How do we process this?
I am in shock.
The shock is a familiar one. I felt it after the UK voted to leave the European Union. I felt it as I watched state after state fall to Trump.
It’s the feeling of being completely, blindingly, stupidly wrong.
It’s a feeling of dislocation — where everything I thought I knew about politics, my sense of the pulse of the public that I’m a part of, is a lie. The values I carry into the world, which I thought I shared even with those people who don’t do politics as obsessively as I do, are repudiated by a vote. And I don’t know how it happened.
I feel like I don’t know my own country.
I don’t know this place that could vote for such a mean, heartless, chaotic, incompetent, stupid and unreasonable government. I don’t know whether people are concerned about anything more than their own wellbeing, even at the expense of the community whose wellbeing is just as fundamental to their own.
To quote a very close friend of mine last night, who was in even greater shock than me: “I will walk around the streets and think WHO THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE?”
Last night, Australia re-elected a bad government, completely contradicting three years of opinion polling, completely repudiating a big vision of Australia that so many people claimed they wanted from political parties. The Labor party took a big target agenda to the election, laid out clearly a plan to redistribute tax breaks for the wealthiest in order to make the country a little bit fairer, and that vision was slapped down in favour of a wretched, self-immolating rabble. I need to understand how this happened.
For me personally, as a middle-class, white, male professional with a secure job in a capital city, it doesn’t really matter to me personally who is in government. I will do just fine under Liberal or Labor — in fact I’ll probably get bigger tax cuts from the Liberal party. So my engagement with politics, with the politics of the Left, isn’t selfish — it’s about looking out for people who don’t have the same advantages that I do. It’s because I am a patriot — that I want the best possible future for the beautiful country in which I live and the community that raised me — that I fight for the Labor party. What follows needs to be viewed through that lens: I am a person who cares about the future of the world, and of the society I live in, and I am trying to come to grips with how we are struggling to bring other people along with us.
A lot of post-election analysis comes out too quickly as a hot take which simplifies complex issues, and I’m afraid this post might fall into that genre. But writing, sometimes, is the best way to give structure and order to our thoughts. It helps me to take the thousand loose threads, the frayed edges of my torn political narrative, and stitch them together to make some kind of sense of the thing that has just happened.
So I want to look at three domains of the election, and some thoughts within each that I’ve had in the last 12 hours: the personalities that underpinned this election, the policies that drove the narrative, and then the politics and political game that brought us to this place. And then maybe I can give some humble preliminary thoughts — as someone who has been a committed member of the Labor party for ten years, and will continue to be so — about where we go from here.
Personalities
The individual personalities that drive elections are the least interesting thing to me, because I don’t think they have the impact that the bigger, structural and social forces do. But people get caught up in the narratives around individuals, and I think the narratives here speak to broader issues in this election. So I want to touch on a few individuals whose stories, this election, are worth paying attention to.
Murdoch
We overrate Rupert Murdoch’s influence in Australia. This election result is going to make people think otherwise, but I still believe that his wretched propaganda outfit doesn’t change as many minds as people think. Murdoch’s conservatism — his Foxification of Australian media — is blatant, and I give people enough credit to see through much of it. The Daily Telegraph is the least trusted ‘news’ source in Australia.
And yet, so many of us felt so good about attacking the Telegraph after it attacked Bill Shorten’s mum. So many people jumped on a feel good hashtag — and to be fair, the messages on that #MyMum hashtag were truly beautiful. But weren’t they preaching to the converted? Isn’t the frothing anti-Murdoch hysteria on Twitter just another echo chamber? Ultimately, a bunch of progressives telling each other how great their working class mums are was doing nothing to counter the broader political narratives that Murdoch wants Australia to focus on.
I should have clued into it better when my flatmate — who votes progressive, but who doesn’t engage closely with politics — watched Bill Shorten on Q&A and said he kind of agreed with the angle the Telegraph took. He found Shorten evasive for leaving out information, even if he understood why in the context of the program. He said the Murdoch press, even if it was tacky and pointless, were running an understandable line.
This should have been a clue to me — whenever I hear these sorts of perspectives from people who don’t live in the political bubble that my friends and I do, I should sit up and pay attention. Murdoch knows that his propaganda rags aren’t trusted — but that’s never the point of propaganda. The point is to set the agenda, to suggest and hint, and to influence. I think he did that: too many people on my side of politics decided to take the fight to Murdoch, rather than the Government. That was the wrong fight.
Dutton
I don’t understand how Dutton — a rabid conservative, with no charisma, from a marginal seat, who launched a failed bid for the Prime Ministership — was returned to his seat. But then, the fact that I don’t understand is exactly part of the challenge for people like me in this election.
