with new bags of tricks and promises
What can we expect from the 2025 election?
The news has been around for about a year or so now. The clowns are coming to town sometime in the first quarter of the new year. You can tell because they’re already brushing up their make-up, rehearsing lines, blowing up balloons…and practicing not to trip over their huge flat feet while running around everywhere.
When I was a boy the big circuses came to town every three or four years. They were big and rare events – exciting events, larger than life. The feats performed inside the big top amazed, the sideshows entertained. The ‘rides’ took us on true rides. And the clowns made us laugh.
The days of the Big Top are over. But a vestige of them survives in another form of our Big-Top, our parliaments. Our parliamentary Big-Tops were once solemn and august places of drama, expertise and sober decision making. Or at least that’s how we positioned them in our mind’s eye. They were places we respected. The migration of unemployed clowns from circuses to parliaments changed all that. The sawdust and big bands were gone but the clowns didn’t mind that. They quickly substituted bull dust for sawdust and tv cameras for brass bands. Indeed clowns have thrived in their new environment to become its major players, their major attraction.
We have our own domestic political clowns of course, but as they prefer to hide behind their smiling masks of make-up, it’s easier to example what’s happened in modern democracies by citing the antics of the world’s most influential clown.
It’s hard to find a better practitioner of political clowning than Donald Trump. What a clown. Here’s an ex-President (now, again, President) who suggested Americans inject disinfectant to cure Covid, a clown who makes us laugh by telling the world that, once re-elected, he’ll personally stop both the Ukrainian-Russia and Israel-Arab wars on his first day in office. This guy is a hoot. He even ‘dances’, on stage, to his play-list of favourites during many of his never ending rallies. YMCA, YMCA…Yer, Yer, Yer. Is there nothing this clown cannot do? He modestly claims he has it all over amateurs like Xi, Putin and little ‘rocket man’ (Kim Jong Un)…not to mention Iran’s Ayatollah and Israel’s Netanyahu. Easy. A breeze. No sweat.
The tragedy here is nearly half of America thinks this comic egoist is (now was) worth a second term in office. That fact highlights the danger of the entertaining clown who is expert in telling people what they want to hear – namely that all their disappointments can be blamed on the unfair actions of others. Trump is a Pagliacci, the sad clown, the victim of his own misreadings of complex issues. Unfortunately for the free world ‘la comedia (isn’t) finita’. Many politicians have witnessed the unexpected success of Trump’s strategy to win votes and have sought to ape it, albeit in less extreme forms. Nonetheless Western democracies are trending in this direction, including Australia.
THE INTERNAL CONTRADICTION AT THE HEART OF DEMOCRACY
Roy Morgan research (2021) shows the Australian public rates politicians about the same as insurance brokers, car salesmen, real estate agents and admen in terms of honesty and ethics.
In short, we don’t rate our political class very highly. And that’s that’s not the way it ought to be.
Politicians are the very people we hopefully and repeatedly elect to protect and lead us, the people we expect to help us improve our living standards and assist us in the pursuit of our lifestyle and societal goals. They should be the very best amongst us, the most talented and dedicated, the most ‘public-service’ oriented of professionals and coonsequentially, the most respected.
We expect our representatives to fight for our interests in a way that we ordinary citizens have neither the interest nor talent (or, for that matter, the time) to do. If they did, surely we would hold them in very high regard? The honourifics historically accorded senior politicians (eg. ‘the honourable’ so and so’ used when referring to ministers and ex ministers, the Speaker of the House, President of the Senate etc.) suggest that’s the way we voters would like them to be. We’d like to believe our political leaders are statesmen and stateswomen but find most fall far short of this ideal when we look at their real-world behaviour.
Which of our PMs this century has lived up to such a standard? Howard? Rudd? Gillard? Abbott? Turnbull? Morrison? Albanese? Which Treasurer has? Which Minister for Foreign Affairs?
Why does this gap between theory and practice exist?
