Move fast and fix things

Turning our back on Australia's oligarchs

There was movement at the station, for the word had passed around
That the colt from Old Regret had got away

—AB Patterson

Australian politics and the nation’s economic disposition are dominated by a handful of all-powerful industries that completely undermine any notion that we are the country of the fair go or egalitarianism. All our systems of power funnel us towards their interests and away from the sort of democratic diversity that makes life worth living and joyous. We must get much better at pushing back against this oligarchical tendency.

Caspar David Friedrich, Woman in Front of the Setting Sun, 1817

Julianne Schultz put it well in her book, The Idea of Australia, when she wrote that “The phrase ‘culture wars’ conjures an arcane dispute between ideological opponents about matters of interpretation and understanding, but at heart there is an undeniable political economy. And in Australia, that comes from the four economic foundation stones: mining, agriculture, banking and their handmaiden, the media.”

I’m more and more inclined to say we are a petrostate ruled by landlords. That these are our oligarchs.

In Voices of Us, I set out the ways in which the state is captured by the players in the political economy that Schultz describes, and in countless other articles I’ve tried to set out the way in which vested interests seek to shape the “national interest”. (See this piece for instance.)

But it isn’t just economic influence.

Inevitably, various interest groups are wielding art and culture to discipline governments and bureaucracies and even the ABC. For all these campaigns, there is an endless bucket of money from the vested interests to fund various groups who they use to front advertising campaigns attacking everyone from independent politicians to the sort of constitutional reform envisaged by the Voice to Parliament.¹

The most recent tool of these reactionary elements has been to weaponsise the very real threat of antisemitism and use it to undermine artistic and academic—not to mention, journalistic—freedom of thought and speech.

In another section of her book, Schultz reminds us that there is nothing new about this cultural assault, and that the Howard Government in particular sought to demonise the arts and educational sectors—any source of alternative narratives about the nation—in order to enforce its own narrow view designed to keep the power of our oligarchs in place. What the Right now dismiss as “woke” was once ridiculed for being “elite”:

A strong public sector has distinguished Australian administration since settlement, but it proved to be a surprisingly easy target. John Howard expanded those on the watchlist to include ‘Indigenous activists, multiculturalists, feminists, republicans and black armband historians’. Making life uncomfortable for these groups, whose jobs gave them a public platform, also sent a clear message about who was in control.

…This was mystifying to those of us who worked as journalists, lawyers, teachers and academics. How had our workplaces gone from being a part of the institutional fabric of the nation to its enemy? …For most, [the work we did] was not a matter of ideology. At heart it was a liberal lesson, one that could be traced back to the Enlightenment and conservative thinking about the value of life being more than economic.

Instead, we were pilloried as elites, often by those who by virtue of birth, wealth or class were unequivocally elite.²

At every point, politicians, journalists, bureaucrats and board members have shown themselves to be pathetically vulnerable to this sort of pressure and they buckle like Jenga towers. The governance rules that set chains of accountability are increasingly failing in their primary function—which is to protect the democratic voice of artists, journalists and academics in the name of we-the-people—and instead those same artists, academics and journalists are being thrown under the bus.³

There is no easy solution to any of this but I can assure you that it requires more than voting. Grassroots organisation and protest are the only ongoing tools we have to change things, and this is precisely why governments of “both” persuasions take every opportunity they can to criminalise and otherwise restrict this sort of citizen behaviour. Whether it is outlawing protests or rigging campaign finance reform, the goal is to stifle what they see as dissent. Alleged threats to national security, concerns about public order and social cohesion are wielded with a Goebbel-like aplomb to justify every further restriction they dream up and we have to call them out and push back at every opportunity. We have to create opportunities to confront them.

In all of this, the legacy media—particularly the Murdoch media—are key players and we really have to recognise the paradox at work here: despite the fact that they are no longer a mass media, as they were in the past, with an ability to shift public opinion, they nonetheless remain hugely influential amongst the political class and can at least bend governments and oppositions to their will. As well as the boards and bureaucrats, managers and advisors answerable to those politicians.

Independent artists, journalists, and politicians are silenced with monotonous and predictable regularity, and we-the- people are corralled into ever-narrower publics where free speech is less an inherent democratic right than a dispensation doled out in microdoses from on high.

