On doing the same inadequate shit over and over again until the end of democracy

Just a few quaint pandemic-y years ago, Scott Morrison, Prime Minister, secret Health Minister, secret Finance Minister, secret Industry, Science, Energy and Resources Minister, and secret Home Affairs and Treasury Minister, possessed the Professor-X-like ability to put my mind into a trance. To telekinetically move my arm to the tv remote, to click off, and, without me having any conscious realisation I was about to open my mouth, mutter something like ‘what a creepy fuck’, or ‘that’s the guy that shat himself at Maccas,’ or ‘they used to make prosperity preachers with charisma, what the hell happened?’ Morrison possessed real power over my mind and body and I resented him for it, amongst other things. 

In normal times (for argument’s sake let’s define those as not right now) the profound unseriousness of Australian politics induces in me physical pangs of cringe and lengthy spells of dissociation. I have the wrong job. This week, attempting to watch the Sky News leaders debate, the vibe, some-fucking-how, is even more desperate. The cringe has been replaced with an internal dance between wide-eyed terror and being too bored to be terrified. Our national imagination lies in a gutter slowly filling with Nazi piss. 

Australians do not seem to understand where fascism comes from, or even what it looks like. If you’ve been expecting BMWs and blonde Germans trying to round up Polish Jews, consider that Cybertrucks, American oligarchs gorging on entire economies, publicly defying their own judiciary, and deporting legal residents for saying Free Palestine while brown people are fed through a genocidal meat grinder ticks a bunch of those fascist boxes, folks. The frog is well and truly boiling.

We get this next part wrong here, too. Don’t just be on the lookout for a single villain like Mr ‘Temu Trump’. The real threat is the normalisation of depravity, and the cowardly acceptance of corruption and cruelty across society. We have this in droves. As fascism ascends it crosses party and national lines, always benefitting small in-groups of ruling elites. TL;DR hyper–rich white racist assholes. We have a bunch of those too! Selling out is bipartisan: just look at the cowards surrounding your personal life that apparently haven’t noticed the infanticide of the most oppressed people on the planet. Fascism is hatred and silence, supremacy and fear. Enablers are just as responsible.

Don’t cry for decorum when surrounded by barbarians profiting from an apocalypse. We have problems that cannot be solved by pretending Gough Whitlam is still representative of the ALP, or by pining for Hilary, for Kamala, for Biden. To long for the politics of Before Trump is to miss the bigger picture of this horrific global moment, because everything that came before this has led us here by virtue of its inadequacy. A fascist like Trump is not an aberration, he is an inevitability of the neoliberal rot we knowingly walked into because it made a few of us rich enough to buy a portfolio of houses and do a bunch of shitty cocaine. 

Let’s flip a popular myth on its head, not just because it’s bullshit, but because we are in more trouble than we think we are. The only way you can waste your vote in Australia is to vote for more of this shit. More of not good enough. Because the consequence of not-good-enough on a longer timeline, as evidenced in the United States right now, is that you inevitably get much, much worse. 

***

Every three years Australians are assaulted with shopping centres, petrol stations, Sky News banshees skullfucking the truth, and, eventually, the calming presence of Antony Green playing with his little Parliament dollhouse. You walk away from the messy ritual with a sausage in a piece of bread and a vague sensation of having done something or other. Ultimately, all of this is distilled into which of the two major parties gets to form government: team red T-shirt or team blue T-shirt.

This matters. The parties are not identical. There is a qualitative difference between being led by a racist assshole with dead, psychopathic eyes, and being led by a spineless hack that stands for more of this please, Daddy. I’m not here to argue they’re the same thing. But I am here to tell you that they both aren’t good enough, that the stakes are too high, and that we do have other options. Desperately necessary options. 

Because, on a timeline longer than each election cycle, something else is happening irrespective of the governing T-shirt situation. Something more important. No matter the result of any of these elections, the rich are getting richer, the poor are getting poorer, the planet keeps heating up, and democratic rights are disappearing. 

This is by design, it is not a naturally occurring phenomenon. 

Put as simply as I can: the major parties across the entire western world have been captured by interests that are not in alignment with ordinary people, not in alignment with a decent future for humanity, and therefore, the only logical thing Australians should do is dilute duopoly power as much as possible. Vote for a minority government. The sellouts need adult supervision. 

And because of our beautiful voting system, the only real risk is that we might accidentally save ourselves from more of this depraved stupidity.

Caption: Josh Burns, my local ALP member, shaking hands with Captain Genocide, Benjamin Netanyahu. Consider this photographic evidence of the excellence of preferential voting because if this guy was my only non-Liberal choice I’d just pay the fucking fine

 ***

Semi-soberly, please consider the real limits of Australian democracy. 

Not our voting system, which is better than most, but the actors that populate it, the debates that fill it, and the possible futures it generates. 

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister who doesn’t want to hand the Trump regime $370 billion to buy imaginary submarines. Submarines that, if they ever appear, will be loaners so we can serve as cannon fodder in a war the US starts with China because China’s economy has eclipsed theirs. I dunno, guys, that sounds irresponsible to me! You cannot vote for a governing party that wants to back away slowly into a hedge and distance itself from the fascists in the White House.

