Democracy and the individual - the unconscious association?

For example, the Parliamentary Education Office (PEO) at Australian Parliament House in Canberra, repeatedly tell visiting schoolchildren that those elected to Parliament are indeed “individuals” who are elected to represent the views of their electorates and States to the best of their abilities and conscience. Yet in their technically laughable 45-minute role plays, the PEO imprint on their young visitors that:

• a benign Parliament makes laws seemingly for the noble benefit of all the citizens; the government “always wins” in the House of Representatives;
• the government party is nearly always forced to compromise with the opposition, minor parties and independents in the Senate; and
• MPs and Senators vote on party lines and will be punished if they cross the floor.

Indeed the scripted PEO role-plays can be completely destroyed should the children demonstrate any desire not to conform like sheep into their assigned roles.

Any philosophical questions about Australian politics, the definition of democracy, basic political theory and why individualism is squashed by Parliament are avoided by the PEO. Why?

They are mere bureaucrats and their conditions of employment prohibit them from engaging in any individualistic intellectual pursuits, lest they be punished by the code of conduct for Senate staff. Indeed, a lack of ability to engage in any of these questions is a distinct advantage to those who manage this office.

The desire to force conformity on hundreds of thousands of visiting Australian schoolchildren should not be surprising. In nearly every aspect, most Australians willingly conform and align themselves to the collective interests of a group, while other Australians are only too happy to exploit this conformity (see John Ralston Saul, The unconscious civilisation, Op.Cit., p.90):

Remember: the origin of corporatism in the second half of the 19th century lay into things - the rejection of citizen-based democracy and a desire to react in a stable way to the Industrial Revolution. These original motives would involve into the desire to a stable managerial, hierarchical society.

One of the great advantages that corporatism was thought to provide in the 1920s was to “dissect the democratic citizenry into discrete functional groupings which are no longer capable of joint political action [enabling corporatism to] achieve is rightful standing as the creator of collective reality” (see Timothy Kaufman-Osborne, Emile Dirkheim and the science of corporatism, political theory, Volume 14, number four, November 1986, pp. 640 & 653). This was the economic and social framework for the rapid rise of fascism in the 1930s which eagerly incorporated corporatism at its core. The aims of the corporatist movement during the 1920s were to:

1. shift power directly to economic and social interest groups;
2. push entrepreneurial initiative in areas normally reserved for public bodies; and
3. obliterate the boundaries between public and private interest.

All three of these aims have a decidedly relevant place in modern Australian society, in fact, we have seen since the 1980s a general acceptance of these concepts from various Australian governments. This process was accelerated by the radical attitudes of the conservative Howard government.

If we are to reclaim our rights as individual citizens we must be prepared to engage our so called political and economic masters, not from the position of inferiority or cynicism, but as equals. Not only must we debate, engage and criticise, we as individuals can also point out the benefits of reflective individuality over sheepish group conformity. The great hope is that barriers that have been falsely created between the citizenry can finally be dismantled.