You first have to lose an election on principle if you want to win one on principle.

This was how Labor rationalised the miscalculations that led to its “Don’s Party” disappointment in 1969, followed by the 1972 triumph of the “It’s Time” campaign.

Half a century later, the idea of sticking with unpopular policy seems romantic, unthinkable. Principles are not just old-hat in an era of professionalised politics, but absurd.

Swamped by voter-attitude metrics, modern democratic leaders are not leaders in the traditional sense. Rather, they are followers.

Followers of market researchers and media proprietors who disabuse them of ambitious conceits like national leadership, or anything that might tempt them to make changes based on electoral judgment, the national interest, or even ideology.

Still, a few months ago, one starry-eyed fool (to wit, this author) described the looming 2022 federal election as the most important national choice to be put before voters since that 1972 hinge-point.

If it was an invitation to Labor leader Anthony Albanese to paint in bold brushstrokes, he didn’t receive it.

Instead, Labor’s risk-averse policy presentation has largely mirrored the reform-shy government it seeks to replace. This makes for the least policy-divergent choice in the 50 years since 1972.

The 2022 election more closely resembles a velodrome match-sprint where the two riders have almost stopped on the banked section, each terrified of leading off and being overtaken in the final dash for the line.

Whitlam’s re-imagining
The 1972 comparison gets even harder when you look at former Prime Minister Gough Whitlam’s first month in office.

He promised to establish diplomatic relations with Peking (now Beijing), following his audacious trip to “Red China” in 1971. Imagine this (or any) opposition making a play of similar foreign policy gravity today.

Whitlam’s bold Australian re-imagining, which historian Stuart McIntyre later characterised as “a nationalism attuned to internationalism”, kick-started a lucrative economic co-dependency that has propelled Australian prosperity to this day. Hungry for commodities and services imports, China’s staggering growth has also insulated Australia through global shocks like the Asian Financial Crisis, Global Financial Crisis, and the covid-19 pandemic.

While the Coalition would no doubt have come to it eventually, Whitlam acted without hesitation or American permission. Crucially, he backed his capacity to explain it to the country, despite the danger of being tagged as soft on communism.

Again, leaders taking decisions and then relying on their persuasive powers to win arguments seems fanciful amid the timidity of contemporary politics.

A shot of adrenaline
In those first days, Whitlam also ended conscription, withdrew from Vietnam, granted independence to Papua New Guinea, and set about ratifying long-deferred international conventions on basic labour conditions, racial non-discrimination, and nuclear weapons proliferation.

With his pared back, don’t-frighten-the-horses agenda, Albanese might have less to do over a whole term, and Whitlam was only getting started.

Before his government crashed, Whitlam would end the White Australia Policy, scrap royal honours, appoint the first women’s adviser, reform draconian divorce laws, champion multiculturalism, dramatically ratchet up funding for the arts and humanities, abolish university fees, revive urban development, and more.

To a slumbering post-war Australia, it was a shot of late 20th Century adrenaline and the results were startling. Australian historian Manning Clark described it as the “end of the Ice Age”.

But in 1975, it ended in ignominy. As McIntyre later observed, “the golden age was over”.

History rhyming, not repeating
So far, the case for equivalence between 1972 and 2022 is not obvious, right?

But what if it is not Labor that now represents the radical option but the status quo? What if changing governments offers the safer, more conventional course for nervous voters? As Mark Twain noted, history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes.

Labor’s 1972 manifesto was inspiring, but it was the urgency with which its modernising promise was articulated after 23 years of Coalition rule that had impatient voters energised. The McMahon Coalition government was a no ideas factory in the lead-up to the 1972 election, although it did not exhibit the insidious corrosive streak of its modern-day equivalent.

This is the rhyme. While the 2022 election is not about the magisterial reform possibilities of an incoming government, it is about the urgent need to rescue longstanding governing norms around transparency, accountability, ministerial standards, trust and the honesty, and of course, the viability of the public service.

It is in this critical sense that the two elections might be compared.

Divide and dither
The radicalism absent from Labor’s 2022 manifesto is made up for in the unspoken but no-less transformative erosion of standards by the government. The Coalition is primarily intent on the political dividends of division, on courting the applause of media vassals, religious conservatives, and a populist Nationals rump.

Morrison’s approach can be described as divide and dither.

It finds its expression in the Coalition’s reflexive recourse to politics over policy — frequently at the direct expense of the national interest such as in the weaponisation of climate change and more recently, the attempts to weaken the outward presentation of domestic bipartisanship on national security.