Dutton’s seat is in Queensland, where there was a strong swing to the Coalition generally (and it’s this swing that seems to have won them the whole election). Dutton typifies for me everything that is wrong with the Coalition: he is inconsiderate, deeply conservative, plays the race card, and abuses state power against vulnerable people regularly. He has exploited his power as Home Affairs minister for his own gain, and he is an unrepentant gronk, like our Prime Minister.
GetUp campaigned hard against him. Labor thought they could unseat him. He ran silent nationally because he was focused on winning his seat, and he did.
For those reasons, I think Dutton is the case study in how Queensland politics differs so significantly from the rest of the country. Not only is the state deeply conservative, it is also parochial (I’ll touch on Adani later), and also able to be swayed by localised and effective (and a little bit racist) campaigns. Dutton may have benefited (I haven’t seen all the preference flows yet) from the effect of Clive Palmer’s party in Queensland. In fact it looks like the Coalition generally did that.
Abbott
The bright side to this election is that Tony Abbott is removed from the parliament. I know some on my side were hoping he would stay as a destabilising feature of the Liberal party, but I disagree. He is pure poison in our politics. His toxic approach to the parliament, to democracy, has corrupted public debate and polarised us. He was ruined consensus on climate change, and he has made it all the more difficult for Labor to take a reasonable, rational policy platform to an election.
Abbott’s brand of politics was repudiated by Warringah, and full credit to that electorate — and to Zali Steggall — for doing so. Of course Warringah would elect a classical liberal independent, just like Wentworth and Kerryn Phelps it is unreasonable to expect anything else. I disagree with much of Steggall’s politics, but I can agree with her on some things, which is more than I can say for Abbott. It’s worth remembering that politics in a democracy always entails working with people and perspectives we disagree with: we’ll never have everyone 100% happy. But healthy disagreement is better than the kind of caustic warring that Abbott enjoyed, and our politics will be healthier for his forced retirement — even if it still features the Hansons, Christensens, and Duttons of the world.
Shorten
I’ve already had people start messaging me about Bill Shorten’s wooden personality on screen. They tell me that this is a significant factor in the election. I don’t know that this is helpful analysis. I’m sure it’s a contributing factor — many things are. Could a more charismatic and natural-sounding leader have prosecuted Labor’s case better? Quite probably. But Shorten was also instrumental in keeping the Labor party united, alongside Tanya Plibersek. The policy development Labor has done over the past 5 years wouldn’t have been possible without such an effective leadership team, so really the idea that his personality alone is responsible for this defeat is a bit of a cheap shot.
He would have been a drag if Labor came to office: polls have consistently borne out a strengthening relationship between the popularity of a Prime Minister and his party’s 2PP. But opposition leaders have a very weak effect on their party’s vote, and certainly not as potent as when they are in office. The real problem with an unpopular leader is their ability to connect with the public and articulate a case for election.
This is where the critique of Shorten is legitimate. Labor seems to have bad media training for our leaders: Julia Gillard had the same ‘authenticity’ problem. When Shorten speaks off-the-cuff, he’s more natural and interesting. He’s no Malcolm Turnbull or Bob Hawke, but he is better than the awkward, slow and unnatural version of himself that delivered appalling zingers and super-rehearsed rhythm. For all of Scott Morrison’s irritating smugness, he is a more natural speaker than Shorten. That can make some difference when talking to publics.
Shorten’s best quality is the fact that he was oriented towards his very experienced and effective team. Penny Wong, Tanya Plibersek, Chris Bowen, Tony Burke, and Kristina Keneally were high profile and effective campaigners. ScoMo ran a presidential campaign, devoid of his frontbench, because they were either retiring or were mired in controversy. It’s one of the most heart-breaking elements of this election: Labor put forward a competent team led by someone without the messianic image usually attached to Labor leaders, and the Coalition ran a fucking jerk with no backup.
The lesson for Labor? We always win with charismatic, big personalities. It’s what we’ve always done historically, and we need to accept that it’s the case. We lionise our heroes — Whitlam, Hawke, Keating — because they crash or crash through, they argue a case forcefully and with conviction. We win with confidence and in a canter, and it’s the contradiction of Labor that a party about the collective needs to win with the charisma of a strong leader.
ScoMo
This man is the most fake, smug, small and contrived person I’ve seen in Australian politics. He is an under-qualified marketing man to the core of his being. His transformation from cruel and heartless immigration minister — a portfolio in which he personally recorded marketing videos to send to asylum seekers who are simply looking for a better life — to happy clapper bogan-in-chief rings so unbelievably false.
