Monthly Archives: November 2021

Australian Politics

The state of our democracy

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In general, there is still overwhelming support for representative democracy but with a focus on making the representative system of government more representative of the people they serve, and accountable and responsive to their constituents underpinned by integrity politics which are “cleaner”, “collaborative” and “evidence-based”.

Mark Evans, Director, Democracy 2025


Terrifying, really. If those qualities are important to us, why do we accept less from our governments? We like to comfort ourselves with tales of how bad Abbott was, and then how ‘adult’ Turnbull was, and then, as if to excuse ourselves for voting for him, how awful and deceptive Morrison is. But we need to lose that version of history, because, notwithstanding how many of our fellow citizens voted for, or used to vote for, the Liberal Party, the Liberals continue to win elections, notwithstanding their insoluble problems.


The first hurdle is their pack mentality when it comes to belief systems. If you want to belong, you must believe in neo-liberalism. There is no longer any room for dissent in Menzies’ party. You believe fully, no reservations, or you are out. No problem, although the neo-libs policies are anti-democratic, bloody minded, inhumane and innately illogical. One can only wonder how they can form a government, whilst believing in diminishing the role of government.


Neo-liberalism is an odd system, which was resurrected after the Second World War, and it is essentially a quest to return to dog eat dog capitalism. Worse, it wishes to return to the economics of the 17th and 18th Centuries, and is a fevered response to the values of social democracy, and the economic theories of Keynes. So it is reactionary, in the worst way.

They also call it market capitalism, because it hides the regressive nature of the system, but they cannot hide the central tenet that economic performance is measured by the performance of the market, hence Trump’s fatuous bragging when the Dow Jones was flying, even as hundreds of thousands of Americans either lost their jobs, or died, during the pandemic.


Forget measuring economic or governmental performance on human happiness, or levels of education, or even self-determination. They stress the importance of individual freedom, which under neo-liberalism presumably includes the right to die from hunger or neglect.


The Liberals’ second ‘disability’ is to be shackled to the National Party. Now we all understand the wonders of modern Australian agriculture, but the National Party is no longer representative of farmers; it seems to have hitched its wagon to miners. It is, however, crucial to the Liberals gaining, and holding onto, power. Without the Nationals the Liberals are a small, urban, middle class party, with delusions of grandeur. Having lost the collective conscience of their ‘soft’ or ‘wet’ members, they have coalesced around a rump of born again Christians, and economic fundamentalists.


The Labor Party has traditionally been the party of the working class, and the party of reform. Extended periods in the political wilderness has de-fanged the Labor Party, which now has a political philosophy of presenting a ‘small target’. Sadly, being a small target projects a message that the party stands for nothing.


The reason for this is that it relies on factions to elect its leaders. These leaders of factions are just that – leaders of splinter groups, unsuited to the macro levels of leadership required by actual governments. As the case of Bill Shorten illustrates, good policies must be sensible, defensible, and saleable. Morrison tore them apart and shredded them in 2019, characterised as economy-wrecking and frightening. Shorten lacked the wit to counter Morrison’s energy and sloganeering. Since Kevin Rudd, the party has not had an effective salesman type representing it, and so it has been out-manoeuvred, and out-sold.


Morrison has always been a marketing man, and he is blessed with an ability to live so ‘in the moment’ that he is able to present himself differently, according to the moment, and the need. In the bush he will appear in immaculate moleskins and a high-vis vest, in the city electorates as a ‘plain aspirational man with worthy values’.


He sees no contradictions in his ‘dressing up’ efforts, and the electorate will tire of it before he will. He is essentially a one man Government, because he has so commanded, and diminished his Cabinet, that there is no-one who stands out. He has no challengers. They are all less energetic than he is, and so they owe him everything. He campaigns for them all, and he stands to gain all, should the voters remain apathetic.


Although we seem to want representative, accountable, fair government, we wouldn’t know it if we fell over it. Like all electorates, we get the governments we deserve, because we are too lazy to listen, too disengaged to take note of what is said, and because the essential elements of our institutions continue to be eaten away by the corrosive nature of neo-liberalism.


Who would knowingly vote for a Government which promotes wanton cruelty to welfare recipients, continues to sell our public service functions to multinational contractors, picks fights with emerging superpowers, treats our money as their own, refuses to regulate the behaviour of our representatives, embarrasses us on international obligations, and is prepared to let the planet burn for the sake of political preferment? With their Trumpian idea of limiting the vote, they are putting lead in the Labor Party’s saddle bags. So, who, in his or her right mind, would vote for a repressive, authoritarian government, which has failed for more than eight years?

Below is a graph showing our faith in democracy since 1996, with a huge drop around the time Tony Abbott’s short time in power began to take shape. So Australians are not entirely stupid, but we certainly ignore hard evidence.

