As the 2010 Federal election loomed, May 31 saw a debate at La Trobe University regarding what had gone wrong (or ‘right’) with the Rudd government. Respected and influential journalists Paul Kelly and Lenore Taylor and professors Judith Brett and Robert Manne offered an extremely critical account of the performance of the Rudd government over recent months. As has become common in the media, the verdict was unanimous and commentators, despite their different political sensibilities, agreed on the Labor government’s loss of credibility. From extreme popularity after his 2007 victory against Howard, Rudd had reached a point of complete distrust. Criticism during the discussion was centred on Rudd’s inability to stand up for anything real or keep even the most emblematic promises made before and after his election. The failure of the insulation scheme and of the educational revolution, the withdrawal of the Emission Trading Scheme, the failure to prepare adequately for the tax on mineral resources, the return to extremely inhumane politics in terms of refugees and many more back flips were raised in the discussion. Despite some interesting points, very little debate followed as it seemed clear to all that the government could no longer be trusted: it had gone back on most of what it had promoted and promised, sometimes in a matter of mere weeks.

The failure of the Rudd government was mostly attributed to Rudd himself. The prime minister was accused of concentrating power around his own persona and of making amateur mistakes, notably by refusing to allow experienced politicians to join his ranks. It even seemed fair to blame Rudd, as he had himself promised that the ‘buck’ would stop with him. Interestingly, what might at first have seemed a brave move was central to most critiques. As the prime minister appeared to take many decisions unilaterally, his self-centred stand became a self-fulfilling prophecy as the failure of his government became, in the eyes of most, his own personal failure and responsibility.

While these accusations had their merit, it is futile to throw the blame at Rudd or attack a singular politician. More interesting for this article was when all participants but Robert Manne (who chaired the session), made known of their own accord their belief that Rudd would nevertheless win the coming election. Brett, Kelly and Taylor all recognised the opposition’s lack of credibility and the extremely controversial figure that is Abbott. Therefore, the 2010 electoral battle was to involve a distrusted prime minister and a leader of the Opposition who had recently admitted he should not be trusted when ‘put on the spot’. In this game, the Labor cabinet appeared more convincing to the participants than the opposition, if indeed convincing at all.

This situation shows how the individualisation of elections, and of politics in general, has become problematic in the past decade. Of course, this is not new; leaders have always played an important part in voters’ choice. Yet it is striking to see the shift in the balance between party ideology and leadership in the run-up to a major poll. This has had two clear consequences. The first is that ideology and convictions have been relegated to the background and the more superficial side of a politician has become increasingly important. It is common nowadays to see many leading politicians across the world attacked by both journalists and adversaries on the grounds of their private life rather than on their platform. Politics has become little more than typical management and marketing.

The second, maybe more important point is that this focus on individuals has led to a lack of questioning, a lack of criticism of a system which is enjoying an incredible benevolence among the media, academia and – possibly as a result – the electorate. This was obvious in the discussion on May 31. Everyone freely admitted that Rudd had a terrible record, to say the least, and that yet, with a much worse opponent, he would still win the election. Candidates other than those of the two major parties were not mentioned, as if they merely represented token candidatures. This lack of democratic debate was further highlighted by the little media attention given to the Greens during the campaign. While these leading political commentators gave an honest and harsh description of the situation and acknowledged that the choice between the bad and the worse would be extremely difficult, there was a complete absence of reappraisal of the system as possibly responsible for this dead end. Rudd and Abbott and their advisors were to blame; the system itself remained unquestioned. At no point during the discussion was this coming election portrayed as what it was bound to be if one follows the logic of the commentators: a travesty of democracy.

For Paul Kelly, Rudd’s lack of conviction and numerous back-flips were the product of a new generation of politicians whom he compared to men like Paul Keating and John Howard. Contrary to his predecessors, Rudd was ‘obsessed with political tactics’. While the editor-at-large of The Australian was correct in his evaluation of Rudd as an opportunist, even a ‘brilliant’ one, Rudd was not as original as Kelly made him out to be. On the contrary, the behaviour now former prime minister should be seen a direct consequence of the drift democracy has suffered over the past three decades and more particularly since Howard was elected in 1996. Dishonesty and strategic posturing in politics is hardly new and has proven time and again to be an incredible skill come election time. However, it can be argued that a new trend emerged in the 1980s once the Soviet model began to fail, or more precisely as its failure became increasingly obvious. With the fall of the USSR, the Western democratic model became hegemonic and unquestioned to the extent that we were grandiloquently promised the ‘end of history’ and the victory of the capitalist model. The result of both the failure of the communist alternative and the acclaimed, albeit exaggerated, victory of capitalism led to the narrowing of the offers on the political spectrum. Individualism and the ‘victory’ of neo-liberalism the world over imposed a vision of society where individuals should fend for themselves and where the state should no longer be relied on to provide some hope for a better day.

