Politics in Australia bears all the Darwinian traits of having been
chastened by a cruel and unforgiving country. It tends toward the
visceral and agonistic. Moments of genuine inspiration are fleeting,
and it rarely reaches above the level of the soporific and outright
banal.
It is hardly surprising, then, that belief — not in the narrowly
religious sense, but in the sense of a clear conception of principles,
of something beyond one's own ambitions, of the ultimate purpose of
one's involvement in politics in the first place — has never been a conspicuous quality among its politicians.
This ambivalence toward belief is not peculiar to Australia, but in
Australia it has taken on a distinctly antipodean flavour. Australians
have a pathological aversion to sanctimony and cant, yet are suspicious
when politicians present as a little too earnest or believing too
deeply. They brand them as fanatical or, worse, ideological.
Australia has thus become a kind of politico-moral wasteland, in
which the public expects the cynical instrumentalisation of the
political process from their elected representatives, who in turn
deliver cautious, small-target performances that barely conceal wanton
ambition. Mutual cynicism, as Mark Latham bitterly observed, is'the gold standard of modern politics'.
But the ubiquity of cynicism in Australian politics, while making
democracy possible, has simultaneously bastardised the political
process. Just consider the erosion of the categories of Left and Right,
celebrated by many as an advance on the brutal partisanship of last
century. Isn't this merely the consequence of the subtraction of belief
from politics?
And so, when the cynicism that pervades Australian politics is
combined with our compulsory voting system, elections are reduced to
the pendular swinging of public whimsy (the'It's Time' factor emptied of any consequence). Principled opposition becomes craven opportunism.
Kevin Rudd and Malcolm Turnbull are archetypal expressions of this
corruption of politics. They are, as it were, political doppelgängers.
Their colossal personae and fortunes in the polls have come to occupy
the place once held by a Party's platform. What results is the
anomalous existence of political parties without political properties,
which is to say, without binding narratives or 'ideologies'.
While the emptying-out of the political domain is currently to the
advantage of the incumbent government — particularly one that has
raised prevarication, spin and avoidance to an art form — it is
disastrous for the Opposition. After just two years, we have witnessed
the return of the Liberal Party to the dire situation that confronted
them after their defeat at the 1993 election.
In March of that same year, B. A. Santamaria lamented to Malcolm Fraser: 'The
country desperately needs a credible alternative to Labor.