The former is a classic of the genre. Morrison’s hollow embrace of net zero by 2050 ahead of Glasgow last year was greeted by political insiders as a triumph of prime ministerial skill, when all it really did was expose how utterly pointless the Coalition’s decade-long negation had been.

Moreover, it brought no revision to interim targets nor adjusted any other policy architecture.

Its real aim — in which it was successful — was the neutralisation of a Coalition stance that had morphed into a clear electoral negative.

The latter, national security, was tickled along last Friday in Defence Minister Peter Dutton’s ultra-earnest press conference transparently called to (re)frighten voters about a Chinese “warship” that was “hugging” Australia’s north-western coast at a distance of 400 kilometres.

Manufactured wars and textimonials
Divide and dither revels in manufactured culture wars over transgender teens and identity politics, fumes about supposed attacks on faith, and white-ants efforts to build support for a First Nations Voice in the Constitution.

Witness the government’s pillorying responses to anti-discrimination campaigners with dismissive throw-aways like “all lives matter”.

Divide and dither’s existence was spectacularly laid bare in a series of explosive “textimonials” regarding Morrison’s character from his own colleagues — people much closer to him than voters, including Deputy Prime Minister Barnaby Joyce. These described him variously as a “hypocrite and a liar”. A New South Wales Liberal senator called him a “bully with no moral compass”.

It’s there, too, in the vicious campaigns against “fake” independent women – simply for standing for office. In a democracy.

The Liberals’ refusal to acknowledge and address female under-representation has invited the very rebellion it now faces from high-calibre female candidates in safe Liberal seats.

The overall impression is of a government shamelessly enabled by a pseudo-independent media that makes no serious attempt to govern for all Australians.

No change means no consequences
In light of these multiple failures, in opting for no change, Australian voters would be saying there is no cost for governing like this.

The Coalition’s take-out would be — keep misleading and pork-barrelling and fomenting useless culture wars.

Keep stacking boards and cutting taxes for the rich and emaciating the public service. Keep denying an anti-corruption commission even as its need becomes ever-more pressing.

Psychologists would call such a verdict “learned helplessness” — an acceptance that such corruptions are inevitable, and no more than we deserve.

Accountable government, national unity, evidence-based policy, and democratic accountability are all on the ballot at this election.

It is not 1972, but the choice might be equally stark, despite Labor’s timidity.

Dr Mark Kenny, is professor at the Australian Studies Institute, Australian National University. This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons licence. Read the original article.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz

When Australians go to the polls on Saturday to elect a new government, the vast continent which was stolen from the indigenous people in 1788 and annexed to the British crown may have its “independent day” — not one that would declare itself a republic, but a day when independent members of Parliament may hold the balance of power in the lower house in Canberra.

In February this year, the founder of Climate 200 Simon Holmes à Court — son of Australia’s first billionaire Robert Holmes à Court — in an address to the Canberra Press Club said that independents hold considerable sway in some seats, and they will provide a tough challenge to the two major parties in Australian politics — Labour (ALP) and Liberal-National (LNP) — in the forthcoming federal elections.

He added that they have gathered a $7 million (US$4.9 million) war chest to fix Australia’s “broken” political system.

“As we approach this upcoming election, the Australian political system is broken. That’s the problem. That’s why we are here today,” he told a packed press club in the national capital adding that Australians have had a “gutful” of politics.

“Engaged Australians are deeply frustrated that we are not making progress on the issues that matter … We are frustrated that so often our government is found to be either lying or incompetent, sometimes both,” he said.

“We have a government more interested in winning elections than improving our great nation. A government that seeks power, without purpose.

“We are frustrated about climate and action. We are frustrated about corruption in politics. We are frustrated about the treatment and safety of women.”

Looking over their shoulders
As the election campaign approaches its final stretch, politicians from both parties are looking over their shoulders at independent candidates who are challenging them in some crucial seats.

The Liberal Party of Prime Minister Scott Morrison is more worried than his opposition counterpart, the Australian Labor Party (ALP). Polling indicates that some blue-ribbon Liberal (governing LNP is a coalition of Liberal and National parties) seats could fall to popular local independent candidates and may result in a hung Parliament when the results of the elections are out by the early morning of May 22.

Liberals got a taste of things to come at a New South Wales (NSW) state byelection in February when voters in the heart of Sydney Northshore (which is a bastion of conservative politics) seat of Willoughby chose a replacement for the former Premier of the state, the hugely popular Gladys Berejiklian, who was forced to resign under corruption allegations.

