When the government changes, the country...well, not so much anymore
The two-party shuffle is a dance of stasis
As the last desperate days of the 2025 federal election unfold and the Liberal Party in particular shows just how unfit they are to govern—unleashing an avalanche of badly thought-through policy, peppered with abuse of independent candidates and scare campaigns aimed at dividing communities—we need to realise that the problem goes deeper than a single major party.
So, I want to come back to something I mentioned in passing a few weeks ago and give it a bit more consideration. The line I want to pull up from a previous post is this:
Any potential candidate with an ounce of integrity, let alone nous, is much better off running as an independent, and by gum, they are. This is true of the Liberals now and will be increasingly true of Labor.
This never used to be the case, of course, and even now, the hurdles faced by independents—the inherent structural bias in a system that favours parties—makes life difficult for non-party players. But the fact remains that the major parties, even the smaller ones, have become so moribund that they are, more often than not, places where values and notions of political reform go to die.
Who would sign up for such irrelevance?
Traditionally—and within political science—parties have been seen as vehicles for coordinating citizens and their government, allowing public concerns to be translated into policy proposals and ultimately, laws. In complex societies, parties are seen as a useful way of providing the institutional structure needed to aggregate diverse viewpoints into coherent political platforms, making democratic governance possible across large populations.
They also perform a role in educating people about democratic participation and mobilising them for that end. They explain policy issues, encourage voting, and provide opportunities for political participation between elections.
The party label itself comes to act as a heuristic, providing voters with an informational shortcut, helping them identify candidates likely to represent their interests without requiring exhaustive research on every individual running for office.
Additionally, institutionalised party systems have contributed to democratic stability. They create “teams” in legislatures that enable efficient governance and quick responses to important issues. Parties have also served as gatekeepers by recruiting qualified candidates and helping assess their commitment to democratic norms.
In other words, if you were an engaged local person who was motivated to participate in the political process, a political party provided you not just a way in, but a values proposition that you could identify yourself with.
And, oh my god, you only have to write the theory out like this to know what a joke the reality has become. Almost none of this is true anymore because the fact is, rather than being vehicles for democratic participation as the theory suggests, parties have develoved into vehicles for the corralling of power and the furthering of careers.
Rather than encouraging rational policy discussion, they foster emotional identification with party positions, leading members—and supporters—to prioritise partisan advantage over truth-seeking. This party-driven polarisation can replace substantive debate with tribal loyalty—the rusted-on effect, as we call it in Australia—reducing politics to a contest between teams rather than a collective search for just solutions.
This schema is reinforced by a legacy media that favours the simplicity of a sporting competition over the difficult nuance inherent in a meaningful discussion of policy and values. Plus the legacy media itself is a self-interested body, captured in the same way the parties are, by vested interests.
Parties, therefore, tend to compromise individual moral autonomy, and I’ve referred often in the past to the French philosopher Simone Weil and her jeremiad against political parties. She argues that party members, especially elected officials, face intense pressure to conform to party positions regardless of personal conscience. This dynamic can lead to what Weil describes as a “reversal of the relation between means and ends,” where party loyalty becomes more important than pursuing truth, justice, or the common good.
Everywhere, without exception, all the things that are generally considered ends are in fact, by nature, by essence, and in a most obvious way, mere means. One could cite countless examples of this from every area of life: money, power, the state, national pride, economic production, universities, etc., etc.
Goodness alone is an end. Whatever belongs to the domain of facts pertains to the category of means. Collective thinking, however, cannot rise above the factual realm. It is an animal form of thinking. Its dim perception of goodness merely enables it to mistake this or that means for an absolute good.
Sound familiar?
Furthermore, when party systems become highly factionalised and unstable, they hinder effective governance rather than facilitate it. This can lead to voter confusion, policy inconsistency, and diminished accountability. Similarly, parties end up failing to represent the full diversity of society, particularly when low participation levels result in representatives who do not accurately reflect their constituents.1
The bigger problem is what we are seeing increasingly in Australia, namely, a convergence amongst parties that were once in opposition to each other. Such a tendency is ultimately a retreat from politics understood as collective betterment, a triumph of what Hannah Arendt calls “behaviour” over “action”.
