In recent weeks, One Nation briefly passed Labor in the published surveys and became, on paper, the country’s most popular party.
Newspoll noted it was the first time since its survey began in 1985 that the major parties together fell below 50 per cent of the primary vote. Two of our most serious commentators looked at this outcome and ended up with different views. The first argued the building was collapsing; the second agreed the building was in trouble, but concluded that the old arithmetic was still relevant.
What differs is not so important. It is what the two Australian commentators shared that is interesting. Legacy parties have never suffered from a shortage of cleverness or powers of explanation. It is the one thing they hold in surplus – with potentially tragic results: in this case a desire to explain away the most serious implications of recent developments.
One commentator reaches for the language of decay. We are living through a ‘great disruption’; the institutions are ‘no longer equal to the challenges’. The vocabulary is borrowed – and a 16th Century Florentine is pressed into service to describe Australia’s suburbs. The claim is that Australia is undergoing a realignment that is vast, slow, and impersonal: geological more than political. The solution is accordingly grand, suitable for politicians with the greatest ambition and capacity – sustained statecraft, a multi-year project of reform, maybe even constitutional change. You can see it appealing to both Albanese and Taylor.
Its quiet attraction – apart from the suggestion that politicians and public servants might be up for such a task – is that it removes any question of responsibility. If the institutions merely decayed, then no one made wrong decisions or acted unwisely. The changing climate and resulting weather, like in Europe now, caused our issues.
One problem is that this sophisticated argument which sounds like a verdict on the times we live in is, originally, not about the context at all. The thinker behind the original framework was making a verdict about rulers. The commentator has summoned an authority that points in the opposite direction to the one he intended.
The other commentator sees a great deal more, which is what makes his reading instructive. He does not say the building is sound. He calls it the end of politics as we know it; he grants that One Nation’s purpose is to expose and replace the Coalition outright; he notices that it harries the left as readily as it splits the right; he even allows that policy may no longer be the point – that the cultural mood has overtaken the policy argument, and that Taylor’s entire suite has not shifted One Nation an inch. He sees the realignment, in other words, very nearly as it is.
But then, at the decisive moment, he reaches for the old ruler. He sets a right of 49 per cent against a left of 41 and concludes that, in theory, the right can win; he reminds us that ‘disunity is death’; he calls it the tragedy of the right. The dissolution he has just described in full becomes, by his closing paragraphs, a coordination problem – a quarrel among tenants who would hold the majority they are owed if only they could stop fighting among themselves.
The reassurance this conclusion offers is harder to dislodge than denial. It does not claim that nothing has changed – he has suggested that everything has. However, the consolation is that, whatever has changed, the old scoreboard still settles the score; the right and left are still the things being counted; and that the right, correctly assembled, still adds up to a government. He implies that we can get back to the game of cricket – if only people would behave, or a suitably able manager could make them.
Both readings are highly sophisticated and intellectually beguiling. However, both seem to me to miss the point. Time has not condemned the building; its tenants are not just quarrelling. Instead, a lot of the residents have vacated the premises and no longer live there – some willingly, others because the building owners wanted different tenants.
Take decay first, because it is the more flattering argument and the easier to test. If decay were the cause, the insurgency should appear wherever the institutions have failed – which is everywhere – and evenly. Falling trust, the housing crunch, the energy bottlenecks, the sense of a system that no longer delivers: these are widespread national conditions.
However, the insurgent vote is not national in the same way. In Western Australia it has been more contained – the displaced vote had somewhere else to go and largely went there. In South Australia it erupted, because the same displaced vote was homeless inside a Liberal column that could not hold it. It was the same country, the same decay, but the outcomes were different. If decay were the whole story, One Nation should perform similarly everywhere, and it plainly doesn’t.
The thing that varies is not how rotten the institutions are; it is whether there is a vehicle the displaced can climb into. Decay is a constant which, by its nature, cannot explain a variable.
That is not to say the institutions are well. Plainly, they are not. However, the honest name for the failure is the opposite of decay, and far less comfortable. The major parties did not wear out; they are not, like the finest wines, exhausted. Rather in various combinations they abandoned traditional electorates, expelled the people inside their organisation who might have spoken for the displaced – most vividly in 2015 – and settled on a mix of cynicism and rhetoric over action.
The thread of political analysis, in particular of leaders and conspiracies, which arose from the era of Italy’s city-states highlighted this: it treated decline as a failure of the governing class’s own virtù, a corruption from within, recoverable only by renewal – which is to say it was always an indictment of agency, never the description of an immutable context.
An immune system that keeps killing its own antibodies does not have a decay problem. It has an agency problem. From the perspective of many in the electorate, key parties have been focused on self-demolition, and appointed trusted foremen to carry out these demolitions. The image flashes through my mind of where I was born, now gone: the Royal Canberra Hospital. The fluency of such external decline-language seems to run highest in the quarters which stood nearest the controls. To relabel demolition as subsidence is a very human thing to do.
The reflex is not confined to the parties; you can watch it in the courts too, right now. A judge recently said aloud what many worry: that judgments held back two and a half years or more can threaten the rule of law. The institution’s answer was not to pursue a solution but to circulate notes on collegiality, to invoke the convention that judges do not criticise judges, and to quietly take his speech down from the court’s own website.
The delay was reclassified as a failure of manners; the man who named it was made the problem. Presented with a potential weakness, the body focused on fighting not the disease but the antibody.