Ockham’s Razor suggests that all other things being equal, the simplest explanation of something is usually the best. And so it is here.
The first goal of the politician is to gain (and hold) power. There’s no point in being a politician if your party never wins office (or holds the balance of power). To win office a party needs to win elections. To win elections it needs people to vote for it. To secure the most votes possible it needs to tell an attractive story to convince voters that its party’s platform is more attractive than its opponents’. To maximise the appeal of its sales pitch it’s wise to remember the advice sung by that old American crooner Bing Crosby, “accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative, latch on to the affirmative, don’t be a mister-in-between”. In other words market yourself. The Bing-Bling model of politician is now very much the exemplar of the modern, major politician.
Above all, politicians are advised (indeed warned) not to say anything that might infer voters may have to endure hard “this is the recession Australia had to have” or Bill Shorten unwisely did (2019) by coming clean about Labor’s proposed tax raising measures, (measures which delivered Morrison his ‘ miracle’ victory in the election of that year).
The ‘survival instinct’ encourages our political class to behave ever more like vote brokers, salesmen and hustlers. It’s a tendency accelerated by the ways of the media which eggs them on to feed their voracious 24/7 media cycle, a cycle that thrives on sensationalism, emotional populism, simplistic sloganeering and controversy as means to attract eyeballs to fiercely competing mastheads chasing dwindling revenue/advertising streams – and the ever-increasing inroads being made into their territory by social media.
Once upon a time, not so long ago, we heard and saw little of our politicians. When we did it was usually in a ‘formal’ setting.
Now, from sunup to midnight, there’s always a politician spruiking their message somewhere on radio, tv, in the press or on social media. Individual politicians just can’t resist the temptation to speak on any public platform they can find. It’s hard to avoid them. Collectively, the result has been an unprecedented overexposure of our leaders to a point where overfamiliarity has shown their weaknesses as well as their self-professed strengths … sometimes, to an extent that’s bred near contempt for a class of leaders who increasingly look like carpetbaggers.
By adopting the marketing techniques of the modern ‘influencer-cum-entertainer-cum actor’, politicians have (willingly or otherwise) helped in undermining their own credibility. They’ve shown that when they talk about politics they’re primarily thinking about how to best promote their electoral prospects – how to outmanoeuvre the competition so as to win the next election – rather than dialoguing with citizens in an adult way and leading voters toward doing what’s best for the Country.
The negative consequences of this way of politicking are significant.
They include,
• Pushing big problems down the road – anything that’s controversial, hard or taxing is deemed too hot to handle until it becomes a crisis. As a nation we’ve shown a repeated preference for short term patch-up solutions at the expense of addressing long term issues of national importance.
It has taken our political class over a decade and a half to start seriously addressing climate change. (Score: 4 out of 10).
It has taken even longer to move toward securing fuel storage facilities, our current refined fossil fuel reserves would last less than a month if supplies from Singapore ceased. (Score: 3 out of 10).
We have known aged care needs were going to dramatically increase since the immediate post-war period when the wave of baby boomers first arrived on the scene. That’s over a half a century ago. Yet we are still talking about aged care as if it were an unexpected crisis. (Score: 6 out of 10).
The ADF is probably weaker now than it has been since the threat of Japanese invasion in 1942. (Score: 5 out of 10).
And on it goes. We recognise a problem and wait until it becomes a crisis before doing anything about it – Australia walks backwards into the future,
and,
• our preference for band-aid solutions to national problems rarely work out well in the long run. Such initiatives usually turn out to be expensive, partial (if not inadequate) and late. They often involve starting all over again from scratch. Snowy 2 is an example. This quick and poorly thought-through part solution to Australia’s renewable energy needs was a politically astute move (in 2017) but recognised as a pragmatic misstep. By 2024 the project was way, way behind schedule. It’s estimated cost had increased by a multiple of six to $12.5 billion – before transmission powerline costs). This would make this 2.2 gigawatt plant a much less desirable proposition than was initially sold to the Australian public. My comment doesn’t mean that hydroelectric power isn’t a good idea. It definitely is. It produces clean base power at roughly the same cost per unit output as wind. The point being made is that the whole project would have been better if it hadn’t been rushed the way it was. The way the Turnbull government favoured the politically expedient ‘copper’ solution for NBN network is another example of where a Party’s electoral needs trumped those of service users.
