Trust matters: politics, trust and the republican cause

Both social research and TV ratings showed that we were beginning to disengage from “the big picture” and turn our attention to more personal, domestic and local matters - home renovation, cooking shows, celebrity weddings and unreality TV. At the same time, Australians were experiencing a long stretch of economic stability and prosperity that is only just now showing signs of wobbling.

This prosperity spread, at the very time the current crop of young Australians were maturing into young adulthood. It was a time when, as journalist George Megalogenis observes, Australians started to “reduce the checklist of things they wanted government to do for them and their sense of what governments should be held accountable for”.

Herein lays the republican movement’s greatest challenge. It is a much harder task than simply developing a model for electing a head of state or deciding on the design for a new flag. Harder but more important and more urgent. Simply stated, it is to give people a reason to engage, to raise their expectations of government.

In a 2003 speech, social commentator and writer Hugh Mackay identified a “disengaged electorate” as one of the republican movement’s significant hurdles. His solution for getting people to engage again was not to wait but to “seize the agenda and promote our cause in a bold and more engaging way”, to “restore our confidence and optimism” in public life. This is particularly true for that uncommitted group of young Australians.

Of course this is all easier said than done. How do we go about doing it? How do we make the republican cause relevant to the new adult generation?

Part of the solution lies recognising the particular character of young people’s political attitudes and behaviours. In my work on the political attitudes of Generation Y, I found that while most young people are turned off by national politics, they are focused on local and community politics.

Similarly political scientist Ari Vromen has found that while young people may not measure high on the scales of traditional political activity (such as donating money, contacting MPs, joining political parties or unions) the majority of them are involved in community, campaigning and protest activities through church groups, parents and citizens groups, environmental and sporting organisations.

It is these groups and NGOs more generally that seem more trustworthy, able and willing to make a difference. We can better reach young Australians by forming relationships with those organisations where they are most active.

Another potential avenue for engagement lays in this a generation’s enthusiasm about direct democracy.

They get to choose the next Australian Idol and the next evicted housemate on Big Brother. One of the reasons there is such comparatively low levels of youth membership of the major parties is that their “tow-the-party-line” mentality seems too simplistic, too constraining for a generation used to direct involvement in decision making. They are also used to having their concerns and issues ignored by political parties eager to chase the votes of self-funded retirees, mortgage holders and three-child families.

Of course this has profound implications for a potential republican model. Generation Y are unlikely to be enthused by a model which denies them a direct say and which is filtered through a political system from which they feel alienated. Despite all the strong arguments in favour of the model presented to the voters in 1999, the direct election model is undoubtedly a better fit for this generation and could help to build a critical sense of ownership of and connection to our public institutions.

If we look back at early republican sentiments, in the pre-federation era, they were largely focused on opposition to tyranny. We are facing a new kind of tyranny of distance, namely, the growing distance between our citizens and our systems of government.

Part of the challenge for our movement is to place our cause at the centre of a broader and braver campaign to build up public trust in those systems. If we don’t, then I believe we may struggle to get young people to care about the republican cause, to believe it matters and has relevance to their lives today and into the future.