In his 2005 Australia Day address, the Governor-General identified a crisis currently threatening democracy in this country. No, it wasn’t truth in government; nor did the interference of foreign powers get a look in. Rather, Australia must find new ways to get its young people engaged in the democratic process, or else.
At first glance, the Governor-General is right. One only has to look at the declining numbers of young Australians joining political parties to discover that something is afoot. Yet this trend does not illustrate that younger generations are apathetic towards Australian democracy—far from it.
While I cannot profess to be the voice of young Australia, I can identify one reason for their retreat from the major parties: as vehicles for change, the parties have lost sight of the big picture. The Australia Project—who we are and where we are going—has been all but abandoned over the last decade and a half.
Australia’s democratic process has entered a political era in which the aspirational voter is king; where it pays to be acquisitive, not inquisitive. As a nation, we’re debt-laden but looking to own more, leaving the vast majority anxious about house prices and interest rates.
The youth voice, if it can be surmised, is one largely unburdened by mortgages and 2.4 kids. Rather than the next interest-rate hike, younger Australians have their gaze fixed on bigger issues. What sort of country is Australia becoming? What is happening to our environment? How can something morally wrong be economically right?
The commitment by both major parties to maintaining continuous budget surpluses has effectively rendered them incapable of nation building. The policy horizon, already firmly fixed within a three-year election timetable, has been constrained further by an aversion to public investment. Young people are starting to figure out that in such an environment, the only way to work towards a better Australia is from the outside.
Australia’s mainstream political parties have become increasingly divorced from the very concerns that once defined them—and their membership. They have become amorphous, private institutions with private agendas. People with passionate positions and policy ideas no longer join them. Into this void has stepped a succession of representatives motivated more by the possession of power than what to do once they possess it.
Instant democracy is at the heart of the problem. As the parties have become steadily more focused on winning the next election, phone polling has