Scott Morrison represents the worst inclinations of Australia. His gross and intense pentecostalism, as opposed to our Roman Catholic-Anglican past, is too American for Australia. His fucking ridiculous ‘how good is…’ formulation is the most irritating attempt to connect with ‘ordinary’ Australians I have ever heard. His thin view of what ‘ordinary Australians’ are doing — driving their V8s and watching the footy — cuts out millions upon millions of people who are interested in different things (not just high culture, but shows like Game of Thrones, or Marvel films). More people watch Married at First Sight than Friday night football. Morrison collapses everything into the narrow view of a rich white man from Cronulla.
He has an unnatural, and incredibly insensitive and historically inaccurate, obsession with Captain Cook. He has spent millions on Cook mementos across the landscape, and I can only imagine another three years will plunge Australia further into this 18th century dystopia. Captain Cook looms in Scott Morrison’s imagination like the Lacanian name-of-the-father: a void in his (and Australia’s) national identity that can be filled only with a figure of authority, around whom we are supposed to structure our being. It is literally total bullshit, and it is being authored by the biggest bullshit artist that has ever run for public office.
Scott Morrison is a professional liar, a gronk, and I hope the rumours about Engadine Maccas dog him for the rest of his life.
Policies
Post-election analysis, annoyingly, always seems to identify ‘the cause’, as though there is ever one single factor that drives voters with complex and competing concerns. The writers and commentators in this space (in some quarters) are playing this election as a pure repeat of John Hewson’s 1993 loss to Keating. The parallels seem obvious: a new Prime Minister who just knifed a more popular man, an opposition prosecuting a bold policy agenda and losing an ‘unloseable’ election. While I think the tactical view of elections is a very important factor (and last night in my post-loss shock I ripped into my Green friends for their poor organisation in New South Wales), such analysis ignores the complex factors that play into elections.
People would vote for bold policy if they agreed with it. Losing the tactical game is one thing, but the tactical game is easier if you have a suite of policies that are easier to sell — that answer a particular need or appetite in the community. Let me mention just three salient ideas from this campaign:
Adani is located in a rust belt, this is Trump and Brexit come to Australia.
The geography of the vote is particularly interesting — and later I’ll talk a bit more about the ‘Queensland’ thing — because of the way the strongest swing clustered around the proposed Adani coal mine. In Queensland, this policy seemed to play hard into the big picture of the campaign: Adani has become a totem for jobs, and the Coalition’s unambiguous support for the project, which is popular in Queensland, contrasted with Labor’s apparent equivocation.
I don’t think Labor was as fence-sitting on the project as people made the party out to be, a few off-message candidates notwithstanding. Bill Shorten clearly stated that he was not opposed to the Adani project, assuming all the appropriate regulatory oversight gave it the thumbs up. This wouldn’t necessarily have played well in wealthy inner-city electorates, where environmental causes get more airtime, but Shorten rightly made the case that we need a consistent legislative framework for investment in this country. That’s a reality of the capitalist system we live in. We can’t jeopardise jobs and industry on a case by case political basis. As much as I think ‘sovereign risk’ is a massively overused term in a stable social democracy like Australia, it is the case that political parties should not run populist campaigns on the cancelling of particular projects.
But Shorten must have been unconvincing in Queensland, and in particular the parts in the north and inland of the state where economic change makes a project that brings new jobs appealing (even if the number of jobs they’re talking about is a lie). The brand of politics that plays well in Queensland is the kind of charlatanry that Trump exploited in the US: Clive Palmer is a poor imitation of Trump (he doesn’t have the same charisma and electric-chaotic use of the english language, though his meme game is far danker and better). Pauline Hanson has always been able to leverage Queensland’s racist streak. The combination of these two distorting forces in Queensland, as well as Labor’s drift towards a more cosmopolitan, Victoria-New South Wales progressivism, probably went some way to blunting the authenticity of Shorten’s support of Adani.
Franking credits
This was the most flogged term of the past six months. Coalition MP Tim Wilson spent months abusing the parliamentary committee process to hold an ‘inquiry’ into a proposed opposition policy. He used parliamentary resources to heat up a political campaign against a very sensible piece of public policy.
The Commonwealth burns billions of dollars each year on franking credits. The Labor policy simply proposed removing the cash handout for people who had no taxable income. The whole purpose of franking credits was to prevent double taxation on income (first via company tax, then via income tax). If a person is not paying income tax, then they aren’t being ‘double taxed’, and they shouldn’t be entitled to a ‘refund’ (since there is no tax to actually refund). This billion dollar annual cost to the budget is a legacy of John Howard’s poor long-term management of Australia’s tax base. This will cost us tens of billions of dollars going forward, and it seems untouchable after this election. It is a rort.