There are plenty of other examples of such phenomena that could be cited but that would be tedious. So let’s move on to briefly look at why politicians have so effortlessly adopted this short term/marketing model of governing.
THE TREND IS NOT THE FRIEND OF DEMOCRACY
Rather than use more words (which is a weakness of mine) let’s look at a graphic way of looking at what’s happening in Anglo-Democracies.
Diagram (1) shows a model of our political parties motivations (from self-interest on one side to national interest on the other) cross referenced by policy effectiveness (from band aids through to substantive policy solutions ).
Diagram 2 (below) shows some, not all, of the symptoms, rhetoric and behaviours associated with operating in these different segments. Feel free to include any you think should be there (and aren’t) or delete, move or amend any I’ve cited or (in your opinion) mispositioned. It’s the overall pattern that’s important, not the placement of individual elements.
You could try placing individual politicians on the map. It’s a tough task. I could only do that for very few of those recently or currently in federal parliament (Abbott, Morrison, Wong, Bandt, Hanson, Dutton and one or two more – at the most). That’s because the masks politicians wear so successfully hide both what they do behind closed doors and what they truly believe.
Diagram 3 (below) is the cruncher. It suggests we are trending away from the democratic ideal toward a populist style of faux democracy that leads to never ending game playing to win votes, an ongoing decline in trust for politicians and the feeding of division within the voting community. We are trending towards the type of democracy that is pulling America apart. I’ve no objective way of depicting the size or speed of that change, but I’m certain it will continue until we change the way we practice democracy.
WHO FACILITATED THE SHIFT TO POPULISM?
Put simply, we voters did.
It’s easy for voters to blame politicians for anything bad that happens -or good things that don’t. That would be more than a little unfair. One of the reasons why our political class has so easily adopted the marketing model of politics is because it works for them – because we voters respond to their tactics the way they expect us to. So why would they change their ways?
Unless voters insist, there’s little reason for our political class to reform itself from within.
In the past many senior politicians came from very different backgrounds, most had real-world careers outside of politics before entering parliaments – ie. experience of working within diverse communities. That’s becoming rarer and rarer. Increasingly,our would-be politicians are career politicians. They leave uni or union to join a party asap as a junior staffer, then administrator, to move up the ranks to adviser before becoming a candidate, MP or Senator – hence the term “The Canberra Bubble”. They live within their own world and people whose understanding of ordinary Australians is ever more gleaned from focus groups and surveys.
And what do they hear?
That ,
• voters are self-obsessed ,they see the world as revolving around their individual needs and wants.
• the concept of citizenship is neither understood nor motivating. ‘Me and mine first’ is the dominant mantra. Voters have little interest in (yet alone understanding of) ‘issues’ that don’t directly impact on them .
• voters behave like consumers, they believe governments are obliged to deliver what they want, where and when they want it.
• voters have little understanding of pragmatics or the need to set priorities. They vote as if they believe governments have unlimited resources, the resources needed to meet all voter demands.
• voters have high expectations, their ‘list’ of assumed ‘entitlements’ and ‘rights’ is long and forever growing.
• they’re impatient (what do we want? when do we want it. NOW!)
• voters reject those who advocate belt tightening or policies that might, personally cause them hardship (even if those policies are in the national interest).
• there’s a strong voter tendency to decry the immorality of ‘pork barrelling’ but an even stronger tendency to accept to such ‘sweeteners’ when offered.
• as most voters have little time for or real interest in politics beyond how it impacts on them, they are easily influenced by what they see and hear on media, both mass and social.