In Australia, Howard was the culmination of this trend, and his eleven years in power entrenched the use of populism as a central part of electioneering. It made demagoguery yet another means to dominate what is democracy only in name. No longer are the people either central or sovereign. No longer are they even treated as the beneficiaries of a system which, it was once dreamt, would be by the people, for the people. Instead, the individual has become just another customer to whom parties have to appeal to sell their product and win over the market. Consumer satisfaction comes only second to the increase in profit; the quality of the product can be neglected as long as it sells. What was expected from giant corporations has now become the ethos of governments and politicians. The world might be facing its biggest challenge yet with global warming, and even very limited reforms seem out of reach. Profit remains central to the agenda and despite alarming reports, the two major parties in Australia appeared completely unwilling to offer anything but superficial, even ridiculous measures. As a result, the 2010 election consecrated one of two parties which had both made the conscious decision to put the health of the planet itself in jeopardy. Whatever happens as a result of global warming, be that something or nothing, the lack of foresight and the complete and conscious disregard of hundreds of scientific injunctions should send a signal to the people of Australia as to the state of their democracy. To put it simply, if Australia was a house with defective wiring and our politicians its owners, they would decline calling an electrician for the ‘common sense’ reason that the house had never burnt down before. Once faced with the consequences of their careless behaviour, they would justify their decisions by claiming what they did was in the name of the people, in the name of democracy.

And that is where the heart of the matter lies and where democracy took yet another turn for the worse. With populism and demagoguery becoming central to electioneering in the 1990s, the concepts of the people and of democracy itself have become increasingly perverted. This became clear when Pauline Hanson gained incredible appeal between 1996 and 1998. As most extreme right leaders across the world, the racist leader of One Nation claimed to be the voice of the silent majority, the ‘voice of the people’. To this day, it remains unproven, and frankly unlikely, that this silent majority agreed with her. Similarly, it remains to be proven that Australians did not feel ‘relaxed and comfortable’ under a multicultural Australia; it remains to be proven that had disinformation not been central to the actions of the Howard government, the population would not have rejected the measures taken against indigenous people and asylum seekers and the Howard government not been re-elected.

Therefore, if a politician ever made opportunism and populism central to his politics in Australia, it was not Kevin Rudd, but John Howard. While Howard had the convictions Rudd lacked, he also had no qualms about misleading the people and playing on their basest instincts. Just like Rudd and Gillard, Howard showed in his endeavours very little respect for those he was supposed to represent. Howard deliberately perverted the ‘common sense’ of the Australian people and used it to push contestable and contested politics even further. By portraying Aborigines as privileged, Howard was not stating what a majority of Australians thought, he was instead borrowing ideas from a bygone era that most Australians had realised were irrational and harmful. By presenting a few boatloads of asylum seekers as invaders, Howard turned what was a serious humanitarian issue into a question of survival for Australia. He turned what deserved a pragmatic answer into what triggered emotional and unfounded fears in the population. With no less than five election victories despite blatant disinformation and misleading of the public, Howard became an extremely successful model in which Australian politicians could find inspiration.

Rudd was therefore not original, and, in 2007, he merely beat Howard at his own game. Rudd understood that to win the election, he had to depict himself as the holder of ‘common sense’, he had to reclaim hegemony, he had to reclaim the mythical people. This did not necessarily mean that he had to believe what he said; Howard may not have believed Aborigines were privileged or that asylum seekers would invade Australia. As Howard had done to Beazley on the asylum seeker issue, Rudd played on Howard’s weaknesses and magnified them to the extreme. Howard’s stubbornness in refusing the principle of an apology was an incredible gift to Rudd. So was his stance on climate change. If Rudd enjoyed two years of honeymoon, his opportunistic brilliance played a major part.

