There’s a word that sums up Australian politics at the moment very aptly. Veteran economic journalist and editor Ross Gittins, who has watched public policy and the people who make it for nearly half a century, wrote about the dirty deal between Labor and the Coalition on political funding last week, noting “When the chips are down, the duopolists must stick together and put their mutual interests ahead of the voters’ right to choose. If you want proof that our politicians put their own careers way ahead of their duty to the people who vote for them, this is it. I’ve never felt more disillusioned.”
Disillusionment is right. Disillusionment with the major parties and with the self-serving nature of the political system the major parties control. We seem set for another spike in the level of minor party and independent support at the coming election.
Much of this disillusionment centres on Anthony Albanese. He was never going to maintain the high levels of support he enjoyed in his extended honeymoon phase in the first half of the parliamentary term. We always expect too much of new prime ministers. But that has given way to a resentment — that he’s so much less than he promised. The one-time left-wing firebrand has become an overly cautious, managerialist prime minister scared of his own shadow. Worse, he has proven as beholden to fossil fuel interests as the Coalition, and his signature idea is a manufacturing fantasy rooted in the 1970s.
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Albanese’s leadership of the ALP was born in the scarring experience of the 2019 election, when Labor went in heavy favourites to defeat Australia’s worst-ever prime minister, Scott Morrison, and came off second best courtesy of attacks on Bill Shorten and Chris Bowen’s ambitious reform program. Ever since, Labor has been resistant to any kind of major reform that might generate political blowback. Albanese’s strategy has been to use caution and moderation to secure multiple terms in government in order to bed down Labor reforms. Problem is, those reforms have been few and far between, and it looks like Albanese may end up leading the first single-term government since before WW2.
Peter Dutton, in contrast, is a novel kind of Liberal leader. He’s not a Liberal at all but a Queensland LNP politician, and it shows — he’s abandoned the free market, small government shibboleths of the NSW and Victorian Liberals who have dominated the party since the 1980s and embraced big government intervention in energy and threatened to use divestment powers against large corporations. But he’s also an overt racist, a peddler of conspiracy theories and fantasies about the threats posed by migrants, an opponent of climate action, and a dedicated culture warrior who has made exploiting social division within Australia his primary political technique.
The effect is a double disenfranchisement of moderate Liberal voters who believe in the importance of climate change and centrist social values, and of economic liberals, who are now politically homeless.
Much is made of Dutton’s apeing of Trump, correctly, and the Trump effect is one of the reasons we’ve ended up with such a rotten choice at the coming election. Trump has legitimised and normalised attacks on key democratic institutions and the dramatic coarsening in public life. While calls for “civility” in politics are a cliché and politicians of all stripes have long lied to us, standards of discourse in politics are significantly lower than they used to be because so many politicians — usually on the right — have seen what Trump not only gets away with but benefits from, and copy him.
But some of the reasons for the hopeless state of major party politics are homegrown. The reluctance to fix the tax system so that it can fund the level of government we want is partly down to timid politicians — everyone remembers 2019 — but also reflects the grubby, self-centred nature of economic “debate” in the media, which is dominated by vested interests like big business and older, wealthy asset owners, and the fact that any genuine reforms that are in the public interest but harm powerful players will become the subject of politically toxic scare campaigns.
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The housing crisis and the bipartisan lack of climate action similarly reflect the inability of the media to properly hold the powerful to account on the most important issues facing Australia.
This goes to the nature of our media — oligopolistic, corporate, unrepresentative. News Corp and Seven are permanent allies of the Coalition (and attack dogs against Liberal moderates, as Malcolm Turnbull discovered). Nine regularly produces quality public interest journalism in its newspapers but its television network is a devoted supporter of powerful interests. The ABC remains cowed from long years of thuggery by the Coalition, with only its current affairs staff up to the task of meeting its legislated duty to provide news and information that is accurate and impartial according to the recognised standards of objective journalism. Most of our media are characterised by a lack of diversity and act as handmaidens to power, not watchdogs.
To return to Gittins’ point, there’s one other group that deserves blame for our current malaise: the Labor and Liberal parties. Individual politicians like Albanese and Dutton will come and go, but the party machines live on eternally, and we have allowed them to embed themselves deep into our systems of power. We allow them to enrich themselves from the public purse with funding for every vote (and we rightly make voting compulsory, thus maximising that funding). We allow them to carve out exemptions for themselves in areas such as privacy. We allow them to get away with disguising who is seeking to influence them. And we’ve just strengthened the power of incumbency by allowing them to cap campaign spending for independent candidates while parties enjoy far bigger national campaign budgets.
The poor choice at the coming election is one that’s been decades in the making. Disillusionment is the only sensible reaction.
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