The Albanese lullaby
Naming and resisting the anti-democratic effects of the prime minister's calls for "social cohesion" and "lowering the temperature"
Go to sleep, little babe, go to sleep, little babe
Your mama’s gone away and your daddy’s gone to stay,
Didn’t leave nobody but the baby.
—Traditional American
I realise I’ve been framing Anthony Albanese’s incrementalism and managerialism as a sort of absence that is being filled by an increasingly empowered right and far right, and there is truth in that. But after watching this recent speech to parliament, I am thinking that that framing is worth thinking about more carefully. The prime minister’s softly, softly approach is actually an active shaping of public debate, not just an absence, and we need to treat it as such.
A comparison with the Howard years might be useful.
John Howard supported a policy agenda of neoliberal economics with an assertion of social conservatism that amounted to a constant barrage of nationalist, patriarchal rhetoric. Howard needed the social conservatism to leaven the effects of the neoliberalism and it was an oddly effective approach given its inherent contradictions.
Howard’s key framing devices were political correctness and the alleged elite-popular divide. These two notions allowed him to join together the economic elites he and his party supported in common cause with everyday Australians by providing them with a joint enemy, the so-called cultural elites. This “new class” was presented as hostile to “common sense” and “traditional values”, allowing Howard to present his class and the “battlers” as joint victims.
Anthony Albanese is pursuing a more subtle but equally consequential methodology framed by social cohesion and calls to “turn the temperature down”. Where Howard was confrontational and not afraid to make enemies, Albanese presents as much more reasonable. He is always the most reasonable person in the room. “I know people have different views and very strong views about the Middle East,” he said in parliament on February 10, “and they're entitled to express those, and they're entitled to do that in a peaceful way.”1
The truth is, people did try to protest peacefully until the NSW police decided to intervene. But the PM offered no condemnation of the police, just the ever-reasonable promise that matters will be looked into. “Many people who saw the footage will want to know all of the circumstances around that, and I’ll allow the police to do their job.”
How reasonable. How could anyone object to that?
As many people have been pointing out, social cohesion is not quite the benign, kumbayah call-to-national-unity that it appears to be. It is not a distraction from other concerns—we really have to get out of the habit of seeing issues as distractions—but it does reframe economic problems as cultural ones. Just as Trump’s promise to “make America great again” offered cultural restoration as a substitute for economic justice, or Howard offered traditional values as a balm for disruptive economic transformation, Albanese’s “social cohesion” framework offers national unity as a substitute for material redistribution. In all cases, the diagnosis is cultural—too much diversity, too much dissent, too much division—while the disease is structural: decades of policy that have enriched the few at the expense of the many.
Work by the Scanlon Foundation at the ANU addresses these issues. In their 2023 Mapping Social Cohesion report, they note that “Financial circumstances remain the most important factor associated with social cohesion.” People who are struggling financially score lower on virtually every metric of cohesion — belonging, trust in government, trust in others, optimism about the future. In 2023, social cohesion hit a record low, driven by cost-of-living pressures. Almost half of participants cited economic issues as the most important set of problems facing Australia, with 41 per cent describing themselves as poor, struggling to pay bills, or just getting by. A record 84 per cent believed the gap between high and low incomes was too large.
I think we have to be careful with economic reductionism in these matters, but there seems little doubt that inequality is a huge driver of concerns that often express themselves culturally.
Once you frame matters in terms of social cohesion and demonise dispute as being contrary to that aim, you are depoliticising something that is deeply political, trying to dismiss things that we should be arguing over. Rarely does this call for deescalation run from right to left. Concessions to the right are framed as sensible compromise while the demand for a progressive agenda is reconstituted as a threat to social order.
Be patient. We will get to you.
In all this, the presumption that a middle mass of Australians exist who more or less believe the same thing and who have to be appeased rather than convinced is where depoliticisation becomes deeply problematic. Once you give up on the idea that politics is about creating coalitions rather than presuming them, then of course you fall back on the idea that there is some sweet spot we can all gather on and all our problems will be gone, somewhere we can all cohere at a low temperature.