• voters have short attention spans so politicians have to use KISS (Keep it Simple Stupid) messaging even when talking about complex issues.
You might dismiss the above as sweeping, distorting and excessively negative generalisations. To some extent they are, collectively however they paint an overall picture that’s authentic. This is not a depressing picture that frightens our political class – or their advisors. Quite the opposite. It confirms their belief that they can manipulate voters by applying the battery of marketing/propaganda techniques that have served big corporates and multi-nationals so well for so long.
There’s nothing in law that prevents them doing so. In 1982 the Commonwealth passed legislation demanding ‘truth in political advertising’…it lasted but a brief while before being repealed on the basis it was too difficult to implement in a meaningful way.
Besides, in a very real way voters have rewarded the behaviour of our political class by willingly playing their game, by turning up at the polls every three years and voting for the lesser of two evils knowing that nothing much has changed in the past, or is likely to change much in the future. Doing the same thing over and over again in the expectation that things will turn out differently this time is (to again quote Albert Einstein) ‘insanity’.
If we want change we voters are going to have to take the initiative.
THERE IS A WAY FOR VOTERS TO FORCE POLITICIANS TO CHANGE – BUT YOU‘LL LAUGH AT IT.
Back in 2019 (at the time of the Morrison-Shorten election) I ran (or at least tried to run) a local campaign in our town. It never took off.
Before explaining why, let me present a short version of the idea behind that campaign.
At core it had four elements.
First, the practice of being compelled to choose between second rate parties made no sense. It only encouraged the big parties to carry on as usual and for the smaller parties to play the role of irresponsible ‘Chicken -Littles’ that came and went without ever achieving much beyond grandstanding, making much noise but having little or no impact.
Second, voting for independents (or fringe parties) as a way of changing things, cana’t and won’t achieve anything unless those independents hold the balance of power. In our system of preferential voting one of the two major parties will always be the government, or centrepiece of any coalition, no matter which independents are voted in.
Third, somehow, voters need to regain more control over our political class (and the major parties in particular). We need to rebalance (if not reverse) the power relationship between our political class and voters. That requires that voters play a more active role than the rather passive one of choosing between the lesser of two evils every three years.
Fourth, that dissatisfied voters could powerfully express their dissatisfaction with the current style of politics by not voting for any party or candidate on the ballot, ie. to deprive them all mandate to govern until they deserve it. One way of doing that would be by deliberately voting ‘informal’ (with the attendant message of ‘no reform from you, no mandate from us’).
If as little as 10% of the electorate did that all candidates and all parties would listen.
Even such a modest result would cause a seismic shock they couldn’t ignore. Things would have to change. This doesn’t have to be a mass, majority or consensus movement to succeed…all it requires is sufficient numbers to signal the major parties that their already small primary votes (Labor around 33%, LNP a little higher) would be at further risk of decline unless they take action to improve their game.
This idea is a potential circuit breaker that could operate as a peaceful way of quantifying the electorate’s satisfaction or dissatisfaction with the overall performance of our political class. It requires no infrastructure, no party structure, no leadership hierarchy, no candidates. Its cost would be next to nothing (informal votes are already counted and reported under our existing electoral system).
At election time it would be up to individual voters to decide whether they’re happy to vote for a party or parties on the ballot (and proceed as normal)…or express their dissatisfaction with the way our political class, as a whole, is managing the Country (by voting informally with a NO symbol).
When voters are happy with the performance of the political class, when they believe things are basically on track – the informal/boycott vote would be low. When voters think our political class is dropping the ball, the informal vote would rise to a level commensurate with the degree of dissatisfaction in the community.
The informal/boycott vote would act as an inbuilt ‘warning system’ to alert our political class when it’s seriously off track – when it’s time to ‘rebalance’ by listening to (rather than trying to continually manipulate) the electorate to view the world their way.
