Welcome to the next ten years of Australian politics

Seeing what is in front of our own eyes is a constant struggle

In the end, afraid of the poems and the many cigarettes,
he went out at midnight to a suburb--a simple, quiet
walk past closed fruit stores, among
good things with their vague, true dimensions.

—Yannis Ritsos

The coming era of Australian politics will be about managing the transition away from two-party governance to permanent minority government involving a crossbench that better represents the diversity of the nation.

The nature of a contemporary society like Australia is that the issues are too complex and diverse to be forced into a two-party system based on the ideological divisions of another era. We need to think with a bigger social brain than a two-party system can generate and that means broadening the pool of people from whom we draw our political leaders.

The transition will be rough, but it is clear that Labor’s small-target, neoliberal approach and the Coalition’s persistent shift to the right, trying to crash through with a small-bore, populist approach built around denial and demonisation, are both only of limited appeal.

Something will have to give; is already giving.

The degree of difficulty in managing this change is increased because, as things stand, the legacy media, certain mainstream commentators, along with the political class more generally are only belatedly recognising that we are heading for minority government, and the vague, true dimensions of what is coming are still being ignored or denied.

Actually, it is more active than that. The political class are resisting this transformation.

It is still possible to read otherwise interesting and learned pieces like this by Professor Paul Strangio that don’t even mention the independents. To the extent that minority government is countenanced, it is presented as a problem to be solved by a reinvigoration of Labor. “Little can be taken for granted in our fractured, volatile electorate,” he writes, “but my hunch is that Labor will survive the election — as it deserves to — albeit with serious prospect of being reduced to minority rule.”

The situation is framed as a disaster waiting happen, the article noting that “The 2025 election will test whether Australia is tipping into a zone of ungovernability: whether an able administration can endure beyond a single term.”

The nature of the community engagement that has underpinned the rise of the independents suggests we needn’t be so pessimistic if we would only look at it from outside a two-party bias.

Annabel Crabb wrote the other day, under the subheading of “A market test in Tasmania”, that this is an era of disruptors, and I suspect that might be right from a top-down perspective. From the point of view of the political class, of the Labor, Liberal and National parties, the rise of a crossbench with the support of around a third of the electorate must seem like disruption.

But its commercial roots¹ make “disruption” a misleading metaphor.

What is happening isn’t about new players coming into a “market” and pushing out incumbents. The change that is happening has been much more gradual as voters themselves have shifted their first preferences away from Labor and the LNP over decades. Those voters aren’t choosing to use a new product provided by a new player at a better price; they are involving themselves in a process of self-governance in a way that the two-party system has made impossible.

It was encouraging to hear former Liberal staffer and commentator Nikki Savva say in her recent Speaker’s Lecture:

Everyone refers to the “drift” away from major parties, implying it is whimsical or unthinking or transitory, or a phase that voters will grow out of. It isn’t. It should be described as the great desertion. It is a deliberate, conscious, repudiation by Australians in their millions of traditional politics and politicians.

From a bottom-up perspective, then, it is more accurate to think of what is happening not as a disruption but as a democratic correction, an organic attempt by voters to use the tools available to them to construct a parliament that better represents their views rather than the views of the small number of highly influential interest groups that currently dominate policy and governance in Australia through the major parties.

The Voices Of methodology that most new independents have availed themselves of has allowed representatives to emerge through a process of community consultation that has reinvigorated the fundamental idea of democracy as self-governance, and we should be leaning into that. This methodology must find its way into parliament itself, and the crossbench should make their support for a given minority government contingent on that government accepting some form permanent citizens’ assembly.

No one should pretend that this will be easy or that any given outcome is completely predictable. But this is the directions in which we need to move, sooner rather than later.

Voters are making it clear they no longer trust the two-party system to deliver the sort of society they require. We have reached the stage where any electorate given the option of an independent or minor-party candidate who they perceive as viable will give serious consideration to that alternative candidate.

And here’s the thing: the first of the major legacy parties to embrace this transition rather than resist it will almost certainly be assured of longevity at the head of successive cooperative governments.

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1. This article is a pretty good outline of “market disruption”, just by the by.

(Note: Sections of this piece have been edited for clarity and emphasis since the newsletter went out.)