How To Reclaim Democracy

Australians are currently engaged in a slow and methodical revolution – weakening the country's major parties and electing independent MPs instead.

Australia has always been a democratic innovator. The secret ballot began its modern widespread usage in the then-colonies on the Australian continent in the mid-19th Century. The world’s first permanent independent electoral commission was established in South Australia, as was Saturday voting – which is the norm everywhere in Australia. South Australia was also the second jurisdiction after New Zealand to allow women to vote, and one of the first to remove property ownership from suffrage. Preferential – or ranked choice – voting was adopted Australia-wide in 1918, and voting was made compulsory in 1924.

Many of these innovations are credited with infusing stability into Australian politics and society – notwithstanding our political parties’ fondness for “knifing” sitting prime ministers. Compulsory voting means that elections are won and lost on kitchen table issues. The dark emotions of ideology are not particularly beneficial for either political ambition or to “get out the vote”. Preferential voting gives oxygen to a wide range of political forces, while also generally producing majoritarian governments.

This stability is incredibly important to the Australian psyche. Australia is a conservative society – in the philosophical or dispositional sense, rather than as a political identity. The distinction here is incredibly important, as Australians look outwards at parties like the Republican Party who may call themselves “conservative”, yet have instead become intensely radical, chaotic and destabilising. Donald Trump seems almost perfectly designed to offend Australians’ sensibilities.

The political concept that best captures Trump’s rise to power – Max Weber’s “charismatic authority” – has negligible traction in Australia. Of Australia’s prime ministers, it is only Bob Hawke (1983-1991) who possessed anything resembling this idea. And his public connection was mostly due to the very low-stakes of his fondness for having a beer.

Instead, Australians have an innate suspicion of charisma. Potentially this is due few of us actually possessing any, but it’s also tied to what is known as the “tall poppy syndrome” – our tendency to denigrate those striving for too much success. Part of this is driven by the country’s egalitarian spirit, but another part is a mechanism for social policing. To prevent what is considered the greatest sin in Australian society – being a dickhead.

This syndrome may hinder Australians from achieving the great heights of human endeavour, but it also keeps our politicians in check. Populist politicians in the minds of Australians are mostly dickheads. They are seen to be breaking the central covenant of Australian politics – that the country’s affairs will be guided with competence, and without any personal grandstanding.

While these political and social guardrails have mostly worked well to keep Australia stable and prosperous, there is currently a strong public sense that this covenant is being broken. Our individual politicians may still be relatively boring, but our political parties are seen to be straying from the public expectations of them. There’s too much cynicism and bad faith, a lack of integrity and accountability, and not enough focus on bigger structural concerns. Australia’s short three year terms doesn’t help parties lift their eyes towards the horizon.

Australia’s two largest parties - the Labor Party and the Liberal Party – are also 20th Century beasts struggling to find consistent policy platforms within the new conditions of the 21st Century. Demographic shifts, new sets of economic interests, and new cultural motivations are scrambling how these parties see themselves, and how they engage with the public.

To rectify this, Australia’s spirit of democratic innovation has kicked in – but rather than any new top-down structural initiatives, this innovation is now emerging from the bottom-up.

Australian politics is in the midst of a very Australian mutiny. Slowly and methodically the public are building a new party system. They are doing this not by completely wiping out political parties – as their Canadian cousins are fond of doing – but by simply going seat-by-seat over several elections and replacing MPs from the major parties with independents. This is maintaining the stability of the system while simultaneously transforming it into something new.

Rather than driven by grand ideas and political passions flowing out of universities or crowding into city squares, this Australian political rebellion began in a sleepy rural electorate, around the kitchen tables of ordinary citizens. It started with a very simple question – how can politics work a bit better to improve the conditions in our community?

Rural electorates in Australia tend to be massive. The seat of Indi in the state of Victoria is far from the largest, but it is still the size of Belgium – yet home to only around 160,000 people. It has a pair of small cities in Wodonga (pop. 40,000) and Wangaratta (pop. 30,000), some prime agricultural land, but mostly covers the “high country” of the Australian Alps.

Believing that issues within the electorate were not reaching the halls of power in Canberra, in 2012 a group of locals formed a research project called Voices for Indi. The group traversed the seat, organising chats in people’s homes, seeking to build a decent picture of the district’s interests and concerns. They called the format of their research Kitchen Table Conversations – ideally having no more than nine people to encourage active participation, and structured around a series of key guidelines designed to facilitate conversation. The ideas sourced from these discussions were then collated into a report.

The plan was to take their report to their local MP, the Liberal Party’s Sophie Mirabella, hoping to have her advocate for these ideas in the Liberal Party room – as the country was moving towards a federal election the Liberals and their coalition partner the National Party were likely to win (and did). Yet the meeting didn’t go as planned, with Mirabella wrapping it up in ten minutes and declaring “The people of Indi aren’t interested in politics.”

