If you can keep your head when all about you
Are losing theirs and blaming it on you,
If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,
But make allowance for their doubting too;
If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,
Or being lied about, don’t deal in lies,
Or being hated, don’t give way to hating,
And yet don’t look too good, nor look too wise.
To quote the famed opening stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s “If” may seem anomalous at this disconcerting and tangled political moment. After all, the late Victorian English writer fell out of favour posthumously — and is now cancelled in some circles — for such sins as being an unreconstructed British imperialist and a suspected white supremacist. Yet those words, and especially the opening injunction, do seem to speak to this time.
In the immediate aftermath of Donald Trump’s electoral triumph it would be easy to lose equilibrium and faith in our values, or succumb to sanctimony, fight perfidy with perfidy and give way to anger at those whose worldview appears so alien. Yet none of these reactions, while natural enough, would be constructive.
Nor, here in Australia, can we afford to be complacent about what Trump’s victory might portend for our own politics. For a variety of reasons, historical, cultural and institutional, the political centre is more resilient in this country than in the United States and many other parts of the globe.
Our long and robust democratic tradition stretches back to the nineteenth century, when the Australian colonies led the world in innovations like the secret ballot, payment of members of parliament and the enfranchisement of women. Our national founding was mostly prosaic — an extended exercise in horse-trading among political representatives — and was yet a fundamentally democratic process capped by the vote of the people.
Unlike the United States, with its exaltation of individual rights, sanctification of state rights and instinctive resentment of government interference, Australia is typically described as having a majoritarian or utilitarian political culture. This predisposes citizens to be open to trading individual rights for the collective good and accepting that government has a responsibility to go at least some way to levelling social outcomes.
Where other countries have been susceptible to demagogues and snake oil political salesmen, Australians have shown a keen antennae for detecting and repudiating charlatanry. The public’s relatively speedy working out of, and subsequent revulsion towards, Scott Morrison is an illustration, as is the fact that Peter Dutton, for all his pretensions to be a political strongman, is blessedly free of the performative excesses of his counterparts overseas. The rhetorical crudities and behavioural transgressions of a Trump would simply not wash here.
Australia also boasts precious, albeit undervalued, democratic guardrails, most notably the century-old practice of compulsory voting and an independent, impartial national election authority, the Australian Election Commission.
Nonetheless, a strain of conservative populism has penetrated Australia’s right-of-centre political parties this century. John Howard, the dominant figure in this millennium, initiated this trend, and the 2001 federal election, arguably still the totemic political contest of this century, was a landmark moment in its development. Howard weaponised the issue of asylum seekers — in part to stave off Pauline Hanson’s One Nation Party insurgency but also to continue his party’s efforts to cannibalise Labor’s working-class base — and along the way recreated himself as the nation’s steely protector against a foreboding background of unauthorised vessels on Australia’s high seas and the 9/11 al Qaeda atrocity in America.
Not coincidentally, that was the election at which Peter Dutton arrived in federal parliament, quickly emerging as a Howard favourite because of his unforgiving hunting after “welfare cheats.”
Once the right-wing populist genie is out of the bottle it is difficult to put back in. Indeed, flirting with the dark angels of politics easily begets extremism. Witness the Republican Party’s morphing from the Bush–Cheney era of aggressive neoconservativism to the Tea Party insurgency and then the MAGA movement.
Australia’s conservative parties have not travelled anywhere near as far along this ideological continuum. Yet current events suggest we may be on a slippery slope. Howard, at heart respectful of institutions and conventions, disassociated himself from Trump’s run for office because the former president’s refusal to accept the 2020 result was “not compatible with democracy.” But Dutton gives not the least hint of disquiet at the direction of the Republicans in the United States.
To the contrary, in fact, as veteran political commentator Niki Savva has observed, Dutton is mimicking Trumpian tactics by making inflammatory attacks on immigration, for example, and impugning trusted institutions like the AEC and CSIRO. On the day after the American poll it was telling, too, to see a photograph of a smiling Gina Rinehart, a chief Dutton confidante, celebrating with Britain’s version of Trump, Nigel Farage, at Mar-a-Lago, the president-elect’s Florida residence.
In imitation of Trumpism but also amplifying Howard’s strategy, Dutton is focusing his party’s appeal on the outer suburbs and rural and regional Australia. He appears to envisage a future in which the Liberals become the natural home for economic battlers and especially the lower-educated, in a mirror of the Republicans’ growth constituency in the United States.
But Dutton might also be discovering that the forces of extremism can whirl out of control. Most notably, in still another echo of the Trumpian revolution, some of the most militant conservatives in the Coalition are agitating to ignite a debate on women’s reproductive rights. And so the slippery slope quickens.
Can this cycle be arrested? America’s nominally left-of-centre party, the Democrats, has undoubtedly failed in this regard. On its watch — during the Clinton and Obama administrations — neoliberal policies that razed industries and destroyed traditional working-class jobs were left largely uncurbed, economic and cultural inequalities were allowed to fester, corporate excess not only went untrammelled but the culprits were let off the hook when their avarice and recklessness ended in widespread distress for the vulnerable and poor, and the party became typecast as synonymous with a wealthy establishment elite (complete with orgies of celebrity endorsements at election time).
Australia’s Labor has a far better record than this. The governments of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating modernised and internationalised the economy through market-based reforms yet cushioned those changes by extending the social wage, including through measures as the cherished institution of Medicare and compulsory superannuation.
In common with social democratic parties across the world, however, Labor has frequently appeared philosophically adrift and bewildered about its mission in the twenty-first century. Notwithstanding some worthy measures, the current Labor government is wedded to cautious incrementalism — to modest renovations of the status quo rather than weather-making change.
As prime minister, Anthony Albanese has demonstrated little capacity to persuasively articulate a case for major reform, to inspire or galvanise public sentiment, or to cogently explain the sum of Labor’s policies or what lies on the horizon. Nor has it helped that his public persona — as an ordinary, relatable, wrong-side-of-the-tracks-reared bloke — has crumbled since he was revealed to have acquired a multimillion-dollar coastal property and a taste for upgraded flights and other perks.
To repeat: this is no time to lose our heads. But Labor must treat the challenges of this time with urgency and conscientiousness. This demands a degree of boldness from the government, and needs the prime minister to spread his wings — if, indeed, he is capable of growth in office. It requires policies that don’t merely tinker at the edges of inequalities but extend to systemic change with a real impact on the welfare of voters. And it needs a dexterous language with emotional freight that binds constituencies together and is attentive to the fact that disadvantage and disempowerment comes in different guises, economic, cultural and identity based. •
