Flushing out the Augean parliament

Moving power from the centre to the periphery

“What I do see is the last feeble stirrings of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system.”

Leo Naphta in Thomas Mann’s, The Magic Mountain

I want to acknowledge some criticisms that have come up in comments and private texts over the last few weeks regarding my arguments about democracy.¹ I keep going on about the importance of democratic governance, but people are rightly worried that, in practice, special interests wield so much power—through the major parties—that they overwhelm any possibility of what a functioning democracy should be, which is self-rule by the people themselves.

As the previously unthinkable happens and America descends into “an unapologetically white supremacist, misogynistic, oligarchical, Christian nationalist agenda”—fascism for short—we need to get our democratic ducks in row.

The argument comes down to whether we can continue to pursue democratic reform within the existing institutions of the state, or whether we have to, somehow, build around those institutions and invent, almost from whole cloth, new ways of doing things.

In many ways, it is the perennial problem of democracy.

I spent a couple hours last week chewing over these questions with someone whose views I very much respect and who has given this matter deep thought and it was interesting to see the extent to which he—someone who has dedicated his professional life to working within the system—was increasingly coming around to the view that we need to build something new rather than to keep trying to reform what we already have.

He was more advanced with his thinking on the subject than I was, though he was quick to admit he didn’t really know what the best way forward might be. Still, he tapped into matters I have been thinking about too, and that many readers here also worry about, so I thought it might be good to think out loud about where we might go.

The nature of the problem

There are so many things on which ordinary voters want action—from climate change to housing to cost of living—but little ever changes. Other agendas always drive the actions of politicians. We feel something essential slipping away from us, while a welter of issues gather that seem beyond human management: the so-called polycrisis. Every small gain is like pulling teeth, while progress in one area leads to losses, or neglect, elsewhere. The confrontational, zero-sum game of our political system lacks the tools of proper deliberation, and meaningful concessions are almost impossible to achieve.

One step forward, two bullets in the head.

Levers most of us barely know exist—the ley lines of actual power—silently mitigate against addressing people’s lived concerns and we are forced to run very hard in order to stand still. A small example of how this works this came up on a Bluesky thread about the way local council elections are run in Melbourne. Travis Jordan pointed out that the mail-in voting system used in council elections, and the way electoral boundaries are drawn, meant that “Victoria's local politics prioritises the voices of older homeowners with long housing tenure” over those, generally younger voters, who rent. “Renters are directly materially impacted by local government decisions but are structurally excluded from participating in them,” Jordan wrote.

Such structures are what I have elsewhere called the automatic stabilisers of political power. They work in the background, unseen by most of us, and they resist reform. They are designed precisely to do that.²

Honestly, it is a shit show. It’s scandalizing, every single day….

[O]ur current political system is designed to revolve around a very narrow band of people who are, over all, materially O.K. It does not revolve around the majority.

—Alexander Ocasio-Cortez

A more obvious example is the legislation before federal parliament billed as reform of campaign financing but that is shaping up as just another dirty fix by the legacy parties to protect their duopoly against growing electoral competition. As independent Kate Cheney has pointed out:

“The popularity of the major parties is at an all-time low, with one in three Australians voting for a minor party or independent at the last election,” she told Radio National.

“But instead of trying to earn back the trust of voters, this bill is a desperate attempt by the big parties to rig the rules, squeeze out the competition, and protect their patch.

“Both parties are running scared of the possibility of a bigger crossbench that will continue to hold them to account.”

And then there is #robotdebt which showed the depth of complicity between politicians, bureaucrats and the media, the extent to which they can function as a conspiracy against the will and interests of ordinary voters, especially the most disadvantaged ones.

Instead of fixing those systems, a whole new layer of so-called regulation is built on top of the rotten foundations, and we wonder why it falls over.