Obviously this idea will be rejected by politicians. At the moment we, by law, have to vote for one or more of them, to make a choice no matter what we believe about their adequacy. Understandably our political class likes things as is, everything is biased their way. Surely, in a true democracy, voters should have the right to say ‘none of you are doing your job well, that you won’t get my vote until you lift your game’. Why is this a seditious request?
Most voters will also poo-poo this idea too. That’s OK…all are at liberty to vote how they please. That 90%+ are likely to vote as they normally would shows that no one is being deprived of anything .This concept increases voter options, it doesn’t reduce them. How can that damage a democracy?
Here is some of the material used in my little ‘campaign’ referred to earlier on.
The campaign consisted of a local letterbox drop and three shop posters…and a Facebook invitation to discuss the idea. That’s it -not much. I did get feedback. But it was mostly on social media, negative in content – and overwhelmingly from people who never even explored how a boycott could work.
The idea was reflexively dismissed as, seditious, anti-democratic, cowardly, unnecessary ,weird (meaning ‘mad’) or even an insult to the memory of those who fought for ‘our’ freedom in two World Wars. (‘Spilling blood on the wattle’ was referred to in one piece).
On the Sunday morning before the election I received a phone call from the ‘legal department of the AEC’ informing me that I, ‘as an unregistered party’, had breached the Electoral Act by interfering in an election – and would be fined unless I withdrew all material immediately. Their ‘senior legal’ representative went on to emphasise that if I persisted a fine (of over $15,000) could be expected. Although I found it strange that one person could be classified as a part, but I withdrew. So much for free speech.
The informal vote in town for that election was around normal. The AEC had saved democracy!!
Obviously I’d vastly underestimated the threat the idea a boycott posed. Apparently it would bring down the whole deck of cards, ruin the Nation. I found that a strange reaction given the successful ways boycotts have been – and still are -used.
One of the first and seminal steps toward American independence (The Boston Tea Party) was a boycott of English Tea (and the taxes they attracted). The battle cry then was “no taxes without representation”. I don’t think that’s very different to the catch cry ‘no mandate from us unless you listen’. If anything, by comparison, the latter seems a rather mild request.
Democracies (indeed, all forms of government) frequently use boycotts to express their dissatisfaction with countries whose actions displease them. Sports people have used boycotts. Students call for them too, most recently in regard to their universities boycotting investments in companies that supply arms to Israel. Even conservative investors insist their fund managers boycott investing in fossil fuel companies (et al). It’s hardly a revolutionary idea .
Being of Irish descent I’m probably more inclined to resort to boycotts than are the citizens of less historically troubled lands. The word ‘boycott’ comes from Ireland. It was a major technique my forebears used to shuck off British control, they (the Irish) felt that they had been taken for granted for too long.
So when the clowns next come to town you can enjoy the entertainment, cast your vote as per usual and then go back to whinging about their failure to deliver until they visit again. Or ……but that’s all too hard. Forget about doing something different. Sorry, things are perfectly OK the way they are, aren’t they ?
PS. I prefer the clown in the yellow outfit, I think he’s got the best showbag. Who’s your favourite?
TO SUM UP
So, you thought I was exaggerating and unfairly castigating of politicians by calling them clowns. In fact, I was probably too kind. Circus clowns are benign. They’re entertaining, funny, quirky and larger than life, but they’re rarely malignant. Politicians are.
Political clowns don’t want laughs, they want votes so they can win and hold onto power for as long as possible. To achieve this goal they’re prepared to preach one thing and practice another – ie. to consciously, deliberately and strategically lie to manipulate public opinion.
This is a universal phenomenon. It applies to all systems of government from totalitarian to democratic. Australia is no exception. John Howard made an expedient, ‘ex post’ delineation between ‘core’ and ‘non-core’ promises. Apparently his promise not to introduce a GST was a non-core promise because we got one. The Rudd, Gillard, Abbott, Turnbull and Morrison Governments all provide numerous examples of similar duplicity. The Albanese Government is no different. In spite of all its commitment to openness and transparency at election time it too has turned out to be another smoke and mirrors government.
