Happy everything, everyone

Thanks for reading

I just wanted to wish you all the best for the season and to say thank you for your support and company here at The Future of Everything. The newsletter has, over the last two years, built an amazing subscriber list that ranges across the political spectrum, and it is my privilege to have the ear of such a diverse and engaged group of people.

I’m taking a bit of break between now and the New Year, but Tanya and I aren’t taking our proper annual leave until April when we will visit our son, Noah, who lives in France.¹ So, things might go a bit quieter then.

I won’t do one of those big, year-in-review type posts, but as we are going into an election year, ugh—having just come off a major election in the United States, double ugh—I thought I’d jot down a few quick thoughts on the current state of play, or some of my perennial themes, to remind myself as much as anything.

• People are desperate for good journalism. They want trustworthy, factual information and analysis that helps them make sense of an endlessly changing and complex social and political landscape. They will accept having their views challenged if they see the challenge as honest and transparent. What infuriates people about a lot of mainstream news is not bias per se, let alone having their own views challenged, but the pretence that the journalist or the publication doesn’t have a point of view; that they are somehow neutral. The journalistic idea of “Objectivity”, understood as balance, the reporting of “both” sides, or even as simply relaying verbatim, without context, what some self-interested, manipulative politician said does more damage to serious journalism than all the social media platforms in the world. Media is no longer mass and so you must speak to your audience as sentient individuals, not as a statistical average.

• The two-party system is broken, dangerously so. What’s more, people know it and are voting accordingly.² Instead of fixing themselves in a democratic way, the major parties are conspiring to rig the system to make it harder for other voices to be heard: everything from campaign financing laws to parliamentary staffing levels for the crossbench. Federal and state governments are enacting increasingly punitive laws against protest with the same goal, to stifle alternative points of view. At a time when communities themselves are coming together as never before so that they can engage meaningfully with their democracy, the political class is increasingly in thrall to vested interests—whether it is corporations or foreign powers—and they are looking to undermine that community engagement. The parties could respond differently if they wanted to, but these turkeys will never vote for Christmas, and so we have to take matters out of their hands. The only way we will get real reform is by installing a crossbench with the balance of power across a string of elections. It is the only way of making parliament more responsive to a diverse electorate and not just to the vested interests who control the current system.

• The community independents should never form a party, but there is nothing wrong with them cooperating.³ In fact, such cooperation should be completely normalised. That way, the parliament can become a truly problem-solving body, representing communities and drawing on the best expert and local knowledge to fashion policy that makes Australia function as the egalitarian society it would genuinely like to be. The new dispensation of community independents is not without its risks, and the biggest one is elected independents failing to recognise their overarching responsibility to the country. They have to realise they are representatives of the nation, not delegates to the parliament from their electorates. Of course, they owe a special obligation to the people who voted for them, but they owe an even bigger one to the country at large. This will mean some difficult conversations with their communities, because the fact is, what is good for Wentworth, or Goldstein, or Fowler, or wherever, is not necessarily good for Australia. Only once they accept this truly representative role are they likely to have to courage to use the balance of power for serious reform.⁴

• Growing up, people my age often wondered how ordinary Germans "let it happen". Watching US politics at the moment gives a clearer sense of how civil society collapses. People are startled into inaction, they engage in pointless argument, and cling to the idea that all this is manageable. Major institutions, including the media, just play along. Courage is hard to organise. Resistance is hard to define. The self-styled land of the brave and home of the free is proving to be anything but. Still, I don't think for a moment the rest of us are immune. It could happen here. So, we should be watching and learning. (Significant sections of South Korean society seemed to find a spine at the right moment.) The path to authoritarianism is always through the complacent "sensible centre" and democracy ultimately relies on what political scientist John Keane calls “the unplanned mutiny of disgruntled citizens.” It is a nice line, but there is also something to be said for a bit of planning.

I’m going to finish with a little personal indulgence, if that’s okay. It is a link to an article I wrote for The Drum in 2013, and I think it says something about the value of analysis that is independent of press-gallery groupthink, party-political affiliation, and political-class self-interest. So yes, the article was written more than a decade ago, but it holds up well, even if I do say so myself. The thing is, it wasn’t a predication as such, though as a prediction, it’s spot on. What it actually is is an honest assessment of the facts on the ground at the time and I think that is a valuable thing to bring to the conversation. To see what is happening right now and to talk about it as clearly as possible, in the moment. That’s what I will keep trying to do.

Thanks again, everyone, and I’m looking forward to our continuing conversations in 2025.

All the best - Tim

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1. This is our son, Noah, with his partner in the Company’s current production of Cendrillon (Cinderella). When we visit in April, they will be performing a whole other repertoire. ❤️

2. This infographic put together by Denise Shrivell shows the once and future independent candidates that have emerged at past elections and so far for the 2025 federal election. She updates it regularly, so use the QR code to check the website.

3. In the Senate, there may be need for a party structure as that is the only way to get above the line on the ballot paper, as David Pocock explains. See also Better Together, the new party launched by Lucy Bradlow and Bronwen Bock

4. This latter point is something I wrote about in Voices of Us, complete with the famous quote from Edmund Bourke.