The way in which the government is responding to the fact that one woman is murdered in Australia every four days is a reminder of how constrained we are by a political system that, by design, is unresponsive to the needs of the broader community.
Many are rightly angry about the government’s piecemeal response, as independent MP Stali Steggall makes clear in this brief clip ⬇️. Her frustration is completely justified, and I want to attempt an answer to the question she bluntly asks: “For fuck’s sake, what is it going to take for the government to act to keep woman and children safe?”
I want to answer, not just in regard to the issue of domestic violence, but to all the other matters that makes us ask, day in and day out, what the fuck is it going to take?1
This issue perfectly illustrates how we are often defeated before we start. Or least, of how constrained we are by a system designed to frustrate reform. We are trapped in a cage that has certain elite priorities built into it, and anything that falls outside their scope—like measures to curb domestic violence—is given short shrift.
Let’s look at this.
Once a government commits to something like AUKUS, for instance, with its multibillion-dollar budget stretching into the distant future, well beyond the reach of the normal electoral cycle, the rest of us are just fighting over scraps.
The government’s commitment to a Budget surplus is another example of the same thing. Such “priorities” define the elite consensus that governs us and are far more important in determining social outcomes than the surface-level differences that dominate most media discussion about politics.
And what about the media? They have their own constraints, often self-imposed.
The accountability they provide is necessarily piecemeal, an exercise in reporting that the horse has bolted—see? there it is way over there!—and as important as that can be, it is a conservative force rather than a reforming one. This sometimes plays out as an argument about “objective journalism” versus “activist journalism” but even that frames things in a low-energy, conservative fashion: as if objective, fact-based journalism can in any way be separated from the fact that there are significant forces actively working to undermine democracy itself.
Journalistic impartiality in such circumstances is just another tool of the status quo, one that not only convinces journalists they are doing their job “properly”, but that they are somehow involved in a noble act of accountability.
On almost any topic you can name, the debate parameters of the political class are pre-set; elite consensus has been reached, and any activism is constrained by largely invisible barriers that have already done the work of defining the possibility of change and reform.
Instead of having a say in our own governance, we are reduced to arguing about what others have already decided.
Nor is it just activists and ordinary citizens who are constrained. There are plenty of people working within the current systems—politicians, bureaucrats, academics, consultants and think tank operatives—who, more than most, work day in and day out to make the country function better, to live up to the values of a society that still likes to think of itself as egalitarian. But they are hitting their heads against brick walls they would rather were made of something more flexible.
Of course, I am not telling them anything they don’t know.
The primary effect of all this is, as I say, that the rest of us are fighting over crumbs, over change at the edges, eking out a few more pennies here and there for other priorities, whether it is extra money for welfare recipients, investment in the arts or health or education, or stopping men killing women at the rate of four a week. Whether we are working inside or outside the system, we are outgunned at every point because most of the money—and social capital—has already been spent.
The secondary effect is that all this demoralises us. Even when we can see clearly what those in power are inclined not to see, the structure of our politics invites a response of “why bother?” When we are confronted with the impenetrability of systems and practices built over years; by the automatic stabilisers of institutional norms and design that are so taken-for-granted, so normalised, so baked in that they present merely as “the way things are”, it can feel like there is no alternative.
The point is, we can’t let ourselves be demoralised like this, and one way of avoiding that is to recognise what we are actually up against. That’s what I am trying to define here, and in a lot of what I write. Once we understand the nature of the problem, we are better able to avoid the emergent distractions of the self-defence mechanisms the status quo effortlessly activates.
But it also means not wasting opportunities when they present themselves, and Australia is currently in the midst of creating for itself the immense opportunity of minority government, of vesting in a crossbench of smaller parties and independents the power to influence the bearers of the status quo—the major parties and their patrons—in a way that isn’t normally possible.
Carpe diem, as they say in Latin.
Make no mistake, we need to respond to matters like domestic violence as quickly as possible, within the constraints that currently exists. We can’t wait around to reform the entire system.
But until we do reform the entire system and build institutions that are deliberative and responsive to community needs and concerns—systems that put us on the ground floor of the decision-making process—we will remain trapped in the cage of elite, patriarchal, settler logic that hems us in at every turn. We will keep having these angry and frustrating arguments until we change the system that generates such problems in the first place.
“Nothing proposed today will keep women safer tomorrow, next week or next month.”
Gabrielle Morrisey CEO of local women’s refuge Women & Children First
The issue isn’t the deep state, as some like to say, it’s just the state, and the state can be changed.
Don’t forget, Australian governance was altered beyond recognition as recently as the early 1980s, transformed root and branch over not many years because the people who pull the levers of power pulled the levers.
In the event of minority government after the next election, the crossbench needs to commit to some lever pulling of their own. Not just throwing up a bunch of policies of their own, but in pursuing genuine structural reform that permanently transforms the institutions of state into something approaching a deliberative democracy. We must overthrow the competitive, confrontational, winner-takes-all, party-based assumptions that are baked into the current system and replace them with systems that demand genuine deliberation and accountability. We need to make it impossible for the major parties to enact bipartisan policy like AUKUS that ties up billions and billions of dollars for decades and makes it impossible to address issues like the cost-of-living crisis or the fact that men are killing women at the rate of four a week.
I’ll talk more about specific structural reforms over the coming months and will keep you up to date on some projects already underway. As Carl Sagan once said, "If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe."
Steggall’s full press release on the matter is available here
Or "Seas the Day!" as my cruise ship key from a trip to Hobart last December says! (ref Carpe Diem). Yes - vast sums to feed the share dividends of US investors in WMD/AUKUS nonsense - and "budget surpluses" - definitely not the role of governments whose duty as you point out is to look after its people - not send our tax moneys abroad - nor to Ukraine/Israel either. Nor to hell-holes such as Nauru run on "our" behalf by US security companies! Keep up the clarity, Tim.
You know your stuff Tim, and you write so eloquently and articulately about it. I've never heard you speak, but I wonder if you would ever consider political representation? You seem to get the issues, and have a nose for what we can do to make progress. I'd vote for you in an instant!