The changes to, and challenges confronting, representative government as we know it have been canvassed by a number of journalists, most recently Niki Savva in the Nine Entertainment newspapers. Like others, Savva correctly identifies the “drift” away from major parties and the “repudiation” of politics as we know it.
But, like others, Savva gets it wrong, by confusing the symptoms of change — “much like the desertion of audiences to social media or streaming services” — with its causes. Savva is correct to say these changes are real and not transitory, and that they have “profound implications for . . . how we are governed”.
Politicians do sometimes make promises they cannot keep, sometimes knowingly. Sometimes politicians lie or convince themselves that their version of events is true, even when the evidence says otherwise. And, very often, politicians find themselves adrift in seas of change they can neither understand nor control.
For anyone who has met and spent time with politicians, most are decent people trying to do the right thing as they understand it. Sometimes they are intelligent, or have a particular rat cunning, and they are almost always vauntingly ambitious. But very often, politicians are just ordinary, except for their ambition, which is not a flattering quality for most people.
Politicians have always been so. But that has not, until recently, challenged the very foundations of the two-party system (or alliances of parties around government and opposition).
Modern democracy, as we know it, arose on the back of, on one hand the industrial class and small business owners who preferred a more or less free market approach to socio-economic organisation, and on the other their employees organised into coherent trades and occupations. Competition between these antagonistic groupings has been mediated by electoral politics, giving rise to the approximate Left/Right divisions that has traditionally characterised representative democracy.
What has changed is there appears decreasing fundamental distinction between mainstream political parties. Politics has become a competition over who is the better technocratic administrator. There are three reasons for this.
The first is that industrial societies have “matured”; they have moved away from reliance on manufacturing and its related employment to having a greater emphasis on services – retail, banking and finance, and office-based bureaucracy. This has diminished the traditional foundation of trade unions and, consequently, left their representative parties (in Australia, Labor) less anchored to the workplace and its needs.
The second reason for this shift towards technocratic administration is that, reflecting this underlying economic transition, around four or so decades ago there was a change in the prevailing economic paradigm. This was away from government intervention and debt financing, or economic Keynesianism, towards a theoretically more free market or neo-liberal economic model.
One key outcome of this change was the reduction in real incomes of what used to be the working class and middle income groups, which has been especially stark relative to increased incomes for the financial top end. This has bred resentment with, and alienation from, traditional political models.
Neo-liberalism was not a necessary corollary of post-industrialism, but it tended to capture political imaginations at a time when old economic answers seemed incapable of addressing new economic questions. Thus politics became less what economic model was preferred by political parties and to which was the better at managing the economy with the consent of the electorate.
The third reason for this shift towards administrative technocracy has been the profoundly disruptive and transformative impact of digital technologies. From the exponential increase in global financial trade to the nature of industry to the rapid-fire exchange of ideas, we are currently experiencing socio-economic reorganisation on a par with the first phase of the industrial revolution. The main difference is that this reorganisation is happening exponentially quicker than it did two centuries ago.
As industrialisation and its consequent class organisation threw up two broad political camps that competed in the regulated environment of elections, post-industrialism (or whatever one wishes to call it) is throwing up a search for new political models. As with “legacy” media, the old models are still employed, but, in the scramble for answers while debating technocratic competence, “legacy” parties are increasingly dressed in the old emperor’s new clothes.
So, the old Left becomes the technocratic centre and the old Right, its traditional ground now occupied by the “Left”, lurches towards populism. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that voters instinctively shy away from the naked emperors, and from the media that represents them.
That there is profound political change afoot in the old industrial democracies is now commonplace. They question is, in what direction does it head?
In the short term, the legacy parties retain external form while being increasingly bereft of traditional content. The Left is less “progressive” in any meaningful sense and the Right is increasingly throwing up demagogues, in the US, Italy, Hungary, Poland, France, Germany and so on, with disturbing echoes in Australia.
As early industrial societies could not foretell late industrial democracy, so too the political vessels of the future will reflect the stresses and challenges that are only just making themselves plain. Rather than comment on the superficially obvious, that voters are deserting traditional parties, the fundamental reorientation of political society is to where Savva and her colleagues should address their future attention.
Deakin University’s Professor Emeritus Damien Kingsbury was leader of the Australian volunteer observer mission to East Timor’s 1999 ballot for independence and was advisor to the Free Aceh Movement’s 2005 successfully negotiated conclusion to its three-decade war with Indonesia, among other conflict resolution advisory roles.
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