That 2010 was a nightmare on the other hand, can be blamed on his short-sightedness. Rudd was elected at a time when the Howard government was running out of steam. Even by doing nothing, Labor would have seemed a breath of fresh air; by following in Howard’s economically conservative footsteps and promising at the same time token progressive measures, Rudd was allowed to take what seemed to be a convincing victory. To many, the signing of the Kyoto protocol and the apology to the indigenous people of Australia were a good start, even though it soon became clear these were for the most part only symbolic measures. Yet they allowed Rudd to enjoy early extreme popularity. Once real challenges arose however, it did not take long for Rudd to show the limits of his commitment to progressive reforms and to fall back into what appears increasingly to be a parody of Howard’s politics. Instead of standing strong and fighting crucial battles such as climate change and refugee issues, instead of facing the disinformation the opposition and lobbies would send his way, Rudd backed down even before the first blow. He recoiled in the face of the challenge of convincing the Australian electorate a progressive path was the only way. In his failed attempt to remain in power, Rudd reneged all he had so ostentatiously promised; the only way he saw to win the next election was to break the trust the people had placed in him.

As Rudd proved unable to bounce back, he was replaced by Julia Gillard who had overseen most of his own failing policies as deputy leader. Was the system fixing itself? Could Gillard, despite having played a major part in Rudd’s failures, prove more credible, more original, more democratic than her predecessor and her opponent? Her first speech on June 24 only confirmed otherwise. Undeniably, her speech was a good, ‘pragmatic’ speech. While some were worried Gillard’s leftist past could resurface, the speech made clear her leadership had been granted by the right-wing factions of the Labor party. Rudd had not been the most radical Labor leader, and yet Gillard would move further right to fill the gap between her and Abbott, proving further the abandonment of ideological positions by our leaders in place of marketing strategies.

Howardesque, she told Australians not to be deterred by censorship and political correctness, and that she promised she would ‘reward those who work the hardest, not those who complain the loudest’. Gillard would reclaim the battlers, ‘the people who play by the rules, set their alarms early, get their kids off to school, stand by their neighbours, and love their country’. Credit was even given to Howard and Costello for ‘continuing’ Labor’s reforms, a clear sign to the right-wing electorate and something unthinkable only three years earlier. Gillard mentioned the importance of the carbon tax for the future, not before a vague ‘community consensus for action’. On the resources tax, Gillard dropped the advertising campaign, asking in return for the mining industry to do the same and to ‘negotiate with its mind open’. Further, in what was perhaps a telling slip of the tongue, Gillard thanked Australian soldiers for ‘honouring the US’. Another reassurance for the right, Wayne Swan would guide Australia back into surplus, back into the black. Saluted by Pauline Hanson, she declared that the ‘people’ who are ‘anxious about border security’ are ‘expressing a genuine view’. ‘This country is a sanctuary’, words no longer reminiscent only of Howard but of the White Australia policy.  Gillard promised the people a voice; instead of a Pacific Solution, she promised a ‘Timor Sea Solution’. Symbolic of the personalisation of politics, this change of leadership was at first enough for Labor to reclaim 7 points from the Greens, who, to the relief of journalists, fell ‘to a more normal level of 8 per cent’ (my emphasis).

Thanks to compulsory voting, Australia was spared the acknowledgement of the flagrant disinterest the increasing level of abstention has highlighted in other western countries. Yet it seems hardly conceivable that a majority of Australians voted for a project rather than against a person. Voting, and as a result democracy, has become for many little more than a formality. The Greens, which it was clear would perform well in this election, were given very little space in the media and were therefore prevented to gather a much more important support as they retained the stigma which had been attached to them during the previous slur campaigns against them. Further, that over one in ten Australian voted for this party was soon played down as focus shifted to independents.

