Australian election: belief might be the biggest idea

Politics has ceased to be a contest of ideas in Australia. In fact, it’s largely true for democracies worldwide.

The Australian federal election will be held on 21 May 2022 and we’ll head to the polls to choose between Tweedledum and Tweedledee - the leaders of the nation’s two major parties about which Australian’s already know two things. Most know they don’t like the leader we have, and most don’t know much at all about the alternative.

Like in the USA and elsewhere, politics has become polarised and, even where we don’t directly elect leaders, the electioneering is all about the party leaders, aspirants to the next term of prime ministership.

Where are the big ideas, the concepts and plans that will ensure we make the necessary transformation to a more equitable, sustainable and environmentally healthy planet? The problem is that personal attack is deemed less of a political risk than floating an agenda for change.

Therefore, as national wage stagnation fails to cope with growing inflation, as the central bank tweaks interest rates on already over-indebted households and the metrics of official unemployment numbers are manipulated to hide an emerging crisis of underemployment, we have no vision, no articulation for the nation’s future.

Instead, we’re fed an incessant stream of slogans, many without substance or empirical evidence to back them up. The conservative incumbents are running a scare campaign on national security, with the Defence Minister occasionally stepping out of his department’s toy shop to inform us how we need to arm ourselves for a war that might happen tomorrow but for which we won’t be ready for about 40 years.

We’re told against all the evidence that Labor governments are worse economic managers than Liberal National coalition governments. Hence, our billboards are adorned with ‘Secure economy. Securing our future’. This from a government that has pushed the nation into an unprecedented level of debt to be picked up by generations beyond its tenure.

In tactics of which Trump and Bojo would be proud, our attention is being deflected to the Solomon Islands and a conga line of paranoid statements about China’s aspirations for the Pacific, a region in which we have done little to earn respect or allegiance.

We’re prepared to let Pacific island nations drown as oceans rise and we dig deeper to extract and export the fossil fuels that drive climate change and sea level rises. How will our future generations treat the inevitable stream of refugees that this will create in the decades ahead? Will we keep Manus Island open as a refuse tip for our humanity?

This is not to suggest that we should underestimate or accept China’s political and commercial aspirations for regions and nations beyond its own borders. Its poor record on human rights is long and shameful, its totalitarian monitoring and scoring of its citizens immoral. On the other hand, both the British and Americans with whom we have forged our AUKUS alliance have also built their wealth and empires on the back of colonisation, slavery and commercial exploitation. Nations across the world are still recovering from their rapacious history.

Within our country, those seeking re-election failed our elderly citizens during the COVID pandemic, they’ve egregiously deployed public funds in rorts engineered to secure votes, they’ve protected their own against allegations of misogyny and sexual misconduct. Lies, deception and secrecy have been their bywords for governance. We are unsurprised that this coalition government has failed to set up its promised independent integrity commission.

It is equally astonishing that in this context, the Labor opposition has hardly landed a blow. It tells us ‘we can do better’. It wouldn’t be hard in the aftermath of the past few years. Doing better is hardly aspirational and certainly not in the realms of inspirational. It tells us ‘Health care, Medicare, Aged care … Labor cares’. And yet, despite the current government’s obvious failings, for many Labor scares.

Is the underlying assumption that Australians just yearn for the return of Donald Horne’s ‘lucky country’, when we could exploit our environment to run and harvest great herds of livestock and grain or dig and extract from big holes in the ground? Or is it a belief that Australians will put up with any crap leadership and intellectual mediocrity on offer?

Inevitably, one of the two major parties will form government, perhaps with the support of Greens, independents and a motley crew from the conspiracy groups that are the constituency of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation or Clive Palmer’s United Australia Party.

Both major parties are arguing that a hung Parliament, in which these minor parties and independents will hold the balance of power, will be inherently unstable and possibly unworkable. The reality is that a hung Parliament might be exactly what we need.

Agree with Greens policies or not, its leader Adam Bandt’s address to the National Press Club in April was the only speech to date that produced anything like some big ideas. The inclusion of dental services under the national Medicare scheme, while appearing to be something of a no-brainer, would actually be a transformational initiative for many low-income households.

The Green’s ‘no new fossil fuel developments’ would be another significant shift in Australian government policy that would enable Australia to play a more responsible role as a global citizen in taking climate action and fighting environmental degradation.

As for the independents, pilloried by the incumbent government as some sort of ‘false flag’ intervention by Labor sympathisers, they will force the issue of climate action and more ambitious de-carbonisation targets on whichever party forms government. Their other key goal is to quickly establish a transparent and effective integrity commission.

Unlike sitting parliamentarians in the seats they contest, they’re putting themselves forward based on their belief that these two key policy planks align with the concerns and priorities of their voters.

Candidacy on the basis of personal belief may emerge as. the biggest and most influential idea of this election.