It’s a ground war and we must start getting better at speaking across ostensible divides of class, race and gender and bring our communities together.

Mainstream media and legacy politicians are engaged in the opposite activity and we have to recognise that too.

Most importantly, we must realise that the two-party system holds all these structures of power and influence together. This means that electoral politics remains important, and does anybody think that anything will change if we just keep electing a majority Labor or LNP government? Isn’t there a definition of insanity that defines it as doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different outcome?

Are we insane?

No, Australians are not insane.

Over the las thirty years, we have increasingly recognised this structural fault in our system of governance and have relentlessly been casting votes in such a way as to undermine the power of the two-party system. This began in the Senate where it is now taken for granted, by citizens at least, that the crossbench is a legitimate player in the decision-making process. It is increasingly regularised at the state level too, with minority governments being unexceptionable.

And now, the same logic is now taking hold in the federal House of Representatives, and almost all the turmoil you are seeing in the political class is driven by panic about this organic shift in our politics.

A recent paper by Ben Spies-Butcher and co-authors does an incredible job of setting out how the 2022 election of our largest crossbench ever has been building for decades, and I would recommend everyone read it. It documents a process of political fragmentation happening in concert with a bigger process of political realignment. The nature of the realignment is increasingly away from the conservative parties in particular, and it represents the sort of broader social changes that I have been highlighting over the last few years (most recently, in this piece).

The paper does an incredible job of tracing the nature of the changes that are occurring and the rise of what they call IMPs, independent and minor party candidates:

Our findings suggest the 2022 federal election is far from an anomaly.

Since 1970, we identify 124 candidates who have been elected at least once as an IMP. Analysing our dataset against key electoral events, we abductively identify three periods of IMP success – from 1970 until 1995, 1996 until 2010 and since 2011. In the earlier period, IMPs were more likely to rise through lower levels of government, and from outside organised politics, with defections a persistent feature.

Most recently, ‘party-like’ organisation has emerged, through either explicit endorsement or resource sharing amongst independents. In general, avoiding incumbents and benefiting from preferences are both common features of IMP success.

Additionally, we find that while the impact of Australian minor parties on the major ones is mixed, independents have consistently been more dangerous for the Coalition.

Taken together, we argue that while there is some evidence of an ‘anti-politics’ effect, the increasing organisation and partisan implications of IMP success suggests a more stable realignment of politics based on new social distinctions.

Our political class can see the writing on the wall and they certainly don’t want a minority government. What they want even less is a minority government that works. So, the automatic stabilisers of two-party power are already kicking in to demonise the very idea of minority government and we are increasingly being treated to this sort of article in our highly compromised mainstream media.

I am not so foolish as to think that a bunch of centrist independent politicians from the leafy suburbs is going to lead us to progressive nirvana, but their success and general demeanour opens up a space for reform that has never existed before. I am also not foolish enough to think that merely switching between majority governments led by the LNP or Labor forever and ever is going to do anything other take us deeper into the mire of the status quo and the influence of vested interests.

Both parties have long been the lynchpin of the political economy Schultz describes and both parties, entrenched as they are, and subject to the never-ending influence of those vested interests, have shifted relentlessly to the political right. The LNP’s future is an increasingly Trump-like manifestation—openly and proudly, as it happens—while Labor has given itself over almost entirely to neoliberal managerialism, less a party of reform than one of incremental, market-based change.

By themselves, neither party is ever going to properly address the issues of climate change, inequality, housing, or even the threat posed by our traditional alliance with the United States now that it has succumbed to Trump’s prerogative state. They will never not throw artists under the bus if the political temperature gets too high.

And how is all that any sort of democracy?

The only access ordinary Australians have to the sort of seismic structural reform that is needed to genuinely change things is to take it upon ourselves to engineer a minority government. That process began in earnest in 2022, after years of slow development, and it will take more than a single term of deliberative governance for us to really move fast and fix things.

But the path is clear.

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1. See work by Lucy Hamilton documenting the rise and provenance of these organisation.

2. See another earlier piece I wrote about all this.

3. I won’t go through the long list of recent of recent examples, but obviously I am talking about everything from the Antoinette Lattouf case, to the one involving Khaled Sabsabi and the Venice Biennale, and even the recent decision by 39 Australian universities to adopt a restrictive and politicised definition of antisemitism.