A voter came up to me on election day, holding a Liberal how-to-vote:
“You want to take away some of my income next year” he said.
“Are you talking about the franking credits thing?” I asked.
“Yes,” he said. “You want to take my income away, why?”
“The budget is about swings and roundabouts. That handout costs billions of dollars, and we need to be able to fund things like dental on Medicare for people like you, as well as school for young kids, and other things.” I said (unusually forward, because he was clearly voting Liberal, and because we believed in the policy so strongly).
“But you claim to care about raising wages.” he said.
“We do, that’s why we want to restore penalty rates for workers.” I replied.
“But you’ll take money off me. I’ll end up on the pension, and then I’ll be a burden on the budget.”
“Your franking credits are already a burden on the budget. Swings and roundabouts.”
We politely disagreed, smiled at each other, and he went and voted Liberal.
I can’t argue with someone putting their own interests first. But I think a lot of people who currently receive franking credits, who wouldn’t have been affected by the policy, voted against it as well. The same goes for the negative gearing policy of the ALP: it was grandfathered, it wouldn’t have hit current investors, but the nuance was lost in the way we conduct political debate.
Climate change and progressive issues
The saddest thing for me about this election is that Labor ran hard on cleaner energy and was defeated: they campaigned with a commitment to solar energy, electric vehicles, the National Energy Guarantee, and stronger action on climate change. It feels like this was a misreading of the mood of the electorate (though I must always caution that there are always many factors that play into elections, so perhaps people did support these policies, but were more concerned about others).
Renewable energy is an inevitable move in the market, it has to be. It doesn’t make sense for an advanced economy to continue to produce energy using a finite and polluting resource like fossil fuels. That transition, however slowly, is taking place right now — it’s just not happening fast enough throughout the world for us to avoid the damaging consequences of climate change. I don’t think we should ever resile from that challenge, and I’m disappointed Labor didn’t take the strong platform to this election that it did to the last — instead we settled for the National Energy Guarantee, hoping that the Liberals wouldn’t oppose a policy of their own design, as well as some supplemental targets in certain industries.
Climate change, like refugees, like anti-discrimination movements, like our efforts to combat prejudice in all kinds of ways, doesn’t play well in the electorate. It makes people uncomfortable because it involves confronting problems that — for many people — don’t feel immediate or real. It’s hard to fight campaigns on social justice grounds in a society that has been conditioned to be selfish and self-interested, and to believe that the individual is responsible for his or her lot in life. That problems come from collective systems is too alien a concept to a voter who has been told that managing the national budget is just like managing a household. Big picture thinking requires, per C. Wright Mills, a sociological imagination: we need to be able to think about the way structures shape and influence our lives. That’s a hard way to think, and it makes the politics of hard policy even harder.
I wonder, sometimes, if it would be better for us to run silent on these issues and to simply introduce the policy once we have come to office. Where a policy would benefit a household but might fuel a narrative of fiscal negligence or obsession with environmental or social justice politics, maybe it would be better to quietly introduce the legislation after the election, without making it a tentpole of a broader campaign. If we aren’t denying rights to people, if people don’t stand to lose quality of life, then do we really need to argue the case for certain policies before an election? The conservative parties don’t do this, and three years in office requires that policies be introduced that aren’t flagged in advance of elections. Perhaps instead of individual policies, we could articulate a framework of values that underpins the political project — a big picture within which certain decisions would make sense, a way to provide coherence and justification to the decisions that Labor might have to make in office. This goes beyond the issue of climate change, which has polarised and paralysed Australian politics. It goes to the game of politics itself.
Politics
So the meat of the whole thing, and the thing with which I am most struggling, is what sits underneath this result. Personalities and policies are one thing, but the game itself plays out in the politics of an election (and I am conscious that my analysis may fall off the rails here because I have had a lot to drink in order to deal with Kate Miller-Heidke being so badly dudded at Eurovision). Let me quickly burn through a number of factors that divide us, or that I think played into the election result, before exploring the ‘big picture’ social changes that are shifting Australian democracy.
Prepoll and polling places
Straight up, I support the pre-polling period, though I think it should be limited to two weeks. The fact that nearly five million Australians voted before election day tells you that there’s an appetite for this convenience. Unlike the United States, where polling day takes place on a Tuesday, which is not made a public holiday, and thus leads to the suppression of voters, Australia not only holds our polling day on a Saturday, we allow voters to come up to two weeks prior to vote. More and more people are using this option.
