Nations Peoples are already slightly overrepresented as are members who describe themselves as Jewish. Those from China, Asia, India, Africa and the Middle East and people under 40 years of are underrepresented – ex trade unionists are overrepresented, as are lawyers and bankers and political careerists/apparatchiks.

And balance is a good thing until it’s taken to extremes. The pursuit of ever more refined forms of representation (eg. the need for under 35, single, disabled, trans men who immigrated from war-torn countries ….) can easily become an unproductive fetish. The job of our political leaders is to find common ground, courses of action that a majority, if not most, can agree on, not because of our differences but in spite of them.

Living together requires compromise, the making of concessions to accommodate others – an acceptance that we can’t always have our own way on everything. Our political representatives are charged to listen to all members of their electorate, not just those who reflect their own backgrounds, belief systems or causes they themselves support. In a democracy the key role of politicians is to bring us together -not to foster further divisions.

We already have an adversarial system of politics that fosters division – a sport like model of interaction that strives to ensure our side wins and those who challenge ‘our team’ are vanquished. After all teams, tribes and parties look forward to the day they can, with open self-congratulory gusto, sing “We are the Champions”?

Our political system has become increasingly combative, personal, belittling and divisive, not more harmonious.

At the moment two changes in our system of government are being mooted. One (a probably good idea) is to increase a government’s term from 3 to 4 years. Given the complexity and size of modern government three-year terms (two years work and a final year campaigning to win the next election) are an anachronism…and divisive (there are few signs of mature debate or mutual respect between pollies when they’re running for office).

The second proposed change to increase the number of federal MPs is far more problematic.

The core argument is that the number of people in electorates has grown too large for an MP to handle or effectively represent. The average number of 150,000 in Australia is roughly twice the size of those in democracies like the UK, Canada and America. Ipso facto, the proponents of this idea argue, increase the number of MPs in Federal Parliament in the interest of better representation.

Australia is already one of the most represented countries in the world. We have a bi cameral Federal parliament of 150 MPs and 76 Senators. Each State and Territory has its own Parliament (the membership of which ranges from as low as 25 in the Northern Territory to 135 in NSW). There are over five hundred Councils.

Are yet more politicians likely to improve the quality of government? It’s a rhetorical question.

QUALITY NOT QUANTITY

The major problem with our current political system is not a paucity of politicians or a failure in our parliaments to duplicate the external characteristics (gender, sexual preferences, age, ethnicity etc.) of each and every ‘cohort’ living in our increasingly multi everything (multicultural, muti-lifestyle, multi-this and multi-that) society.

The major problems we face are not primarily, or even mainly the result, of underrepresentation but ones stemming from living in a consumer society. A consumer society of individualism, a society of ever-growing assumed rights and entitlements and ever-growing expectations. An impatient society where everything is viewed through the lens of what I (and mine) need and want.

Many groups want others to accept they’re the one’s made in God’s image, the ones entitled to be at the head of the queue in getting Government support, to make others conform to their view of the world. We blame others for any social or economic hardships we suffer, we expect concessions from others but rarely give them. In short, we voters tend to either indifferent to the plight of others when things are going well for us or blame others when times get tough. Our political class plays the same self-interested game.

For all these reasons our society is fragmenting into combative cells, cells that show little interest finding common ground in compromise with others. Unease disquiet, anxiety, anger-and distrust – are on the rise. That’s not the path to becoming a successful multicultural nation, a harmonious melting pot. Rather it’s the path to greater discord and, perhaps, even violence.

The theatre of discord has been very evident in The Senate over the past year.

Lidia Thorpe has done far more than dress up in a kangaroo cloak in the chamber, refuse to take the oath of office and label the British Monarchy as (at different times in different places) Colonialists, ‘not my/our king’, ‘you are not our sovereign’. Yet she also holds the Crown (ie the King) responsible for the payment of reparations to Indigenous Peoples who she asserts are the real sovereign owners of the Country.

She has verbally attacked many Senators but especially Senator Hanson, a Senator who has herself indulged in many confrontational stunts of her own. Senator Faruqi has been vehement in her repeated condemnations of what she asserts is a white, racist society. The insults and mutual belittlements between Faruqi and Hanson have led to a defamation action.

Prior to these racially laden wrangles the Senate was a cockpit of discontent and vituperative exchanges about the Higgins Affair. Rationality, reasonableness and a desire for a fair outcome were noticeably absent. Political manoeuvering dominated the Chamber.

In the House the issues were different (we witnessed the fake fighting about tax reform, the fumbling of The Voice Referendum, the charade of improved defence via AUKUS, the virtuous gestures re rooting out union and corporate corruption) but the usual manipulative games (blaming, spin, disingenuous promises and attempts at self-interested one-upmanship and intra party warfare), as usual, prevailed.

The symptoms of self-righteousness and inflexible division are everywhere. Sovereign Citizens, Neo Nazis, the would-be silencers (and promoters) of Free Speech, the wokes and anti wokes, the iconoclasts and self-interested lobbyists are all on the rise, and at each other’s throats. The smell of friction is in the air. That smell is a symptom of societal decay.

An example. The Commonwealth’s Envoy Against Antisemitism Report seeks to suppress and punish those who protest against Israeli actions in Gaza, restrict demonstrations that support Palestinians. The report even suggests it rates Universities and Government financially punish those that fail to reach its pass mark. This is not the way to learn to live alongside Arab Australians. If the Islamaphobic Envoy responds with like-kind recommendations, or any other, the most likely result is even more friction not less.

A DIFFERENT TYPE OF POLITY

The way of fostering a more cohesive society, a society that pulls together rather than one that pulls itself apart, starts with we voters demanding the reformation of our political class.

We should aim to,

• replace professional party politicians whose careers are totally dependent on the success of their party (people who live within their party from their late teenager years to retirement) with people who’ve had relevant experience in, and of, the real world; people whose ambition is to give something back to the nation.
• support candidates who have a vocation to serve the long-term interests of the nation, not those offering short term band aid solutions in the hope of winning or holding office for their party. Vote-brokers rarely mature into becoming statesmen or stateswomen.
• be wary of candidates or party leaders who are evasive, talk in generalities or regularly make exaggerated promises. Above all, be wary of those who always blame their opponents for anything that goes wrong while taking credit for everything that works.
• accept that good leaders often have to make unpopular decisions. They don’t do that for fun. So think why they are risking their popularity. It could well be they’re putting the nation’s interest ahead of they’re own.
• be prepared to put some effort into following politics beyond reading newspaper headlines or listening to a few minutes of tv news……and don’t vote out of habit. You only impede the rate of change if you invariably vote for the same party no matter what.

This recommendation doesn’t mean you should automatically vote for independents or other parties simply to punish one or both of the major parties. That can be a jump from the frying pan into the fire.

Unless independents hold the balance of power they can’t have much influence on government policy no matter how virtuous or attractive their manifestos appear. Democracies, historically, work best when there are two (and not many more) major parties. Fragmentation can easily turn parliaments into Towers of Babel.

•check the ability of candidates to serve at the national level. It’s not enough to be a nice or popular person. Leading the nation is (or at least should be) a high calling. We need our very best at the helm. There are plenty of councils and State parliaments for those more interested in local matters to serve in.

And finally,

• beware of zealots, carpetbaggers, fanatics and single-cause candidates.

If we voters are serious about living in a healthy democracy we’re, at least sometimes, going to have to vote in the national interest ahead our own interests, to behave as citizens who are prepared accept our responsibilities as well as demand our rights as individuals. If we don’t do that there’s little incentive for our political class to change its ways.

Remember we get the governments we vote for.