The NACC was established to deal with the sort of intuitional corruption #robodebt represented—corruption in the broadest sense of legal collusion between vested interests—but the NACC’s failure to even bother investigating the crimes uncovered by the Royal Commission, while keeping in place a Commissioner who is arguably highly compromised—who at the very least has lost the trust of the electorate—is a perfect example of what I am talking about, of power protecting itself, voters be damned.³

Democracy takes up too many evenings

I have increasingly come to the view—I’m sure you’ve noticed—that our democracy is being undermined rather than enhanced by the two-party system that has shaped our governance since the early twentieth century; that in different ways, both the Coalition and Labor are too comfortably entrenched in these barely visible interstices of power and influence that prioritise vested interests over those of the country as a whole.

The legislative process is biased towards means rather than strategic outcomes. The technical solution is prioritised and politics is reduced to the subsequent selling of that technocratic approach to the electorate. The bureaucracy and the parties—the departments and the cabinet—are held to be the custodians of the national interest meaning the whole process is closed to ordinary voters. Outside input, to the extent that organised community interest groups can make themselves heard, are treated as irritants, something to be managed, or preferably, shut down.

Too much of what we call politics, then, is about parties inducing voters to conform with party policy rather than politicians listening to what people want. This is deeply undemocratic, obviously. Still, it is as well to remind ourselves that even though they can stifle reform, parties remain useful. Attractive even.

By aggregating and integrating community interests, parties relieve us of a cognitive load. Most of us don’t want to be thinking about policy positions on every little thing every minute of the day and parties allow us to share that burden. We find a party with which we broadly agree—share values—and we trust them to take positions on things we don’t have the time or inclination to think through in detail.

It’s a variation on Oscar Wilde’s quip that socialism takes up too many evenings.⁴

To approach it from a slightly different perspective, the complexity of political governance makes the process inherently unstable and parties are a way of providing stability.⁵ And of course we want stable government; but the unfortunate flipside of stability is corruption. That corruption can be outright criminality, but the more difficult variation to deal with is the soft corruption of elite collusion. Parties make us complicit in this latter sort of corruption by eliciting our votes while hiding the inner workings of the process from us.

That we come to identify—rust ourselves onto—a party that relieves us of the cognitive burden of complex governance is hardly surprising—and this solidarity can be a good thing. But such support risks anaesthetising our democratic instincts. Fortunately, many Australians have come to realise the problem and are shifting their primary votes away from the two major teams of our political landscape. But that alone doesn’t solve the problem if the same structures stay in place.⁶

For now, the shift away from parties in Australia has moved us in a more democratic direction—towards the rise of a viable and deliberative crossbench. We should embrace that because the alternative is that we surrender the cognitive load of our politics to authoritarianism, as has happened in the United States.

Donald Trump takes advantage of party identification, for sure, but adds the fascistic element that is a common aspect of friendship: uniting us in a shared understanding of what, or who, we hate. This perverse solidarity is essential to the success of all charismatic, populist demagogues.

The more things change

As my friend said during the discussion I mentioned above, the traditional tools of democratic participation are no longer sufficient to the task. The practices of door knocking and community engagement might still be vital processes in localising politics, but what is the point of winning all that support, sending representatives to parliament, only to see their efforts absorbed and neutralised by a system whose every instinct is to protect itself from change?

Participation is not enough. We need meaningful deliberation by diverse representatives in an environment where the executive function—the ability to legislate on behalf of that diverse electorate—isn’t subsumed in the practices of a parliament where the interests of the major parties, and powerful commercial interests, are baked into the structures themselves.

Our parliament wasn’t designed for parties, and we need to rediscover that truth.

Many of the problems we attribute to “democracy” are really problems with the two-party dominance. That system forces us to think about governance in a very particular way, one that prioritises their interests over ours. That bias is deeply embedded in the very language we use: major and minor parties; the balance of power; a hung parliament; a crossbench; political instability; minority government.