Some of the criticism of prepoll voting was made by both politicians and media figures. They argued that electors were going to the polls without a full picture of the political parties’ agendas. This may be true, but that isn’t the fault of voters and it’s unreasonable to want to take that option away. Our democratic structures seem to be rigged in favour of the major parties and their establish ways of doing things. For our elections to be truly informed ‘contests of ideas’, really parties should be releasing a kind of policy ‘manifesto’ well before the election, so that the two week campaign is spent arguing for and justifying their policy platform. If this was the case, then voters would have most of the information they needed up front — rather than waiting for our parties to throw surprise policies or gotcha moments into the mix.
This farce is made obvious by the late ‘campaign launch’ of each major party, held about a week before the election itself, and about five weeks into the actual campaign. Voters shouldn’t have to wait this long to make a fully informed decision — they should be given policy early (as Labor did this election, to be fair), and they should have weeks to ask questions and decide on which platform is better. The problem here, of course, is that there is currently no way to compel the major parties to do this — if one party does (as Labor did), it’s in the interest of the other party to run a small target, invisible campaign.
The way parties advertise to the public is a problem — and one that Labor can’t overcome on its own. Scott Morrison’s marketing did not feel that effective, and while I am stuck in my own bubble, I don’t think there was much cut-through. His ‘Canberra bubble’ answer is asinine, it disrespects voters, and I don’t think it worked — but his single-minded focus on Bill Shorten and on the economy quite possibly did. The campaign material they deployed on the day was ordinary Liberal gear: ‘the Bill Australia can’t afford’ and so on. Labor kept their material fairly positive, which is nice to see, but the cynic in me thinks we could have run harder on the Coalition’s fractiousness and instability. My polling booth is usually a bellwether booth in a bellwether seat. Last time it was knife’s edge — on the night we won it by 2 votes, and then on a recount we lost it by 20. This time, it swung hard to the Liberals. The Labor people got to the booth first and covered it in Labor campaign material: our message was clear, but it wasn’t enough.
As an aside, the public hates the plastic bunting that both parties have started using. I was talking to the Liberal booth captain on the day (he and I have been doing that same booth for ten years, so we have quite civilised conversations with each other). We both agreed that the plastic bunting has to stop — it’s terrible for the environment, and it alienates voters.
The Age Divide
The gap in voting intention between older and younger voters is becoming wider and wider. This isn’t just a product of Winston Churchill’s ‘young people vote with their hearts, old people vote with their heads’ formulation. Young people are voting because they are deeply concerned and informed about social and ecological issues that will affect their lives for many years to come. Boomers and older voters are voting to preserve the wealth that they have accrued, and to pass it on to their children (enabling a runaway concentration of wealth — but that’s an issue for another day).
I listened to a Liberal argue that the voting age was too young, that 18 year olds didn’t have the intelligence to vote! Talk about reinforcing a political system that already leans heavily towards older voters. The young voters have to live with the consequences of these policies for something like 60 years after older voters, which is why the climate change denialism of this demographic is even more disgusting. Realistically, if you pay tax, you should have some say in how that tax is spent — there’s a case for lowering the voting age to 16, if people that young were properly educated about the power and privilege of their vote.
Race
I have to admit that I find it hard to interpret and understand the way race and racism plays out in Australia’s politics. One Nation recorded a huge vote in Queensland, and took nearly a quarter of first preference votes in the NSW seat of Hunter. This is absolutely enormous for a party that has been plagued by scandal in the lead-up to the election. Listening to what drives people to One Nation is going to be an important thing going forward — even if we disagree with it and continue to argue against it, as we should.
In his 2016 Quarterly Essay profile of Pauline Hanson, David Marr worked with social researchers to profile One Nation voters. The strongest and most consistent characteristics of One Nation voters are that they are overwhelmingly white, significantly more likely to identify as working class, half as likely to have been to University, and the policy issue that marks them out more than any other is their opposition to immigration. Across every question about migrants, the metrics clearly indicate that One Nation voters think they are bad news: taking jobs, driving crime, costing us money. None of these beliefs have any basis in fact, but they are beliefs that drive the One Nation vote — a vote from which preferences flow strongly to the Coalition.
How we talk about race and immigration, and how we challenge racism when we see it, is a challenge. This is particularly the case against right-wing politicians who ‘call it as they see it’, because their directness comes across to some people as a defence of the right to hold an opinion, even an unfounded one. We can’t preach anymore, and no-platforming isn’t going to track either. We have to engage, and argue better, and be persuasive. And all of that is fine for me to say in a long essay like this that will be read by a handful of my left-wing friends in my social media bubble, but this is something that I need to work on too. I don’t have an answer, but I am working on finding one.