Our political class will continue to operate this way as long as it continues to work for them. The only ones who can break this vicious circle is us, we ordinary voters. We have to reject this way of being governed by using our votes in a more assertive way.
THANK YOU FOR READING.
GLOSSARY: USE OF THE WORDS ‘BOYCOTT’ & ‘INFORMAL VOTE’
Words matter. People react to them differently depending on the contexts in which they‘ve heard them used. If either of the above these troubled you when reading what I wrote the elaborations below might help us better understand each other.
Boycott
The word ‘boycott’ in this piece refers to an individual’s decision to voluntarily and peacefully abstain from contact with another person or entity as a means of protest. The term originated in Ireland. In the 1880s the Irish protested against high farm rents and evictions driven by British (usually large and mainly absentee) landlords. One of those British estates was managed by a Captain Boycott. Boycott needed Irish labour, servants, supplies to run the estate – and bring in the harvest. His ‘terms’ were deemed harsh and unfair. But rather ‘than fight’ (or break the law) the whole community (not just farm workers) disengaged from dealing with him. Boycott’s requests for domestic staff were ignored – suppliers of agricultural inputs, tradesmen, hauliers and even shopkeepers followed suit. He was ostracised and had to import labour (at higher cost) to harvest his master’s crop. The practice spread throughout Ireland under his name. This is the type of boycott I refer to – exercising your choice disengage, your option not to support.
Recently, in America (and especially since calls for ‘boycotts’ on arms et al to Israel) the word boycott has become divisive. In over 30 US States boycotts have been (to various degrees) banned. A whole new political, legalistic and ideological war is growing in intensity there. This has nothing to do with the way I’ve used the word here.
Informal Vote
People who vote informally are usually dismissed as ‘mistake prone’ (careless or near illiterate), ‘radicals’ or ‘ratbags’. Nothing to worry about really…. as only about 2% to 3% vote informally. A fact which shows how marginal they are. The political class support that interpretation, as does the education system as does the protector of the electoral system the AEC (nothing personal here, that’s their legal remit). There’ s a heavy opprobrium associated with the phrase. Sound citizens don’t vote informally. There’s something wrong about it.
So when I use the phrase I expect many readers will, reflexively, turn off and tune out. I only use that term because it is an ideal vehicle for registering a protest within the structure of the existing electoral system. Let me explain in a step-by-step way why that’s so,
(1) we, by law, have to vote.
(2) our legal obligation is to choose between the candidates fielded by parties (or independents) – ie. the representatives of the political class.
(3) if you vote informally, your vote is invalid and discarded; an informal vote is often referred to as ‘wasted vote’.
(4) it is not illegal to vote informally…..and even if it were there’s no way ( because of ‘secret voting’) to link individuals with their votes. In short, there is no way of stopping or penalising anyone who votes informally.
(5) if the informal vote jumped from the usual 2%/3% to say 10%…and stayed around that level for a couple of election politicians would definitely want to find out. The AEC has analysed informal votes at least once before to see if they were errors or carried a message. It could and would be done again for reasons outlined in this essay.
(6) if each informal-protest vote carried a handwritten mark, symbol or short phrase (written by a voter on top of their ballot paper) the purpose of the vote would be clear and countable.
(7) the beauty of the protest-informal vote idea is that such votes would be counted and presented within election results, it would be hard, indeed impossible, to avoid them.
Imagine how our political class would react if, on election night, the results board read,
Primary Votes
.LNP 33%
.Labor 30%
.Informal protest (no party / candidate selected )10%
.Greens 10%
.One Nation 7%
.Rest (Teals/independents/others) 9%
.Informal (procedural errors) 1%
Wouldn’t such a result (or anything near it) be a huge incentive for producing a political class that’s more responsive to voter needs than the one we have now?