She last won the seat with a hefty margin of 21 percent but there was a swing of 19 percent against the Liberal candidate who very narrowly won the seat via postal votes. The successful Independent candidate Larrisa Penn ran her campaign with very little funding.

Holmes à Court’s environmental organisation has been providing funds to a chain of candidates around the country, but he says that Climate 200 is not a political party and the candidates they give money to do not have a common political platform.

He also added that they give them money if they ask for it and give them advice on campaign tactics if they seek it. However, most independents are funded with donations from ordinary Australians who want to see systematic political change in Australia.

“These candidates don’t need to go into politics to be successful because they are already successful,” he told the press gallery.

“They are business owners, doctors, lawyers, journalists, and athletes. They are in it for the right reasons.”

Community advocacy group
In the Melbourne seat of Kooyong, held by Federal Treasurer Josh Frydenberg, local independent Professor Monique Ryan, the head of neurology at the Royal Children’s Hospital Melbourne, who was endorsed by the community advocacy group Voices of Kooyong to stand in the seat is being given a good chance of unseating the government heavyweight.

“A genuine contest between two smart people to represent a smart, engaged electorate should make for good politics. Instead, the Kooyong campaign has turned rancid, as Ryan and her principal backer, Simon Holmes à Court, can almost touch an unlikely prize and Frydenberg, a potential future prime minister, can see his political career fading to black” observed Melbourne Age’s chief political reporter Chip Le Grand.

Professor Ryan is one of 21 “Voices of” candidates to have announced their run for a lower house seat for the 2022 federal election, and political analysts believe that in at least 5 Liberal-held seats in Victoria and NSW they stand a good chance of toppling the sitting candidate.

“The grassroots campaigns have attracted tens of thousands of people across Australia, many of whom have never volunteered for a political cause before,” noted Guardian Australia’s Calla Wahlquist. “Government MPs are feeling the pressure.”

The Seven Network claimed last week that PM Morrison had become “hysterical” about the independent challenge. It pointed out that he had started to hammer out a key campaign theme in media interviews and speeches claiming that independents in Parliament would threaten Australia’s economic stability and national security.

“The allegation by the prime minister … that independent parliamentarians and candidates are a threat to Australia’s security is a shameful slur on decent people exercising their democratic right to stand for election,” Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie said in a statement broadcast on Seven Network.

“It’s also symptomatic of a government becoming increasingly hysterical at the realisation it’s out of step with a great many Australians.” Wilkie pointed out that some crossbenchers, such as himself, had served in the defence and intelligence services and it was “outrageous” for the prime minister to criticise them.

Encouraged voting for independents
Former Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who was toppled in a party-room coup by Morrison in 2018 is encouraging Australians to vote for independents whom he calls “small-l Liberals” that are trying to save the liberal values he once espoused.

He says the party is now being taken over by climatic change deniers supported by Rupert Murdoch’s media in Australia such as Sky News, which has given ample coverage to Morrison’s “independents being a national security threat’’ argument.

Well-known election analyst Malcolm Mackerras predicts that the May 21 elections would result in a hung Parliament with both ALP and LNP dependent on 6-8 independent MPs to form a government.

The preferential voting system in the lower house of the Australian Parliament has resulted in favouring a two-party system, but he believes it is due for reform and voters would deliver it. It is compulsory for Australians to vote in elections.

Independents supported by Climate 200 are called “teal candidates” because they use colour in their campaign material which is a merger between green and blue.

“The teal independents are speaking directly to moderate Liberal constituents who are frustrated with the (blue) Liberal Party’s positioning on social and environmental issues” argues Amy Nethery, senior lecturer in politics and policy studies at Deakin University.

“While these same voters may never vote Labour or Greens, many are alienated by Morrison and his government, particularly on climate change and women’s issues.”

Many candidates are women
She points out that it is significant that 19 of the 22 Climate 200 supported candidates are women.

“All of whom have had highly successful careers in their own right. High-profile candidates include Ryan (Kooyong), a professor and head of neurology at the Royal Children’s Hospital, Zoe Daniel (Goldstein) a former ABC foreign correspondent, and Allegra Spender (Wentworth) the chief executive of the Australian Business and Community Network,” noted Nethery writing in The Conversation.

“The teal independents are not political staffers taking the next step towards inevitable political careers. These are professional women making a radical sideways leap because, they say, this is what the times require. It’s a compelling story.”

Dr Kalinga Seneviratne is a Sydney-based IDP-InDepth News Southeast Asia director, the flagship agency of the nonprofit International Press Syndicate. He is currently in Suva. This article is republished with permission.

Article by AsiaPacificReport.nz