Opinion
Leonardo DiCaprio fought one battle after another. Voters in Australia and elsewhere feel like they’re experiencing one letdown after another. Across the world, these are unhappy times. We’re living in a great age of disappointment and disinformation. The economic system that most of the developed world has relied on for the past 40-plus years – privatisation, financialisation and the monetisation of as much of daily life as possible, from your shopping and cultural interests to your sleep patterns – has increasing amounts of sand in its gears. Radical, nativist populism is on the march here and in Europe, the UK, and in North and South America.
The default analysis is to put this down to political failings: poor salesmanship, incompetence via bad policies, today’s politicians aren’t a patch on the pollies of old and so on. That’s not completely off the money. On the Australian front there are valid questions about the government’s advocacy performance. Treasurer Jim Chalmers is under heavy fire, and he’s not assisted by Anthony Albanese’s softness as an advocate of detailed policies in difficult times.
Yes, Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard were more able national leaders than Scott Morrison and Albanese. But that doesn’t provide a full explanation and let’s not overdo the romanticism. The Hawke-Keating-Howard years were fundamentally different times. You can’t expect a mechanic who in the ’80s could pull your Commodore apart and put it back together again to use the same tools to do that with a BYD today. What used to work politically in the days of landline phones and faxes and a less fragmented media can’t be as effective in the mid-2020s.
In those days of yore, most folks regularly paid attention to the daily political goings-on. How many of us bother to listen today? Some don’t even know how to, they just want to get into a scrap, as evidenced by the viciousness of social media, the rise in violent incidents outside polling stations and the mostly unreported threats of violence against many federal and state MPs.
Something powerful is going on in the way that we assess information and accept complexity, and how much trust in politicians exists in society.
We are caught up in a global phenomenon created by a technological revolution that rivals the invention of the printing press and industrialisation. When John Howard won his last election in 2004, Facebook had just launched. Twitter came along two years later. The first iPhone arrived in 2007, just months before Kevin Rudd led Labor to victory. Instagram appeared in 2010, TikTok went international in 2017 and most of us became acquainted with Artificial Intelligence when ChatGPT was released in late 2022.
Consider Australia’s national political story during that vastly transformative series of rollouts. Since the advent of the iPhone, every prime minister has found it difficult to remain popular and voters have become more impatient and disillusioned. The Rudd-Julia Gillard-Rudd revolving door was a sign of things to come. Tony Abbott led the Coalition back into office in 2013, but voters gave up on him after barely a year. By 2015, he was replaced by Malcolm Turnbull, who rose instantly in the polls and then trailed away, barely scraping through at the 2016 election. Two years later, he was ousted by Morrison.
At the 2019 election, the erratic Morrison won but by 2022, most voters had finally seen through him and Albanese was installed, promising a nostalgic return to slow and steady analogue-era politics. Albanese’s ride has not been smooth. His polling numbers have gone down and up and down again. They went up at the right time last year, in the closing weeks of the election campaign, but are on the slide now, as One Nation has re-emerged, rampant. This digital-AI era saga has been one disappointment after another, hasn’t it?
Our experience is not unique. The UK’s politics has a similar story, with multiple prime ministers under the Conservatives, a populist shift via Brexit and the rise of Britain’s One Nation equivalent, Nigel Farage’s Reform party, followed by a new Labour government that quickly lost support so badly that it has had to shoehorn Andy Burnham into the Commons to replace Keir Starmer as prime minister. In the US, look to the rise of Donald Trump after the ultimate disappointment of Barack Obama’s presidency and Trump’s rise again after the woeful and dishonest performance of Joe Biden, even when Americans already knew Trump’s true, anti-democratic nature. Thanks to the rapid moral decay embodied by the MAGA movement, America is close to a lost cause.
Back here in Australia, One Nation has, by investing heavily in social media, been able to harvest hitherto unimaginable levels of support by articulating the politics of grievance and exploiting the inevitably fleeting nature of public support for leaders and governments from both major parties, which now seems to be baked into the system. Pauline Hanson is making the most of this moment.
The challenge for the government is to work out a way to reset. Trying to retrieve lost members of the flock by emphasising its levelheadedness is not working. It would likely be well-served by getting in touch with its own buried radical Labor impulse to fight Hanson’s right-wing radicalism. Voters are telling it that incrementalism has had its day.
Beyond politics, these are dark times and we do ourselves no favours if we pretend otherwise. The Cold War was a dark time too, but the threat then was singular: a potential nuclear war between two superpowers. This is different and harder to comprehend, let alone navigate. Few issues are left uncontested. It’s a time of insecurity, both economic and personal – a time of mass disinformation, bot and scam factories, digital sabotage, AI slop, online intimidation, AI coming for your job, or your kid’s career. It’s a time of drones and asymmetric warfare, of a major ally that doesn’t like allies. Little wonder that so many people are so unhappy with the status quo.
As the speaker of the House of Representatives Milton Dick said on Monday, democracies don’t fall; they crumble. By facing up to the dangers and looking forwards, not backwards, for solutions we can overcome them.
Shaun Carney is a regular columnist, an author and former associate editor of The Age.
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