Wasting away in Albaneseville

Trade-offs between power and longevity

In a number of forums since the 2022 federal election, I’ve noted that Australia has managed to avoid the authoritarian extremes afflicting other democracies. My book, Voices of Us, is a discussion of just that, and part of the reason I wrote it was capture that moment of hope.

A key to our relative success—two cheers for Australian democracy—is that we use preferential voting; that we have compulsory voting; and that we have the Australian Electoral Commission, three pillars which help rescue us from the worst excesses of, particularly, US politics, where electoral boundaries and voter turnout can be endlessly manipulated against the national will.

The key point to make, though, is that while these three pillars offer some protection against authoritarian forces, they do not make us immune, and that’s what I want to get at here.

The thing that makes me saddest, as someone who welcomed the new Labor government, is that they have misread the national mood and adopted a political strategy …