To put it slightly differently, by presuming there is a political “centre” and that its views are set in stone and therefore need to be catered to rather than challenged, politicians of the left push the Overton Window firmly to the right. The same thing is happening in the US and the UK and we can see the results plainly: not social cohesion but an increasingly emboldened right wing that will constantly demand ever more extreme positions.
Why do we think Pauline Hanson is suddenly empowered to spit her bile with less caution that usual?
A recent LRB article captures this process nicely. “The intelligent thing to do, if you actually cared about the country, would be the slow work of developing public understanding. Yet what we get, again and again, is the opposite: politicians courting right-wing voters with positions that flatter bigotry rather than challenge it.”
Under the ALP, all “progress” that is pursued is, yes, incremental. It is what can be managed after other, more pressing matters are dealt with, which actually means, after other, favoured special interests are placated, whether they are within the fossil-fuel sector or pro-Israeli Government groups.
In his speech, the prime minister frames the visit by Herzog as part of this civility agenda and necessarily, therefore, presents any opposition as disruptive of social cohesion:
President Herzog is here in Australia to offer sympathy and solidarity to people who are mourning, and to offer his support to members of Australia’s Jewish community. He has said, to quote him, that his visit is in the spirit of ‘solidarity, friendship and love’. There’s not enough of that anywhere in the world, not the least here in the past couple of months.
The real tell in how insincere Albanese’s call to turn down the temperature is comes at the end, when, once again, he blames the Greens for causing problems. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again to conclude: we need to turn the temperature down, and the Greens political party need to be a part of turning that temperature down rather than up.”
FFS, how is that doing anything for social cohesion?
I find it deeply problematic that in speech like this, the Australian prime minister speaks more kindly and with more empathy towards the Israeli President than he does to a progressive party in our own parliament.
You don’t get to say take the temperature down and then invite someone as divisive and problematic as Herzog here at a moment when community tensions are already inflamed. You politely tell those demanding his presence exactly that, that now is not the right moment for such a visit, and maybe you ask them to turn down the temperature.
Under such circumstances, the call to lower the temperature is not a reasonable demand for civility amongst all sections of society but a thinly veiled demand for compliance from one group and not another. It is passive-aggressiveness elevated to the level of governance.
And we all know the play!
Labor supporters were quick to point out the subtext of Scott Morrison’s extolling of what he called “the quiet Australians” but somehow manage to miss that Albanese’s “turn the temperature down” tune is being sung from the same songbook. Both are infantilising, narcotic lullabies designed to shut us up. They are siren songs, luring us to our democratic death.
So, look, I know this sort of talk and analysis can sound like an overreaction, and there is something really attractive in imagining that all the problems of the world can be solved if we all just calmed down and got on with our lives. In fact, I would honestly be thrilled if the government organised actual meaningful community consultation that brought together different factions in an openly deliberative environment aimed at reaching genuine compromise.
But that isn’t what is happening and we don’t live in a world where blind compliance with political slogans is a safe option.
In some lights it can look like the PM is abandoning the field and leaving a space in which the right has been able to thrive. But I think it goes beyond that. He is actively dressing up the government’s position as reasonable and measured while framing dissent as disruptive, as a heat-inducing threat to social cohesion that must be contained.
It is a manipulation we must name and resist.
Not quite as bad as Scott Morrison’s “Not far from here, such marches, even now are being met with bullets, but not here in this country,” but the difference is in degree not kind.
Good piece Tim, and a bit scary too. I imagine Hitler could have included all sorts of views and action to be consistent with his view of ‘social cohesion’! Trump as well I’m sure. The ALP has a great opportunity right now to use deliberative democracy to explore the community’s views and feed them into policy making, but it’s too timid. If only political parties would get out of the way of democracy!
Your piece came alive for me with these two paragraphs:
"You don’t get to say take the temperature down and then invite someone as divisive and problematic as Herzog here at a moment when community tensions are already inflamed. You politely tell those demanding his presence exactly that, that now is not the right moment for such a visit, and maybe you ask them to turn down the temperature.
Under such circumstances, the call to lower the temperature is not a reasonable demand for civility amongst all sections of society but a thinly veiled demand for compliance from one group and not another. It is passive-aggressiveness elevated to the level of governance."