Peer over the edge of these linguistic fences and a whole other world opens up:

• major and minor parties are just parties

• the crossbenches are just seats in the parliament

• the balance of power is just power

• the parliament is not “hung”, it is the party system that is hung

• political instability is just the refusal of the major parties to deliberate

• minority government is just government

As Matthew Lamb has argued, “In the circumstance of a major party not getting a majority of seats….what does not retain its ability to function is the two-party system, with the members of each party unwilling to enter parliament and make an argument without the outcome being known in advance.”

So yes, we must talk about reforming the system, and there is still a hope, I think, that a collective (“minority”) government will weaken the hold that Labor and the Coalition have on executive government—we will see. But there is also a strong chance that the skewed structure of parliamentary practice will simply overwhelm any chance for serious reform and the vested interests that hold up the two-party system will flex their muscles and undermine the possibility of truly meaningful deliberative government.

I mean, we already know there will be a loud scare campaign about how a “hung parliament” will cause instability; and we already know that vested interests will seek to undermine not just various independent candidates but the whole idea of independents; and we know the Greens will be attacked, with much clever handwringing about how they aren’t really the party they used to be, and in fact this is already happening.

What is to be undone?

There is a whole literature on what is called interest-group politics and I guess what I am talking about is a more robust version of that. That theory has many strands and I will spare you the longer discussion.⁷ Suffice to say that the rise of interest groups and other issue movements seeks to, in Ian Marsh’s words, “challenge the integrating, opinion forming and agenda setting capacities of the major political parties. They do this by advancing and defending a widened and more differentiated political agenda.”

All well and good, but we still come up against the problem of how to convert such alternative views into actual policy. Who, or what, is the agent of change?

There is a related literature on what is called the inside/outside strategy, where community power is used to build institutional power in a self-reinforcing manner, and it has many attractive features at a theoretical level. But as articles like this make clear, even where the approach has had genuine success, the final outcome is capitulation to institutional power, preserving the status quo. The opportunity for progress is further subsumed by the so-called real politick of the political class; in the “long game” strategies of an Obama, or an Albanese, which end up fizzling out somewhere near an unchanged “centre”.

This is death for progressive politics. By design.

I speak often with lifelong Labor voters who are completely demoralised by Albanese’s capitulation on key issues and these aren’t people who are unrealistic or naive about what is possible: they are true believers looking for genuine leadership from the party that has, traditionally, been almost the sole driver of progressive reform in this country. What is happening to Labor under Albanese is symptomatic of a political reversion to the meanness of a neoliberal centrism.

Is it any wonder people start thinking about how to work outside the system?

I’m not talking about burning the old to the ground: far from it.⁸ But relying on incremental reform and trying to nudge in a different direction people whose salary and career and sense of self depends on them not being nudged in a different direction is a sucker’s game. You might as well demand more.

There is a famous quote from Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s novel, The Leopard: “If we want things to stay as they are, things will have to change.” It is the cry of established power willing to do anything to preserve itself. The motto of democrats needs to be something like, “If we want things to change, we have to fucking change them.”

Not quite as poetic.

What it means to build around this status quo I don’t exactly know, but more than ever I am convinced we need to focus on this sort of change if we are going to avoid the slide to fascism now taking place in the US. We are better placed to do that than they were, but let’s not get smug.

I guess the point I am making is that much of what ails us cannot be resolved within the parliament itself but requires a community-level engagement that educates by involvement and provides alternative sources of knowledge that “challenge the integrating, opinion forming and agenda setting capacities of the major political parties.” Online engagement is a powerful tool, but it isn’t a substitute for a politics grounded in infrastructure and personal relationships.

In the meantime, if the “crossbench” does end up with the “balance of power”, they must be willing to use that power for structural reform, not just the pursuit of a handful of signature legislative programs. Their support for minority government needs to be advanced only on the promise of serious institutional change, and they must muster a genuine willingness to wield power in the interests of the many.

Ian Marsh develops a five-point approach that might serves as a place to start, but I won’t outline the whole thing. In essence, he is trying to create new relationships that encourage cooperation and problem solving over the confrontational agenda setting that is the norm now. He says that the repertoire of policy implementation strategies would be much wider under a participative approach:

Now government prestige is implicated in the successful achievement of any proposed policy change. When opposed by recalcitrant interests governments usually possess few options other than confrontation. The opposition has considerable incentives to side with any recalcitrant interests. This means that direct stakeholders often exercise substantial veto power over proposed policy changes.

