Uncivil wars

I wonder if contempt is merely a symptom rather the cause of our corrupted democracy.

The real cause is likely to be our Two-Party-Preferred (2PP) electoral system which is afflicted with the winner-takes-all (WTA) mentality. 

Parliamentary sittings have become brawling spectacles performed for a population habituated to aggressive macho behaviour.

During the week before the recent Melbourne Cup, it was said that an increase in domestic violence was to be expected after the Cup. Men supercharged by aggression on the field and barracking on the stands, not to mention copious alcohol during and after, would end up unleashing their aggression upon women in the privacy of their homes. The same, it was also said, has happened after every AFL game.

Aggression is institutionalised.

Contempt is but a corollary of aggression that is primed in Parliament, in sports and in all the battlefields in our democracy.

And worse still, our democracy is unrepresentative.

In the 2019 Federal elections the Greens got about 10% of the primary votes, yet their presence in the Lower House is not even 1%.  The democratic principle of one vote one value has become a sham.

One consequence is that trust in our politicians has been declining. Now only one in four or five voters trusts the elected representatives who are by and large selected by their mafia-like Party machines.

A fish rots from the head. That rot has now spread to every part of our polity.

The debasement of our parliament, the consequent spread of that rot throughout the polity, is the more likely cause of the sorry state of our democracy.

Just imagine if the Greens had had their democratic quota in the Lower House for the last ten years! A coalition government with the Greens would have been inevitable. And that would have tempered the barbarity of the climate wars which have deepened the division and anger in our country over so many issues.

Instead, after the 2019 Federal Elections, we got the devious Scott Morrison, there by the skin of his teeth via the 2PP system, who went on a rampage just as any victorious WTA conqueror might. Not even the Westminster spirit could stop him.

Much has been said in the media about our economy having created more and more losers in the last decade, with the winners getting richer and richer.  Money and status are celebrated, no matter the colour or smell.  The late Richard Pratt for instance was honoured with an AC, our highest civic honour, whilst presiding over oligopolistic price-gouging. Against all that background, we can postulate that it was Morrison’s hubris and WTA excesses rather than contempt that heightened widespread anger and despair. And that would also account for the Teal wave and the Greenslide of the 2022 Federal elections.

Will the unprecedented 2022 Federal election results change our political culture for good?     

Unlikely.   In all probability this was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence: climate change denial over a decade, blatant grey corruption in governance and continued reluctance to address the oppression of women all coalesced into a rainstorm that flooded the citadels of the two old parties.  But people have short memories and under our 2PP electoral system historically the two old parties will retake their ground.

Even more insidiously, the winners in our economy have immense economic and political power to keep their ramparts impregnable. They have MPs on both sides, bureaucrats and ex-Ministers turned “consultants” in their pockets.  And they can buy media influence at the drop of a hat, to create chaos, anger and animosity to cower a government not of their ilk into doing what they want, be it taxing gas windfall profits, negative gearing or putting a price on carbon. This and more is laid out in Cameron Murray & Paul Frijters’ recently published book, Rigged, which clearly explains “how networks of powerful mates rip off everyday Australians”.

The working poor are angry: poverty and relative deprivation diminish all humans. The aspiring middle class is forever mindful of not catching-up and easily cajoled into the fear of losing any trickle-down privileges like negative gearing. They can vent their spleen quite well. And the top tier moneyed class is always networking to keep the government under control. This class won’t yield an inch of their established privilege to government reforms, without wheeling out their mighty arsenal: hugely expensive media campaigns, disingenuous offerings from their cultivated retainers in powerful institutions and orchestrated guerrilla tactics from their networks of winners.

But social activists and agitators are no longer shot at sight, nor are they incarcerated willy-nilly unless, of course, they happen to be black.

There is thus perpetual tension in our capitalist society, afflicted with the winner-takes-all mentality from the Parliament down.  

So for the working poor, the alienated, and those anxious to catch up with the winners, what better than to escape into a parallel world of instant democratic voice, shared commons, and untrammelled intimacy?

Clever exploiters like Mark Zuckerberg no doubt saw this unfulfilled need and have succeeded in creating social media word-wide-webs in response.  But it’s the fools’ gold that makes the spruikers the richest people on earth for all time. Those enticed into this parallel world would become mere merchandisable consumers.

