The March for Australia last weekend reminds us that, among other things, there are consequences for the gradualism and pragmatism of the Albanese government. Their risk-averse tweaking of the status quo has left open a space for political actions that are more aggressive in their behaviour and worryingly regressive in their ideology. In the absence of a robustly articulated alternative, this brand of politics is launching its bid for the soul of the nation.
Going down slow
Back in 2009, on Norwegian television, a new television genre emerged: ‘Slow TV’. Slow TV typically presented an immersive representation of an event, without a plot, a narration, editing or other kinds of intervention. Launched with a seven-hour presentation of a train trip from Oslo to Bergen, it simply placed the viewer in the train and looking out the window. The slowness was its key attribute, making it seem like a natural, Zen-like, experience. For the household, where it could play for hours in the background, TV was reinvented as an undemanding backdrop to everyday life. It caused quite a splash for a while. In Norway, it is still a big deal when a new program arrives.
Here, not so much. SBS gave us a three-hour journey on the Ghan, but the genre never really earned the interest it had attracted elsewhere. For a time, it was paralleled by other kinds of positive ‘slowness’ – the slow food movement, for instance. But those who chose to try it out never did so in sufficient numbers to make it a success in Australia.
So, we don’t have much slow TV in Australia, but we do have ‘slow politics’. Notwithstanding the electorate’s expressed appetite for change in the practice and outcomes of organized politics, the actual pace of change seems never to get beyond steady, at best, and mostly sits at stationary. While there is talk about achieving progressive outcomes, this is routinely, predictably, deferred in service of the politics of the possible.
Stranded in the Dead Centre
Slow politics has left us stranded in what Richard Denniss’s latest essay calls the ‘dead centre’. This is the place where nothing much gets done, as progressive politics is unwilling to chance its arm and conservative politics makes sure they don’t try. The pragmatic leaning towards ‘the sensible centre’ which has marked so much our recent politics, he argues, becomes ‘indistinguishable from blind support for things as they are’.
Australia’s slow politics has been driving us drearily around from week to week, not without the prospect of interesting things possibly coming up, but in the end losing most of us along the way. So-called ‘reform’ may be foreshadowed, but in the many areas where it matters to us – education, health, aged care – the federal government has either done the bare minimum or actively caused harm.
Consequently, the uninspiring political landscape passing by our windows is not enough to keep us interested.
There’s more to this than boredom, however. Not only does slow politics produce little in the way of progressive change, but it is also gradually eroding the capacity for the nation to think about that kind of change.
Filling the vaccuum
Slow politics has left us with a significant vacuum in the public debate about the character of our politics. And this weekend’s March for Australia has shown us what is emerging to fill that vacuum. Some of the demons from our past have come to reassert themselves.
While I was aware of legitimate concerns about the lack of clear policy leadership on immigration, I will admit to being a little shocked at how thoroughly the march, and its media coverage, was hijacked by racism and white nationalism. Although I understand that this march was genuinely conceived as an ‘anti-immigration’ event, its numbers were boosted by that persistent stream of racism in Australian society we might have thought had been defeated. And, there in the spotlight once again, was its champion, Pauline Hanson, greeted by the crowd as a hero.
Turning back the clock
Much of the shock-horror the march elicited from the political class, however, has to be called out as, at the very least, disingenuous. Politicians have been flirting with this stuff for years. Dutton’s dog-whistling on race has played a prominent part, but so have the mixed messages on race which have emerged from the Labor Party.
But there are multiple factors driving the resurgence of racial hatred as a component of our political sphere. Some see it as a consequence of measures taken during the pandemic which undermined faith in government; some suggest it is a product of misinformation campaigns from politicians and social media which have scapegoated migrants over the housing crisis and the rising cost of living; some suggest it is a consequence of the failure of our political class to firmly maintain their support for the values of multiculturalism; and some suggest it is an inevitable consequence of the politically motivated demonisation of refugees.
And then there is the Trump factor, which has emboldened those on the far right of politics all over the world.
Whatever we end up concluding is the key driver here, Australia has a problem. Tens of thousands turned up to these marches. Regular folk with legitimate political concerns found themselves sharing the space with neo-Nazis and white nationalists.
Suddenly our slow politics has sped up, but it has selected reverse gear. This is turning back the national clock.
The enabling conditions
Predictably, each side of politics have accused the other of feeding this shift in the nation’s political culture. It is tempting to pick a side, but in truth, they all must bear the responsibility for what is happening. This is a consequence of bad politics, of an unprincipled pragmatism, and a failure to think seriously about the character of the society our policy choices have created.
Australia has endured decades of bad policy across multiple portfolios which have directly created the rising tide of inequality. The most vulnerable in the community are the most targeted and the least well served, and the values our governments claim to espouse are many miles from the social consequences of their policy settings. Little wonder that we have a problem with what politicians like to describe as social cohesion.
Examples of policy failure that have actively undermined that social cohesion are numerous. To name just some, there is the failure to thoroughly address the consequences and afterlife of Robodebt, the failure to rectify the harms created by the privatisation of childcare, the failure to properly address the corrosive effects of a poorly regulated gambling industry, and the disgraceful failure to recognise and protect the human rights of refugees.
These are areas where the core values of tolerance, care, respect, egalitarianism and just plain decency have gone missing from the formation of public policy.
Little wonder, in such an environment, that white racism would see this as a good time to reclaim its space within the body politic.
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