Similarly, the small yet increasing part of the population which had lost faith in the system altogether, and which often found refuge in abstention, was ignored or condemned as anti-democratic for its refusal to participate in the one act that had come to represent democracy: elections. The increase in donkey votes and blank ballots in the 2010 election has been condemned and ridiculed, despite the fact that they reached record levels. While almost one million registered voters did not go to the booths, choosing to face fines, more than 700,000 votes were informal. While 2010 marked the highest ‘turnoff’ since compulsory voting was implemented in 1925, it has often been derided as the ‘Latham effect’, invoking the former Labor leader who called on voters to vote blank for lack of a good choice. The aim of this denunciation was clearly to lessen the importance of the political gesture of rejecting all candidates and, by association, the system. Some NSW electorates, where blank ballots represented almost 15% of the vote, had been considered the ‘worst performers at the 2007 election, but this time, they were even worse, swinging decisively towards informal’. While it is hard to know whether abstention is active or passive and while it remains marginal, rather than as an anti-democratic gesture, such behaviour, along with protest votes, should be thought as a serious hint about the state of our democracy. If discarded, voting becomes no longer the act of choosing those who represents one, but merely the act of legitimising one version or the other of the hegemonic ideological paradigm.

While people remain engaged in politics, the lack of a positive alternative might lead to the further ‘deresponsibilisation’ of the people, to people caring less and less about the state of politics and about the future of their community, let alone about the future of the world in an era when most decisions taken by our leaders affect us all. As various philosophers have argued, the current hegemony of right-wing populist discourses is the result of the limiting equation between democracy and voting. This equation was the result of the growing acceptance of liberal democracy as the ‘least worst’ system. It was reinforced by the abandonment of social movements from important parts of the population disillusioned by failed left-wing progressive attempts, and the superficial comfort provided by an increasingly individualist form of society in western countries, rendered ever more tolerable, if not appealing, as the situation worsens in the rest of the world. While after the Second World War, the idea of democracy became linked to elections, particularly as a reaction to both the authoritarian fascist and Stalinist regimes, this acceptance became a burden as the moderate left accepted the rules of the market. Eventually, the parliamentary left abandoned its claims to class struggle, and as such, the possibility for people to counterbalance a system which had slowly became an oligarchy, a government of the elite, by the elite, for the elite. By the twenty-first century, elections meant little more than the endless reproduction of previous governments. They have become the illusion of change, the illusion of choice between professional politicians increasingly coming from the same schools and backgrounds, and more importantly, with the same acceptance of the hegemonic political and economic order.

This has resulted in a backlash as politics have progressively become divorced from the ‘people’, disillusioned parts of the electorate losing interest in their governments. As an insecure and delegitimised left failed to recover from the fall of the USSR and the uncovering of the crimes perpetrated under the name of ‘communism’, this backlash took two faces: abstention and disenchantment with electoral politics, and the rise of the extreme right. Parties such as One Nation took advantage of the state of politics, and of the disillusion and fear present in part of the electorate as globalisation made the future uncertain, multiple crises loomed and a growing third world began asserting itself. While some of those who had in the past turned to moderate left-wing politics, now turned to abstention or to the Greens, important parts of those who were less politicised, yet who retained faith in the liberal democratic process, turned to extreme right protest forms of politics. The consequent yet almost ‘silent’ form of abstentionist protest vote was ignored or condemned as undemocratic and the vote for the Greens derided as some kind of elitist vote. On the other hand, the vote for the extreme right was taken extremely seriously by politicians as it was this part of the electorate that could be swayed the most easily. In an attempt to assuage their fears and/or to reawaken their governing elite, this part of the electorate encouraged those in power into a race towards populist politics. In doing so, ethno-exclusivism became accepted as the only alternative to a government less and less concerned with the interest of their people and increasingly focused on a global economic interplay abstract to most.

Therefore, instead of undertaking a reappraisal of politics and democracy and taking into account all forms of protest votes, politicians chose to interpret this particular vote as the will of the people, thus as the democratic will. This in turn allowed the elite to both claim to work for democracy by paying lip-service to ethno-exclusivist politics, but, more importantly, to reinforce their hegemonic hold on power, strengthening the idea that the rule of the people would always be the authoritarian irrational ‘rule of the mob’. By this stratagem, the elite locked the democratic and political process into a vicious cycle: the people should be heard to a certain extent when there were elections to be won and to keep the system ‘legitimate’, but its judgement as a whole should not be trusted, as proved time and time again by their irrational behaviour. Liberal democracy became therefore self-justified as it offered a safe democratic choice, albeit limited and committed to the continuation of the existing system.

Written in June 2010

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