Country and city and class
Labor is struggling to ride the competing interests of the city and the country. The Liberal party has this struggle too, but in Queensland they were able to play to their pro-mining strengths, which can be read as being ‘pro-jobs’ in the jobs-starved inland areas of that state. For Labor, the party is trying to appeal to cosmopolitan inner city areas that are threatened by the Greens, where voters are wealthy enough to prioritise human rights, climate change and social issues. Then in outer-suburban and regional rings around the capitals — like the Central Coast, where I am from and where I campaigned on election day — Labor is running highly localised campaigns, where voters want to see services and tax breaks that will make concrete improvements to their lives.
In marginal seats like those on the Central Coast, abstract philosophical arguments (many of which I am making in this essay) don’t translate into a real reason to vote. Mortgage stress, traffic, job security, basic public services, and the size of the pay packet each week are the big determining factors. People are happy to chat about politics — contra the received wisdom, people actually find politics interesting, because everyone likes to have an opinion (and so they should). But John Howard’s ‘relaxed and comfortable’ mantra was his most perceptive insight into mainstream Australia. Life needs to go on without the intrusion of capital P politics — and when people are offered a tax cut (which the Coalition offered), or they are offered a complex policy program with big numbers (the Labor program), it’s easier to side with the scale that is comfortable to understand. This middle Australia, at least in NSW, is where elections get decided.
Further out, in the country, Labor struggles to beat the Nationals and the Coalition. In a way, Labor has become the party of the cosmopolitan middle-class, while claiming working class roots, and taking a professionalised, technocratic approach to policy. This doesn’t play well out in the bush or in the big swathes of land in coal country. It never has, and Labor’s challenge here is to ensure the quality of life and services that helps communities stay afloat. People want jobs, and therefore want anything that promotes economic growth and development, without radically changing a culture and a community profile. Adani responds to that need in parts of Queensland — even if the jobs figures may be a lie (what company that wealthy wouldn’t automate the supply chain as much as possible?)
Individual aspiration is the challenge the Labor party must grapple with. Everybody wants to be rich, many people think of themselves as upwardly mobile, and few people consider the way structural and social forces shape what happens to their lives. After the election, a friend of mine simply said “the majority has spoken, you just have to deal with it and stop whingeing”. In her view, cuts to penalty rates, to public services, to pensions…all of this was fair game and the election loss meant that nobody had any right to oppose these changes. There’s a sense of learned helplessness in the community — that both parties are ‘as bad as each other’, and that individual elements of these programs aren’t worth fighting, or “won’t effect me”, or that’ll everything will work out in the end.
For people like me, this is probably true. I’m well-off enough that I don’t have to worry who is in government for me personally — the services that impact my wellbeing are ones of comfort (public transport, for example) that are delivered by the state government. But I would rather not see an economic downturn, and I think we need to do something about climate change, and we need to do something about reconciling with the first Australians, and we must do something to help the poor and disadvantaged people in Australia.
Scott Morrison’s coded messaging about ‘quiet Australians’ who won this election is clever, because he reinforces the view that people like me — who fight loudly against the injustices a Liberal government enables — are not only losers, but that we are offside with the ‘silent majority’. How we speak to and persuade that silent majority (and unfortunately, I think we need to admit that it exists) will determine how and when Labor next comes to office.
Progressive Australia?
Rebecca Huntley’s latest Quarterly Essay irritated the hell out of me. She conducts social research and tracks public opinion by doing surveys, interviews and focus groups. Her essay painted a picture of a broadly progressive Australia, open to action on climate change and redistributive social policies. She thinks Australia is more left-wing than people give it credit. But the problem with her analysis is that it operates on stated beliefs, rather than revealed preference. As soon as people have skin in the game, their response changes.
This election was a perfect example of that. Most surveys indicate that the issues Australians care most about at elections are supposedly health care, education, and the economy. Polls before this election indicated a strong and growing concern about climate change. That’s all well and good, and I don’t doubt that people do have that concern…until they are asked to pay for it. This is where revealed preference comes into play.
People won’t vote to reduce their own income, or if they perceive that they personally will be worse off (no matter how much they can probably afford to be worse off). The prospect of a change for the worse means that people have a concrete understanding of how a policy will negatively impact them. So Labor’s negative gearing policy might have been smart public policy, but the idea that it may (and quite probably would) accelerate the downturn in the housing market is concrete enough to scare people even if they wouldn’t be affected by the grandfathered policy. Likewise, people might say they want to see more investment in Medicare (expansion to cover dental, for example), but as soon as they have to give up their franking credits, even if they would still be entitled to dividend imputation because they had a taxable income to claim against, they would naturally vote for their own interests.
Huntley’s Quarterly was, like Richard Denniss’ essay, the progressive echo chamber writ into print and celebrated by the progressive left. It was naive — and I realise I say this with hindsight, but in this instance I can point to the social media record of the time to say this was my critique then as well. People can say what they like, it’s not until they come to vote, to put their money where their mouth is, that we get a real sense of their values and capacity to absorb a financial loss. And right now, people will not do that.