Australian Politics

Would you like voter suppression with that?

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Many Australians are still mightily impressed with the state of our nation, especially when we compare it with our rich and powerful ally, the USA. We have managed to somehow avoid the utter chaos and devastation, which they have endured now, for close to two years, during a once in a century pandemic.

Our Government(s) made plenty of mistakes in handling the pandemic, but nothing on the scale of the criminal negligence President Trump and his Republican Party allies were guilty of. Even now, with Joe Biden attempting to salvage the situation, vaccination appears to be the only way out.

But there are gathering signs that we have a particularly immature, and sadly ill-informed set of ‘parliamentarians’, and their fellow travellers, mainly from the loony-right think tanks, who are keen to import some really bad American ideas. Of course the loony-right think tanks are another import we could do without, but that is another matter entirely; suffice to say we are stuck with them.

One reason the American system has faltered recently is that the traditions and the myths of their origin story have been hi-jacked, and politicised, and the myths have won out, over common sense.

Some bad American ideas

Some examples include the notion of personal liberty outweighing the public good, the belief  that public health systems are socialist, the idea that education is not a basic human right, but something to be purchased.

Other caustic ideas include the notion that imposing regulations and limits on the private sector are always bad, that global warming is rubbish, that welfare paid is money wasted, that citizens should have the right to bear arms, that any relationship, or family, based on anything other than the classic nuclear family is immoral, that reducing taxes on the rich does nothing other than to increase inequality, and that poverty is a sign that a vengeful god is punishing the poor.

There are many other silly ideas, but I want to highlight the matter of voter ID, aka voter suppression, which is definitely on the radar for our very own Trumpist Government.

Voter suppression is a first step to authoritarianism

Voter suppression is an ancient, and honoured tradition in America, and it continues today. Since 1870, when the Fifteenth Amendment was passed, all men (later broadened to include women) were guaranteed the right to vote. This included men of all races, and specifically former slaves. Southern states, still smarting from their loss in the Civil War, set about limiting black access to the vote. These methods included a poll tax, which charged a fee to lodge a vote. Poor whites could gain an exemption from paying the fee, but not poor blacks.

Literacy tests were also routinely applied, with many more black Americans being excluded than white Americans. This often related to the level of education achieved by black Americans, which was in most cases inferior, if it was even available. But in other cases, the tests applied were selective, with African-Americans often receiving more difficult tests. These measures were gradually phased out during the 1960s, but not before they had disenfranchised generations of otherwise entitled voters.

More recently the Republican Party has refined its methods, to suit the times. In Florida, for example, until recently convicted felons were ineligible to vote. Many with similar names to felons were wrongly purged from the electoral rolls.

That law was reversed in 2018, but the Republican State Government managed to circumvent the intention of the statute, known as Amendment 4, by making restoration of the right to vote almost impossible. In the election of 2000, George W Bush won the country by less than a thousand votes, while convicted felons, and some of those with similar names, were purged from the electoral rolls. Convicted felons were, by a huge margin, more likely to be black, and to vote Democrat.

Although the election last year was not decided by a tiny number of votes, Florida voted for Trump. As many as 1.4 million voters were eligible to be restored to the rolls, but only 300,000 were allowed to register. That is 1.1 million voters disenfranchised. That would make a difference to the result.

That couldn’t happen here

Of course that could never happen here, or could it? We have no voter fraud here, so there could be no reason to change the voting rules. Well, yes it could happen here. As Caitlin Fitzsimmons reported in the Herald Sun in January this year, the federal government’s joint standing committee on electoral matters recently included a recommendation to require ID to vote, and another recommendation to require ID to enrol or change address. The chair of the committee is Senator James Paterson, an ex-IPA director. He thinks if he has to show ID in a club, why not when voting?

Liberal members of the committee made similar recommendations in their reports on the 2013 and 2016 elections as well. They quoted several submissions in support, from the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA), and others. Labor and the Greens opposed the recommendations, but they were outvoted.

There is a cynical reason for such a simple rule. The more disadvantaged you are, the more difficult it is to conform to what look like petty requirements. And the ID of choice for the majority of Australians is the driver’s licence. Petty for you, and me, but not if you have insecure housing, or are forced to live on the starvation line, or if you are fleeing domestic violence. And many disadvantaged people do not own, or drive, a car. That means they probably don’t own a licence, and yet they may need to buy some form of photo ID, in order simply to vote.

The Liberals think that the disadvantaged are more inclined to vote for Labor, so any measure which makes voting or registering to vote more difficult, is a good thing. There is a reason why most Australians despise the IPA and its ilk. They appear to be staffed by strangely inadequate individuals who dream of making life difficult, in a range of petty ways, for the vulnerable.  