In contrast, the disunity reading fails not on a fact it missed but on one it refuses to follow to its end. The commentator grants the vote may be cross-flank – that Hanson harries the left as surely as she splits the right. But take that admission one step further and the 49 per cent comes apart in his hands. A bloc drawn from both flanks is not a ‘right’ waiting to be reunited; rather it is a new coalition being put together – one unlikely to decompose back into the previous halves on command.
At the Farrer by-election One Nation took a safe Liberal seat with Labor standing aside; earlier, in Narungga, it beat the two majors during the SA state election. Its threat to Labor is now so obvious that even friendly outfits like Redbridge can measure it. Polls suggest One Nation could be in a position to put together a winning coalition from multiple directions at once. The party is not a simple faction peeling off the right while disconsolately waiting to be offered the warmth of home again. Instead, it is the various displaced building somewhere new to live.
The point is: you cannot reunite a right that is no longer the unit of measurement. Saying that ‘disunity is death’ assumes an established grouping. The conclusion depends on a currency that is being withdrawn, to be replaced. It is like a man who knows the euro arrives on Monday and spends the weekend obsessed about collecting lira.
There is an irony here, though not the more usual one. It is not that a writer who once chronicled the end of an earlier set of certainties now hesitates to credit this ending; he does not hesitate – he announces it. It is that, having declared the old certainties gone, he spends his opinion counting on them.
Behind these two commentaries – powerful as they are – lies a common shape. They take a structural fact, that the legacy parties no longer fit the country, and convert this fact into something that lets the establishment off the hook. One removes the blame; the other says the old scoreboard still matters. Neither will say the plain thing: that the legacy vehicles were assembled for an electorate that is no longer there.
Worse, these and other commentators do not seem to care that the people who are moving away will not be interested in their explanation and are unlikely to engage with a register so entirely at odds with their world. The elite appear to sleep with Machiavelli and Sun Tzu under their pillows as citizens once did with the bible.
Which returns us to the borrowed words, and to why top-flight writers should address a revolt in the outer suburbs of modern Australia using the lenses of a Renaissance Florentine and an academic theorist specialised in postwar history of British statecraft. The answer is, of course, in the audience.
Machiavelli can mean a great deal to an intellectual politician, but almost nothing to the voter whose defection the idea is meant to explain. The genuine erudition seems to do little real analytic work. Rather it is doing social work – like a guide’s flag for intellectual tourists coming off a cruise ship to visit an unknown country. The author’s writing reminds me of a Victorian-era misery tour for respectable women. It is a way of speaking to the people inside a room about people outside it.
What is more, the writers who reach for these concepts to prove that no one is to blame – at least no one wilfully or consciously – are the same writers who, in the next breath, demand heroic, cross-cutting leadership.
Depending on your persuasion the model of leadership differs. The lauded British academic might raise Attlee as the genuine transformer, in contrast to the merely derivative Thatcher; his special, multi-generational academic insight demoting the most transformative leader of the modern era to a footnote on older models. Others – leaning the opposite way – might raise the incomparable Churchill, whose portrait has graced so many suites of executive government.
The point is that the first commentator’s explanation and his solution do not go together: you cannot send a foreman out to alter the weather.
Part of the problem is that the framework is distorted through multiple refractions, like some game of whispers. Someone from inside a legacy party of the old right resorts to an elite second-generation intellectual theorist whose scholarly heritage is on the left; a man credited with injecting realpolitik into UK governments which, across four Prime Ministers, have shown strikingly little of it – administrations that almost never subordinated posture to delivery.
It hardly surprises me – having myself grown up in Canberra – that the capital city might see gain in an intellectual so far removed from Australia’s own circumstances on the ground. We can see Canberra’s rejection of Hanson and embrace of British academia as two sides of the same elite cultural cringe.
I have often read that the political class shares a single habitus across various nominal divides. It is one bubble with numerous dialects, of which two are the press gallery and the public service. Each group communicates mainly with its own members but is intelligible to others in the same bubble. The realignment now taking place is the displaced no longer interested in listening to any of it. And how does someone in the bubble then engage with those who have left if they don’t share the same words?
This is the thing the commentaries do not picture, because seeing it would implicate the seer. The legacy parties’ problem was never too little cleverness; they command some of the cleverest people in the country. Indeed, we do not need more displays of erudition or smarts. Such cleverness is itself the problem – the distance between the symbolic class and the displaced is precisely what emptied the vehicles.
A reflex of people who trade in the symbolic, in the value of the abstract, is to answer a falling market in their own product by pouring out even more of it. Just consider Taylor’s laundry-list over the weekend. I felt exhausted before even reaching the end. The symbolic world meets a revolt against the remoteness of their world with increasingly rarefied vocabulary: the same disease, only at a higher dose. Indeed, a resort to sophistication is not the rescue; it is the tell.
The displaced do not want a more elegant account of their own displacement; and the wider audience does not need it. The decay reading consoles the people who built the problem; the disunity reading consoles the people who would gain from its neat resolution; neither does anything for the people living inside the change. The realignment will not be settled by whoever names it most impressively. It will be settled by whoever builds a voice to engage the target electorates and a vehicle that the displaced can climb into – a party which stands in line with them, not a theory that stands above them.
Australia is not so unusual in producing this realignment; the same forces have been tearing at London, and elsewhere. However, the system, the terrain, and the commentary are all local. And in some ways this should make the process more legible here, easier to follow. However, the cleverest people in this country, still inside their bubble, are frantically reaching for books – whether dictionaries, management bibles, or battered copies of Sun Tzu, where they’ll search for their preferred solution – rather than actually engaging with the people who are going.