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister that will do anything meaningful to stop the rich getting richer and the poor getting poorer. Under both red and blue governments, the wealth of the richest 200 Australians has risen from the equivalent of 8.4% of GDP in 2004 to 23.7% of GDP in 2024. That’s gross, and no one even talks about this. The public purse is being pilfered by the ultra wealthy, our assets have been sold off, and, shock horror, there is a direct correlation between this and the fact that younger working people cannot afford to own houses anymore. You know all that money that the government gave out during lockdown? Because billionaire oligarchs that own giant holes in the ground and shitty newspapers and/or shitty shops aren’t taxed enough, basically all of it, your money, has trickled up through to Gina Rhinehart by now. The major parties talk about cuts to your power bills and vouchers for fuel. Fucking fantastic, but neither approach even attempts to address the real problem – because they have been bought by the real problem – and this trend will continue to get worse. You get to vote for tinkerers, not fixers. 

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister that will stand with the overwhelming bulk of humanity against Israel’s US-funded genocide of Palestine. You cannot vote for a PM that will expel Israeli ambassadors, join South Africa’s case at the International Criminal Court, sanction, boycott and divest from a genocidal apartheid ethnostate committing the largest livestreamed infanticide in history. You cannot even vote for a Prime Minister that will acknowledge reality on this issue. Albanese should be able to utter the g-word, he’s the Prime Minister of a nation founded on it. It is a truly pitiful, craven, morally bankrupt state of affairs.

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister that will commit to no new fossil fuel projects, the precise thing the world’s most exasperated, depressed scientists have been screaming for us to do for decades now. Don’t be confused by toxically dumb media and ALP propaganda. It’s not enough. The fires. The floods. The collapse of life-sustaining ecosystems. You already see it. Both options for Prime Minister – if left without adult oversight from the crossbench – will continue to build new gas and coal projects to the great misfortune of all our children.

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister that wants a functioning, working, viable corruption commision. 

You cannot vote for a Prime Minister that wants to push truth in political advertising laws or run a royal commission into the mind-numbing propagandic shitshow that is our mainstream media.

I wonder why.

I don’t.

None of this is good enough. Why so many enthusiastically accept it and don a red/blue T-shirt, I’ll never understand. You can just go to Uniqlo. You can join local sporting clubs. At least they tend to be against genocide.

***

These are not small issues. These are existential, future-of-humanity issues, and apparently we’re not even talking about any of them during this campaign. 

On this isolated, amnesiac island, we treat the debasement of humanity as though it matters less than if we can say ‘sweet cheeks’ or ‘retard’ inside the boardroom of a law firm. Wouldn’t wanna be too woke while we’re signing weapons contracts with genocidal war criminals on a boiling rock filled with fucking Nazis!

These uniparty similarities do not reflect community sentiment. Genocide, destroying the climate, Nazis, and getting ripped off by rich people aren’t inherently popular things. These parties are machines in lockstep with media both social and traditional that shape popular will. 

So what happens on the longer timeline, then, if these problems remain profoundly unaddressed? 

People get poorer, angrier, more anxious, more traumatised. Social cohesion withers further, distrust grows, and then all of a sudden someone comes along and says ‘It’s the foreigners, and the trans people, and the lefties.’ And these messages seem more convincing than they used to; they have broader appeal when there are masses of the dysregulated, when you’re too cold and hungry to recoginse you’re being ripped off by the guy telling you it’s the foreigners, too angry and scared and deliberately misinformed to pick up on the lies. All of a sudden brown people end up in concentration camps in El Salvador for saying Free Palestine. 

On these crucial issues – all of which need to be addressed to avoid future societal collapse – we are allowed zero meaningful choice. 

All of us should ask ourselves what that really means about the true contours of our democracy. 

And then we need to ask ourselves what we can do about it.

*** 

America always rolls ahead of our trends, but we tend to get there eventually. Look at the size of the SUVs filling the roads. The things our politicians aren’t allowed to say. The culture war lingo forced upon us like tirades against ‘DEI’ and woke. The origin of the content slop we gorge our brains on. The owners of the misinformation factories we spend most our time searching for dopamine hits on. The American military bases popping up here, there, and everywhere. That whole Gough Whitlam/CIA chestnut everyone seems to memory-hole away. To an alarming degree, we already live in America.   

The only way you can waste your vote is to ensure we continue along this path. 

Mercifully, our voting system is different. We don’t need to choose the lesser evil. Because of the beauty of preferential voting, on a local level I can vote with my conscience against Zionist genocide, against the economic immiseration of the future, against the erosion of democracy, against new fossil fuels, against trying to be best buds with fucking Nazis, and still ensure, in the worst case scenario, that the Liberal Party never get near my vote. I just put them below the ALP, near the bottom of my ticket, just above the bootlicking head-injury happening over in Cliver Palmer land.

On a national scale, if enough people feel this way, a minority government would be supervised by human adults. It would need to work with sane, independent people possessing empathy that haven’t totally sold out their souls and your future. Sure, some of the arses parked on the crossbench belong to absolute cooked units. Some of them want to fight crocodiles and drive giant SUVs through national parks. But in some of them, you can see the spark that might just save us from ourselves. 

Ironically, to save democracy, we don’t have any other choice.