For many of my friends, and me, the shock of this election result probably comes in part from the naive expectation that Australians were ready for change, that there was an appetite for progressive policy on climate, on wages and social justice, on taking care of unemployed people and giving Indigenous Australians a voice to parliament. Social media may have something to do with that — the more we curate our online presence, which is now our dominant mode of communication, the less diversity of perspective we see. And the less able we are to take the pulse, and the less able we are to argue a case to someone with whom we disagree. I’ve long been opponent of no-platforming, because without hearing the case my opponents are putting, I don’t know how I could possibly argue against it. Social media concentrates and intensifies the no-platforming effect, it weakens our understanding of the real world community, and we’ve got to stop reading people we agree with all the time!
The N Word
Politics is now an identity game. I don’t mean in the naive sense in which progressives argue about gender or race, but in the sense that people are locking in behind political positions as a new form of ‘team’. Belief in something, even if it’s unfounded or wrong, has become in a sense intrinsically constitutive of people’s public identity. You only need to look at how resolutely an anti-vaxxer, or an activist vegan, or a climate change denier, or any other ideologically fixed individual locks in on their opinions, and no amount of evidence convinces us otherwise. It has become psychological, and emotional, and reason is weak in that domain.
I think social media has contributed to reinforcing that. It’s one of the reasons I am less worried about the Murdoch propaganda outfit than I am about the influence of Facebook on our politics. Facebook reconstitutes the way we relate to one another in a completely new way — it makes our identity a public performance, and the sharing of news and views, fake or otherwise, is a part of that performativity. We become pliable because we are in segregated spheres of like-minded individuals. The ‘Canberra bubble’ is nothing compared to our social media echo chambers. Deleting people we disagree with is convenient, but it takes our finger off the agonistic pulse that runs through a properly functioning democracy. We lose our ability to convince one another.
This election saw the expansion and proliferation of tools like the ABC’s Vote Compass. This tool allows people to take a survey of their political opinions, and it maps their responses onto a political spectrum, comparing them to political parties. It’s an interesting descriptive exercise, but I don’t think it’s good for democracy (at least not in its current form). What it does is tells people what they already believe, and not whether or not they should believe it. Politics is about arguing a case — and most of the views people carry into a Vote Compass survey aren’t informed by the full depth of both parties’ policies.
Our elections are conducted as surprise attack campaigns — the parties very rarely lay out a suite of policies and then spend a few weeks arguing for them. Labor tried that this election, and that was up against the dumb cut-through of a Coalition small target campaign. If anyone took a Vote Compass survey, they might find that they ‘automatically’ agreed with the Coalition policy platform, and spend no more effort trying to learn the benefits of the alternative (or the risks of their existing views). Social media, vote compass, these tools simply reinforce unfounded opinions, they don’t invite us to challenge ourselves. That’s not healthy.
It’s also genuinely the case that neoliberalism has restructured our social relations. A lot of the criticism of neoliberalism centres on its application as a suite of policies between the 1980’s and 90’s — Richard Denniss’ Quarterly Essay is one example of this kind of analysis. The problem with this is that it positions neoliberalism as a ‘top down’ form of power, overlooking the fact that it actually transforms our social relations (and I think if you can make a case that neoliberalism is something other than regular capitalism, this is it). Since the 80’s, we’ve become more atomised as a society — people participate in churches (with some exceptions I mentioned earlier), unions, sporting clubs and community activities much less than ever. In part this is because people are now compelled to work more, and they have less time to do the community thing.
However, we are also positioned as neoliberal subjects, and we’ve internalised the idea that we are prosperous consumers before citizens. This would have disgusted Plato: he thought money was a corrupting, boring, abrasive influence on a society, and he’s not wrong. We produce neoliberalism by thinking of ourselves as ‘entitled’ to a degree just because we are paying for it. We produce neoliberalism when we hear the word ‘customers’ instead of ‘passengers’ over the speakers at Central Station. We produce neoliberalism when the NSW (Coalition) Government creates a ‘Customer Service Minister’.
Our relationship with our community is attenuated by social media, and snapped by our isolation in the consumption of material things. Neoliberalism isn’t just free trade and deregulated industry: it’s the idea that life is a zero sum game, played against the people we live with.
What do we do now?
Does the party need ideological change? What scares me is the pull that will happen between the hard heads in the ALP who say we went too far to the left, and that we should tack right to respond to the electorate, versus those who think the answer lies in a more radical progressive agenda, that we should have run a kinder policy on offshore detention, and a sharper critique of capitalism (or its fortified social iteration of ‘neoliberalism’, a term that my closer friends and colleagues know I find fairly unhelpful).