In the case of instituting Voter ID for Australia, we would need to accommodate Australia’s system of compulsory voting, and compulsory enrolment to vote. That would arguably force the Electoral Commissions, state and federal, to implement inclusion measures such as provision of regulated photo ID for anyone who needs it. Obviously that would send the cost of elections through the roof. This is another example of unintended consequences, caused by allowing inexperienced, or simply shallow twits, to write policy.

Australian Politics

Scott puts in a Barry Crocker (shocker) in Glasgow

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Scott Morrison has somehow imposed himself on the Australian consciousness like an annoying jingle, or even like that awful and embarrassing uncle who continues to turn up at family gatherings. We can now include Rome and Glasgow amongst the places where he has purported to represent us, so that most of the thinking universe now sees Australians as of a kind, throwbacks to the types of characters made ‘famous’ in the Adventures of Barry McKenzie era, of our cultural cringe.


His personality is endlessly grating, like the boy with a chip on his shoulder; he is always looking for the verbal trap, and his pugnacity is more suited to a rugby field than to a conference. Talk about being labelled by how you look, and by how you speak. Many of us expected him to grow into the job, as some have in the past, but he is permanently stuck in a battle to the death, with the forces of liberality, of reason, of social and political progress.


We are endlessly naive in Australia, in that we believe in the inherent fitness for purpose of our institutions, and the innate moral character of our representatives. Morrison has upended our moral certainties, because he is without conscience, without memory, and without a policy purpose. He also lacks a stabilising presence in his life.


His friends include Brian Houston, who is under investigation, and sidelined from leadership of his father’s church, for allegedly covering up his father’s sexual abuse of children; Stuart Robert, who has seen time on the sidelines himself, because of his own problems with record-keeping and conflicts of interest; and Alex Hawke, a man who believes that “The two greatest forces for good in human history are capitalism and Christianity, and when they’re blended it’s a very powerful duo.” (Sydney Morning Herald)

The Cabinet

We have all heard about Scott Morrison’s Cabinet, mostly because they are almost invisible, they are constantly changing roles, and also because the Cabinet seems to have no coherence, no sense of passion for governing, and only one defining rule – follow Morrison, and repeat his talking points, until your voice hurts. So no Minister is respected, no Minister is seen as being on top of his or her portfolio, no Minister is seen as a rival to Morrison, and the Agenda is virtually non-existent.


Cut the public service to the bone, sling cash at the world’s largest consultancies, privatise every possible service and watch it slide into decay and despair, look after your mates. Never apologise, if in doubt call an enquiry, ignore the vast majority of recommendations from the myriad Royal Commissions afoot, and for God’s sake do not introduce a Federal Integrity Commission.

Never admit that you once knew Christian Porter, but defend to the death his right to accept large amounts of money from anyone, as long as he promised to not divulge. Continue to demonise all refugees, except possibly white farmers from South Africa.

The Glasgow performance


Morrison’s performance in Glasgow and Rome was pathetic. He behaved like a thug, first of all by arriving in both cities, with nothing to show the other leaders, for the six long years since we signed up to Paris. As unashamedly as he had presented us with empty brochures, he did the same to them. Like us, they were underwhelmed, but too polite to really say so. Take it as read that our country has taken another reputational hit.


And never forget Angus Taylor. He delivers misleading statistics and rubbish conclusions with a passionate fervour. His background as a management consultant sees him with only one forward gear – manic, and no reverse gear. He was actually in Glasgow dealing with the other rogue nations, promoting fossil fuels, far into the future. It is totally amazing that Morrison and Taylor were running this scam, even as the world watched.

The French fiasco


Emmanuel Macron is still reeling from Morrison’s clumsy lack of style. First he meets with the French, and deceives them until, at the last moment, he dumps them for the Americans and the British. So, knowing how the French feel personally about him, he takes the first opportunity to speak to Macron, by sneaking up behind the French President, and touching him from behind, unannounced. Very like that annoying uncle I mentioned earlier. And laying on of hands? Not cool, Scott. We generally seek consent before touching one another.


Later Mr Macron asserts that Morrison is a liar, and instead of turning the other cheek, (after all, Macron was speaking the truth) he argues the point, and then selectively leaks some texts, supposedly strengthening his position. So we are in Glasgow, with the world watching, and Morrison is behaving as if he is involved in a factional turf war in Sydney, back-grounding his opponent, who is, did I mention this already, the President of France.


Do not believe for a moment that Morrison has had a change of heart. He wants only one thing, and that is re-election. Nothing else matters, and he will subvert COP26, Parliament, his own Government, even Sky News if he has to. The climate change policies he has pretended to create are meaningless, and his Government knows it.