Grass roots on fire: the fuel loads of our democratic neglect

Our representatives have forgotten they are supposed to represent us, gaslighting Australians for decades.

The political class have never seemed so disconnected from the public interest (Source: Twitter/X)

This Christmas was interesting to say the least. Aside from the fact that feeding a Christmas gathering had given the hip pocket a firm wallop, there was pervading presence that nothing much was getting better in our country or the world that sits around it. Only a few Christmases in from the bushfire Christmas and the pandemic Christmas, if last year was the cost-of-living/genocide Christmas, this year was the cost-of-living/genocide Christmas too. Not many Australians are confident that next year will be any different, and this is a problem for the major party duopoly in Canberra, who have not impressed the public in decades.

My grandparents purchased a 3-bedroom red clinker brick home in Melbourne’s north for about £‎3,300 Australian pounds with a £‎100 deposit in 1958. They reasonably and comfortably raised five children in a suburb where mortgage-paying families had loans fixed at 3% for their entire lifetimes, and those that couldn’t afford a home were provided a rental by the Government. Their kids aspired to be whoever they wanted in the security of a stable local economy, with access to fresh and affordable food and essential items, and many parents built their homes with a single income and 40 pounds-per-month loan repayments. They paid off the loan in 30 years without having to worry about a thing because everyone had a job in a diverse local economy. Not too long ago, a Liberal Prime Minister called Robert Menzies and his government built these houses, sold them to people like my grandparents, and rented out the rest to low-income families.

Menzies-era housing is still prominent today, acting as a crutch to a critical housing crisis, and a glaring reminder to us all of the failure of duopoly state and federal governments who have seen Australia slip on vital key metrics regarding housing, economic competitiveness, the poverty rate, and childhood wellbeing. In a nation that has slid off the OECD rankings like an emerging tin-pot banana republic, the affordable and public housing from the 60s, 70s, and 80s run like prescient cultural veins through a society that is not far removed from the memory of something better.

These days in the housing and ideas shortage, in places like the old Olympic Village near Heidelberg in Victoria or out in the suburbs of Penrith New South Wales, the humble asbestos riddled houses are now going for in and around a million, amongst a bipartisan abrogation of duty that sees a housing shortage pick up steam and an entire political class act like there’s nothing that can be done about it. Instead of generating viable solutions, all our political leaders can generate is one in six children living in poverty, 10,000 homeless being created a month, and a generation that never knew anything but struggle in the “lucky country”.

“As a prosperous nation, Australia should be one of the best countries in the world to be a child. But it’s not.” casually opens a report by the Treasury, who oversees the pound for pound biggest mining export income operation on the planet. Something is not right.

The social contract in Australia has not been delineated, but assumed by our political elite since the end of the Second World War. And without much fuss, it has been given by a trusting Australian public. And for decades, the wide-open spaces in this island continent, and genuine relationship between communities and elected MPs, had once allowed for the continuity of ideas and decision-making within the bounds of the public and national interest. Throughout most of the the second half of the 20th century, Australian leaders recognised the interest resulting in tailored policies designed to grow our sovereign capability both economically, militarily and diplomatically, whilst giving a moderated (yet increasingly larger) share of wealth to the big end of town. Menzies, Whitlam, Frasier, and Hawke adhered to the trajectory of sovereign arc that was being actively acknowledged by a more responsible sovereign political class, and providing employment, wellbeing, dignity and housing were assumed as a part-and parcel of being a politician in an aspiring nation.

But since the post-Keating neoliberal era, buffeted by dozens of legislated market friendly policies and compromised by increased access to subversive private interests, golden handshakes, and plum jobs for ethically weak career politicians, the social contract has been gradually dissolved through the parachuted candidates that are chosen for their relationship to what is above them rather than their genuine connection with the community below, and by the open degradation of our society carried out by bipartisan enablers who seek personal fortune and fame at the expense of our sovereign integrity and public interest. In a land girt by sea on the bottom of the Earth, a certain mindset has emerged in the political players who claim to represent us, using their positions as shoehorns for the subjective and disproportionate interests of powerful minorities in business, media and industry lobby groups, rather than bulwarks to protect us from them. And our society has decayed as a result.

Now there is an entire generation born post-Howard’s WorkChoices, that have come of age amongst the geopolitical kabuki of the endless War on Terror, and experience the degradation of social cohesion, the inertia of financial mobility, and the realities of climate-induced national disasters, pandemics, and irresponsible global leaders propelling us forward to war. There seems to be no one left in parliament who can devise coherent policy. In the despairing haze of eastern seaboards in flames, and the post-pandemic pivot from Morrison to Albanese, the public has seen and heard nothing but foreign-influenced ideas like the half trillion-dollar sovereign neutering that is AUKUS, the opening of sovereign resources to be plundered by tax-dodging multinationals, the abrogation of independent foreign policy at the behest of a forceful ally, and an unforgivable support for a real time genocide in Gaza and an invasion in the Middle East by Israel.

When we elect our representatives into parliament, we need to know that they represent the best of us, that’s how it works. And that is not happening any more. In the democracies of not-too-long-ago Australia, before millennial marketing strategies, focus groups, analytics, and consulting grew like a tapeworm in the appendages of the Major Parties, the social contract between voters and MPs was intact, and now it is not. The result of decades of failure and the abandonment of independent sovereign thinking, beset by financial, environmental, humanitarian and political turmoil, is the awakening of the sleepy Australian voting bloc, and framing a redefinition of what our country needs to be at the grassroots.

Starving for ideas that never came from our leadership class, the Australian people express their disappointment with clarity, and begin to dream in the absence of our leaders, with one of the only meaningful outlets left being the ballot box. The tattered social contract that had been in place for almost eighty years, molested by a decade of coalition negligence and disingenuousness, has disintegrated in the clumsy hands of an ideologically and inspirationally moribund Albanese government, who are even prepared to allow the unconscionable to appease the same players as their predecessors. No talk of free childcare can mask a nation with homeless children that is spending half a trillion dollars to buy vapourware submarines, and no social media ban is going to lift the hearts of Australians wondering why we still haven’t outwardly condemned Israel’s genocide.

A soundtrack has been on repeat since World War two, played on the cassette of a Holden or Ford; a social contract made in the image of an aspiring nation. The simplicity of the major party duopoly worked in the spirit of that contract for decades: in exchange for a fair go, in good faith, Australians would go about their day, and leave the people they elected to do their job to ensure that exchange would continue. But the Ford and Holden factories are closed now, and most of the good jobs aren’t around anymore, and haven’t been for some time. The affordable and public houses slowed right down while the corporate profits rolled right up along with the cost of basic nutrition, and the wages haven’t kept pace with the greed-spiral inflation. The social contract is broken, Canberra doesn’t believe it, but the grassroots is already growing. All we need is a match.