But even long before then marketers have subliminally instilled the panacea of instant gratification into every sphere of life that offers these cunning entrepreneurs money, big money, and money-gilded status.

It is therefore all too easy for those who feel angry, alienated, or lonely to find temporary amnesia in those social media platforms. This reminds me of opium in China in the C19 and early C20: respite for the poor until their bodies were drained of vitality, and untold wealth for the immoral, untouchable Brits and their avaricious accomplices from the West.

But the days of an underclass or peasant revolution are gone. Today the weapons of the winners are too good: surveillance, police, prisons, constricting the drip line for social services, and all the statecraft to create a growing underclass with sham democratic rights. Thus while homeless numbers grow, some MPs and their fellow treasury-robbers will acquire more and more houses with blatant shoplifts from our “common wealth” under the euphemism of negative gearing. And all this while the winners’ big lie that it is all the fault of the poor themselves has taken root, especially amongst some in the dwindling class still hoping to join the winners at the top.

The losers, ever more despondent, might every so often behave irrationally, intemperately – uncivilly we might say! But who could blame them? 

They might exhibit what could be said to be contempt towards the winners. In an attempt to bolster a sense of dignity they might pour scorn upon the ostentatious rich. And the winners when affronted, to bolster their position of privilege and to legitimise their ill-gotten gains, might pour unalloyed contempt.

The feeling of mistrust, the division of them and us, is mutual. But the winners always win, with a grin, and they are becoming more powerful by the day.

Thus an undeclared war is ever present.

Starting with Tony Abbott, the self-declared “junkyard dog”, we have lost a decade to political and cultural wars: climate change; oppression of women and especially on rape where the accused can refuse to be interrogated in a court while his hired gun, a King’s Counsel, interrogates the alleged victim; black deaths at  heavily fortified hands of white police; political weaponizing of terrorism, real or imagined; Islam; China with its “authoritarian” ways and anything else that protagonists on either side can employ to vanquish the other.

It is a culture that our 2PP-WTA warriors in Parliament have engendered – a continual spectacle choreographed for the barrackers, reflected in the institutionalised, money-inspired aggression on the footy fields.

The May 2022 elections are over, but the skirmishes continue. At the drop of a hat the two old parties are already launching missiles. The budget of course is the first target. More targets will be found, as the war drags on before the next federal elections.   

How could we urge “patience, reciprocity and free exchange” to revive our democracy when with the complicity and implicit imprimatur of our elected representatives the winners have mortgaged our democracy to private interests?  The losers, like any cornered living beings, might spit and bare their teeth, but their handlers always have the upper hand.

Our beleaguered democracy needs a Disruption.

Proportional representation may well be the answer.  

It is not a panacea - Italy and Belgium come to mind. But our cousins across the ditch in Kiwiland seem to have triumphed with the Mixed Member Proportional system which they adopted nearly 30 years ago. Their government is way ahead of us on democracy and on transparency – freedom from corruption.

I feel certain that Proportional Representation will:

• Vastly improve our democratic representation. (Until this year, the Greens had 10% of votes, but less than 1% of the Lower House seats; and under normal circumstances it was almost impossible for high quality independents to win.  Not to mention the obscene power of the Nationals.)
• Enhance the quality and diversity of MPs.  (Dreams of more teal-like MPs!)
• Banish the winner-takes-all mentality, the fount of so many ills afflicting our parliamentary democracy.
• Herald in a new era: negotiated legislation, in the national interest; no more gladiatorial spectacles on the floor of the Parliament; no more pork-barrelling - community and nation-building projects to be collaboratively agreed upon, and not announced during election campaigns in a bribe-bidding war in a 2PP electoral system.

Absence of contempt no doubt will enhance our democratic ambience, but a new structural underpinning, Proportional Representation, will have a much higher chance of getting rid of the damp and the salt that have crept through the foundations of our democratic institutions:  the grey corruption; the continual skirmishes around social issues big and small; and the winner-takes-all mentality that celebrates individual accumulation of money above the common pursuit of the wellbeing of all.