A pox on both your houses. How can the major parties address the rise of populism in Australia? Andrew Charlton & Lachlan Harris analyse the issue and suggests some responses in 2016 Monthly essay. Key paragraphs are edited verbatim below.
Where did all the 2016 federal Townsville LNP votes go? Family First more than doubled its vote to 3.6%, the Greens vote jumped to 6.3%, Katter’s Australian Party won 6.9% and Pauline Hanson’s One Nation candidate seized a staggering 13.5% of first preferences. Overall, the minor party vote in the electorate skyrocketed by more than 25%.
In almost every part of the world, populists are overturning establishment politics with fiery rhetoric and incendiary manifestos. President-elect Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US, Nigel Farage and Jeremy Corbyn in the UK, Marine Le Pen’s Front National in France, Spain’s Podemos, Italy’s Five Star Movement, Alternative for Germany, the Danish People’s Party and other populist parties have secured staggering growth in their support bases, and many have snatched political victories that would have been unthinkable just a few years ago.
The factor that really unites populists around the world, including in Australia, isn’t an idea. It’s a sentiment. And that sentiment is disempowerment.
The popular left-wing view is that we are witnessing a rebellion by “globalisation’s losers”, who haven’t shared in the prosperity of the past 25 years.
Trump and Brexit are a frustrated reaction to the loss of identity, culture, safety and morality by citizens who value their flags, their Bibles and their guns.
Historically, periods of populism haven’t occurred at random. Populism flares up predictably during interregnums, those tumultuous gaps after an old regime has collapsed and before the new order is born… Populism surges after systemic financial crises.
Since Federation, majority government has been sandbagged in Australia by our system of single-member electorates, which has limited the presence of minor parties in the lower house. For example, in the 2016 election minor parties and independents won 23% of the vote but just 3% of the seats in the House of Representatives.
If the trend of rising support for minority parties grows, and given the durability of the long-term trend there are good reasons to expect it will, Australian politics could change fundamentally over the next two or three elections. One potential outcome is that the major parties could be forced into governing coalitions with smaller, more extreme parties – Labor with the Greens and the Coalition with One Nation – for the purpose of securing an elusive majority (the German model). Alternatively, Labor or the Coalition could go rogue, and transform into populists themselves (the Trump and Corbyn model). Another possibility is that one or both major parties could simply cease to exist as governing parties, overcome by the political power of populism (the Greek model). Or, the major parties could govern together in a tacit power-sharing arrangement forced on them by the sheer size, and lunacy, of the populist crossbench (the Irish model).
For a start, both sides must recognise the reality of their new circumstances: they are now in a two-front war. The traditional left–right battle rages on, but both sides are also fighting a guerrilla army of populists on their flanks.
To ensure they can fight effectively on two fronts, major parties will need to transform themselves in three ways: by rebuilding their structures, refocusing their policy agendas, and radicalising their political strategies. The era of hyper-centralised policy-making, controlled preselections, leadership instability, divvying out of political favours, and dubious donations must come to an end, because these features of major-party politics are the source of public disempowerment that is fuelling the populists.
Without an empowering structure, membership dwindled, there were fewer new ideas, and the centre ground became stale. “The Corbyn phenomenon did not represent a resurgence of interest in the Labour party,” warned British journalist Janet Daley, “it represented a collapse of interest in it.” The vacuum in the centre was filled by a well-organised minority on the far left. Cruddas says the Blairites “woke up to find a party that has totally disappeared in front of them. They don’t know what to do.”
Developing a coherent economic framework will be hardest for major parties in the centre-left, which have struggled to articulate a convincing economic narrative since the triumph of the market economy in the 1980s. There has hardly been a centre-left leader anywhere in the world in more than 30 years who could look down the barrel of a TV camera and deliver a simple, compelling explanation of what a progressive economic policy means in the 21st century.
Any mainstream policy agenda that is not specifically focused on delivering fairly distributed income growth is likely to be overwhelmed by the empathetic appeal of political populism. he economy, stupid,”
Future leaders will need to adopt a new mantra: “It’s the economic distribution, stupid.”
Some are trying to copy the populists. This is the Corbyn, Sanders and Trump strategy – all of whom tried to convert major political parties into populist movements. The other political option for major parties – and the most familiar in Australia – is the small-target strategy.
Major parties will need to focus on delivering significant structural reforms that may be opposed by powerful vested interests. If they are not willing, or not able, to take political risks and pick political fights, they simply won’t be heard.
The good news is that the populist wave is arriving later in Australia than it has in the rest of the world, and is arriving more slowly, giving both major parties a real chance to reform their structures, reshape their policy agendas, and refocus their political strategies to more effectively buttress against the storm.
A pox on both your houses – the rise of populism – by Andrew Charlton & Lachlan Harris, The Monthly, Dec 2016
Related reading
The ALP must repair trust between leadership & members – by James Button Oct 2020
Labor has a significant problem, Premier Daniel Andrews says following branch-stacking scandal – ABC News 17 Jun 2020
12 steps to Labor reform – a petition from Open Labor & the Independents – Sept 2020
A pox on both your houses – the rise of populism – by Andrew Charlton & Lachlan Harris, The Monthly, Dec 2016
Andrew Charlton – author of Ozonomics and Fair Trade for All (with Joseph Stiglitz) and two Quarterly Essays, ‘Man-Made World’ and ‘Dragon’s Tail’. From 2008 to 2010 senior economic adviser to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd. He is a co-founder of the strategic advisory business AlphaBeta.
Lachlan Harris – co-founder and the CEO of One Big Switch, and former senior press secretary to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd.
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