Parties of the centre, particularly those wedded to soft liberalism, are having a difficult time, unless they articulate the kind of populist individualism that the Coalition did leading into this election. The Liberal party is more conservative and right-wing than ever before, and it’s the contradictions between free markets and individual rights and the traditions and institutions of conservatism that led to their fractiousness. They’re inconsistent about everything, except in their anti-Laborism.
And the public isn’t wholesale invested in the Liberal party either, that’s just a quirk of our political system. 25% of people didn’t vote for either major party, but around 95% of seats went to Labor or the Coalition. The Greens consistently outpoll the Nationals, but the Nationals get a minimum of ten seats, while the Greens only ever get one. These numbers don’t reflect the ideological leanings of the electorate, and while our system of government is designed to give representation to a particular geography, I wonder if we need to think about how proportional representation can be added to the mix in the lower house. That’s a bigger question than this essay’s scope though.
How do we on the left articulate a vision of the future that feels as real as a paycheck? How do we allow for ambition? How do we talk about renewables and climate change? Two of my favourite political theorists, Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, talk about the agonism that is fundamental to democracy: there will always be disagreement. The challenge for us is not to homogenise the struggle — this is why I think old-school Marxism which reduces everything to class struggle isn’t the answer, as fun and coherent an analysis as it may be. Instead, we need to recognise a series of different, complex, challenges, and find ways to ‘articulate’ them together, to quilt these different struggles like patches on a bigger fabric. Can we afford to create ‘losers’ as we did this election? Not when the people who lose have an outsized power and voice, or when more people think they will be harmed by a program than benefit. Taking strong positions is a good thing — weak centrism can seem wishy washy — but the positions need to make sense within a broader framework of values, designed to address a particular vision of society and its future.
Politics is the art of the possible, of course, but that doesn’t mean we must always compromise our policy — especially if it’s good. The franking credits and negative gearing policies the Labor party took to the election were good public policies. What we need to do is get better at making the case for them, we need to be more convincing, and part of that is about getting in the heads of those who disagree with us and understanding what their concerns are. It’s about more listening to people we disagree with, not less. We need to expand beyond our echo chambers, otherwise we are going to get worse at winning elections, not better. Politicians are locked into a bind with the media, which wants to sell copy and needs to thin out and simplify messages and amp up the drama for a bored public. Social media and real life conversation gives us a way to break that nexus, but it involves hard work, not just on the ground campaigning and talking to people, but also stopping and thinking about how we articulate the benefits and the vision.
I look at the comments on the social media feeds of the Central Coast’s media outlets, and I see a mixed view of the result. The consistent thing is not an ideological position (at least, not on Lucy Wicks’ side of politics). What people seem happiest with is that she has delivered a number of services and made a number of concrete promises for the Coast. Maybe that’s true, maybe some of it is wishful thinking, maybe some of it is made up — but it’s part of the performativity of modern politics. And it’s a lesson for people on my side about how politics gets done: it has to feel real. There has to be some connection between the philosophy and big picture we articulate, and the concrete experiences of everyday life. Without that, how can we possibly expect to convince people to vote for an alternative vision of the future?
If you’ve never joined a political party, and you’re disappointed about the weekend, then now is the time to get involved. Your participation matters — not just as a volunteer, but as another voice helping us to shape the way we engage with Australians. We can’t stitch together the different stories of our community if we don’t have storytellers to inform us. I am a proud member of the Labor party, but Labor needs you as well if we are ever going to draw a picture of the future that speaks to enough people to get us across the line. That matters a lot, because politics makes a difference, and the bigger the difference you want to make, the more work you have to put in.
Last week, Bob Hawke died. Whatever people’s criticisms of his program (and there are always legitimate criticisms of all political programs), Hawke was successful and remains our most popular Prime Minister because he connected a series of struggles and brought enough of Australia along with him. That’s the challenge going forward — it’s not just about charismatic leadership (though that’s a part of it), and it’s not just about demographics or particular policies (though that’s also a part of it). The game is hugely complicated, and at the moment, parties of the left are losing it.
I don’t think anger is the answer. Righteous anger at injustice, maybe, but positioning publics and people as an enemy, or as stupid, isn’t helpful — and I’m as guilty of that as anyone else.
Over the past 24 hours, I’ve written this essay to help process a shocking election loss. I was proud of Labor’s platform. It wasn’t perfect, nothing ever is, but it was bold given the context of Australian politics. I hope Labor stays that bold, because I’ll be continuing to articulate a case for Labor as the best party to manage Australia for everyone, and to argue inside the party for more boldness and vision.