For Arendt, action signifies a profound connection to political life, whereas behavior denotes a retreat into passivity and conformity, and that is increasingly what we are seeing. It is a distinction that allows us to see what is at stake in modern life: not merely efficiency or social order, but the preservation of human freedom and uniqueness in a world increasingly dominated by behavioral norms and expectations, something we see in the way the major parties are coming to mirror each other.2
As Bernard Keane noted the other day, “On every major issue — both the big policy challenges facing the country, and the issues the parties insist are the really important ones — Labor and the Coalition are on a unity ticket, with only some trivial details over implementation separating them.”
Nick Feik makes a similar point:
Labor have spent the past three years shoring up bipartisan positions on AUKUS and defence spending, the Jobseeker rate and welfare policy, political donations reform, new fossil fuel mines, native forest logging, whistleblower laws, national security and secrecy laws, negative gearing and capital gains tax, corporate taxation, and so on and on and on. It’s all so middling, so compromised. Only a hung parliament will shift Australian politics in any significant way.
In Australia at the moment, the negative electoral problems that arise because of these flaws in party organisation are playing out most crushingly within the Liberal Party and their various Coalition partners, as I have been arguing for a while now. This has left the Liberals all-but destroyed, a brainless, zombie creature, marauding across the electoral landscape.
But Labor remain vulnerable to a similar fate.
Their deeply problematic dual-factional system, as Andrew Leigh has explained, is undermining their ability to properly address contemporary challenges, driving them ever further from their working-class roots and into the sort of neoliberal managerialism that is the source rather than the cure for the problems that confront us.
Their perennially low primary vote—hovering in the low-midthirties and now a permanent feature of their existence—is both cause and effect. As a regular reader pointed out in an email the other day, “The ALP is stuck in a catch-22! They pursue incrementalism because their legitimacy is weak, but their weak primary vote prevents them from pursing bold reform, and so on.”
Why the hell should the country be straddled with this sort of structural impediment to meaningful reform when there is a perfectly viable way through the impasse in the form of minority government?
To reinforce just how dysfunctional the two-party system has become, the major parties are also spending immense sums of money through third-party organisations to divide communities, spread misinformation, and attack independent candidates. This piece by Wendy Bacon is worth your time, shedding light on just how rife and unprincipled this behaviour has become.
I mean, wtf?
None of this is about better governance, or creating a better country, or trying to help those who most need help: it is about trying to retain the power that comes with the sort of duopoly the major parties have enjoyed since Federation and that they have come to believe is their right.
I’m not arguing for an end to political parties per se (as Weil did), just that they learn to function in a way that suits the times. Any successful future the parties have rests on them recognising their limitations, their deep unpopularity, the lack of trust they inspire. They need to understand on a fundamental level that, to have a future, they must be deliberative and govern in conjunction with others. Labor is best placed to benefit from this shift in our body politic if they could just get over themselves. There is a progressive majority waiting for them that could be harnessed with a bit of humility.3
I’m not hopeful of such humility emerging anytime soon, but I am confident that in the meantime, people of talent, people with a genuine commitment to community and nation, will continue to run a mile from party membership and choose the path of independence.
And look, we will all be better off for it. Even the parties will be.
Still, it is one thing to call for more independents and a shift to minority government, which is what I am doing. But for that to work in a meaningful way, we need to wrest back from the parties to the parliament the executive power the two-party system has usurped over the last century-and-a-quarter and turn the Lower House back into the deliberative body it is meant to be. That will be the topic of future newsletters.
Something Australia has addressed this reasonably successfully with compulsory voter registration and voting.
See Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition.
Agree entirely. The two major parties - and the media that sustains the fiction that these are our only choices - are all invested in keeping this charade in motion. If there are ends in this decades-long kabuki play, it is about holding power for its own sake and keeping the other side out. 'Issues' are seized upon as branding opportunities, if nothing else or a way of maximising donations from the people who really run the country - the fossil fuel lobby, the banks, the 'gaming' industry, the arms industry and the junk tanks that run their propaganda. 'Politics' is a play run for the benefit of the people on the stage (the parties, the media) not for the audience (the public). We're not watching it anymore because we can see nothing ever changes. There is no end game other than to keep the confected drama going. It's corrupt and exhausted and utterly meaningless. We need to tear it all down and start again.
I find the persistent asking /beseeching that I give Labor money to help them beat “others” shows an inability to look at their actions on fossil industry who are still receiving largesse from Labor I have written to Labor but ..🤷🏾♀️. No one reads just another plea for help .