In a more participative environment where coalition building is a routine strategy, there would be more flexibility in policy making and ultimately the possibility of defeating recalcitrant stakeholders through a majority coalition of winners.

Confrontation will undoubtedly still occur, but this would be in an environment in which governments would possess more resources and a stronger base in public and/or constituency opinion.⁹

I honestly believe that Australian democracy, for all its faults, is better suited to this sort of reform than any other country on earth. What’s more, Australians have already been using the tools available to them to reshape our parliaments and the democracy they are meant to embody. Whatever its shortcomings, the community independents movement has shown that if you build something, they will come, and rather than tipping a bucket on this approach because of perceived class shortcomings, it might be more useful to recognise that the power of it could extend well beyond the leafy suburbs.

It is no doubt the case that the closer we get to genuine change—the normalisation of deliberative (“minority”) government—the harder the powers-that-be will fight back. It certainly feels like the battle is joined and that the Eye of Sauron is turning its entire attention on the little people scurrying to save themselves.

I’ll repeat: too much of what we presently call politics is about parties inducing voters to conform with party policy. We have to reverse the logic and presumptions of that approach. To the extent that parties remain useful and relevant, they have to stop being vehicles that centralise power and become ones that direct their attention to the periphery, becoming agents of the diversity and demands they find in the country itself.

As much as we must argue for reform within the party system and within the parliament, then, we must also build structures outside those spaces to bring to bear the requisite public pressure from the periphery, the communities, to reverse the polarity of centralised party power. Such reform can seem impossible until you look at what has recently been achieved; to realise that we are even in a position to have this conversation.

As I said at the beginning, this is just me thinking out loud, and in a not very systematic way. But maybe it will spark some conversations. Over to you.

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1. If you ever want to contact me privately, just hit reply when this newsletter arrives in your inbox.

2. Donald Schon has called the process “dynamic conservatism”.

3. The decency and hard work of a Helen Haines, working for genuine oversight, is undermined and squashed by an institutional design that renders something like the NACC ineffective.

4. The actual quote is: “The trouble with socialism is that it takes up too many evenings.” But you can see the point I’m making.

5. Any notion that we can “build around” the two-party system needs to acknowledge that such change requires acclimatising people to a more dynamic system of governance. It requires recognising that the program I am pushing here is vulnerable to the easy stories of right-wing populism. As Timothy Snyder says, “A fascist storyteller just has to find a pulse and hold it.”

6. What’s more, when party loyalty obscures the failings of the party we support, or causes us to make excuses for them, we risk becoming like the character of Leo Naphta in Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, who cynically observes, “What good would politics be if it didn’t give everyone the opportunity to make moral compromises.” (That line kills me.)

7. Says he in a 3000-word discussion.

8. It probably doesn’t need saying, but some may note that the idea of radical reform is precisely what Trump is doing, which is true; but there is no equivalence between the radical democratic reform I am talking about and the sort of fascism Trump is implementing.

9. It is interesting note that Marsh—even in a book called Beyond the Two Party System—still speaks of bipartisanship, and maybe that is another one of those words we should stop using if we want to move past the two-party mentality.

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Eurystheus …wracked his brain to conceive of a truly impossible task, and came up with a good one. He demanded that Hercules clean out the vast Augean Stables in one day. King Augeas had owned 3000 oxen for 30 years—the biggest herd in all of Greece—but had never had his stables cleaned. The cow poop was mountainous, obviously, and it was constantly being replenished. By the time you’ve cleaned up one pile, a hundred more are lying steaming on the deck. Anyone who tried to simply shovel it out would never come to the end of it. Thus the job would not only be impossible, due to the huge amount of filth, but wading in shit would degrade and humiliate Hercules too. Obviously another strategy is required.