Mirabella’s dismissal of the group shifted the plan. Voices for Indi would instead find a candidate who could best represent their report to run against Mirabella. The former president of Australian Women in Agriculture, Cathy McGowan, stepped up, and despite Indi being one of the Liberal Party’s safest seats, Mirabella’s 20 percent margin vanished, with McGowan winning the seat by 439 votes. Mirabella tried to reclaim the seat in 2016, only for McGowan to extend her margin to 8705 votes.¹

This caught the eye of some residents of Sydney’s affluent North Shore disgruntled with their local MP. This MP happened to be the former prime minister, and human faultline, Tony Abbott. Despite being replaced as PM by his party in 2015, Abbott was biding his time on the backbench in the hope of finding his way back into the PM’s seat. Instead, a new Voices for… group was formed, it followed the organisational guidelines laid out in Indi, and at the 2019 election Abbott was gone.

Then came the rush. The defeat of Abbott exposed a fracture in the conservative Liberal Party (apologies for the cognitive dissonance for American readers). The country’s wealthiest electorates – traditionally the Liberals’ impenetrable bulwark and where they would run their best political talent – could no longer stand the party. Unlike in the U.S where wealth has simply swapped parties, these electorates could never bring themselves to vote for Labor. However, the prospect of an independent MP who embodied the pragmatic classical liberal space the Liberal Party was abandoning offered them a path forward. More Voices for… groups were formed and in 2022 six more seats were won.

What began as a civil society group simply seeking to take the local temperature has evolved into a movement known as the Community Independents Project. It has public clout and reach, well organised crowd-funded financial backing, and an army of volunteers who dwarf the numbers that the major parties are able to muster. As Australia moves towards a 3 May federal election, there are now 37 Voices for… groups across the country running candidates for the 150-seat House of Representatives.

While core issues like climate change and political integrity have enabled these local candidates to gain national media attention, the broader traction they’ve secured has relied on two core pillars that resonate with Australians’ conservative dispositions.

The first is that political parties are increasingly seen as agents of instability. While the Labor and Liberal parties have reacted to the rise of strong independent candidates by claiming they will destabilise the parliament and country, Australians think the opposite.

As American politics dominates our newsfeeds, Australians look at the U.S and recognise that a strict two-party system creates nothing but distrust and division – scything through national politics, local communities and even families. That there is a rabid “us vs them” culture, and inflamed political passions which lead to party advantage being deemed more important than national interests. There’s also a hell of a lot of dickheads. To prevent this from influencing Australia further, the only solution is to weaken political parties, and weaken the incentives that drive their tribalism.

Party discipline has always been strong in Australia – compelled by the Labor Party’s strict policy that to vote against the party means to be expelled from it. While the Liberal Party allows its MPs to vote their conscience, the party’s media cheerleaders relentlessly hound anyone who does – effectively keeping MPs in line.

This is no longer acceptable to Australians. What the public instead seem to be striving for is a return to a 19th Century political culture – where political affiliation was far looser and an MP’s primary purpose was to exercise individual judgement on behalf of their constituents.

While this may be a romantic and hopeful vision of politics, the second pillar driving the movement is more striking and consequential – Australians are seeing male politicians as a destabilising force. The eight MPs elected so far via the movement have all been women, and of the 37 candidates running at this election 30 are women.² As the movement swings back towards its rural roots, of the seats most likely to be won by these candidates, only one is a male.

The eight community independent MPs at the time of the dissolution of parliament. Photo credit: Community Independents Project

Politics obviously attracts those keen on power, but as political scientist Brian Klass has written in his book Corruptible, politics also attracts those with “dark triad” personality traits – narcissism, being manipulative, and showing a lack of empathy. These traits tend to be more pronounced in male politicians. Our current volatile global era is clearly possessed by the egotism, fervour and flailing of modern men. Australians are concluding that it's actually men who are too emotional and irrational for political power.

What marks the Community Independents Project as distinct as an emerging political phenomenon is that it is a pro-system movement, rather than an anti-system one. The nature of the movement is based on incremental change – of doing the legwork to build and consolidate itself within existing structures, not seeking to tear them down. It understands that it's not Australia’s political system that is the problem, just the way it is being utilised.

Australia’s national character would never tolerate grand political gestures, or any politician claiming to be liberal democracy’s saviour. Instead, protecting liberal democracy is achieved via the very simple idea of ordinary citizens thinking about what matters to their community, building new civil society groups around these issues, and channelling these through genuine and trustworthy local candidates. In doing so, most importantly, the Australian public are exerting themselves as the real owners of Australia’s political system, not its major parties.

1. McGowan decided to retire after two terms. Following this, Voices for Indi found a new candidate to run for the seat, Dr Helen Haines, and she has now served two terms (and is standing again this election). This was the first instance in Australian federal politics of an independent succeeding an independent in a seat. And an indication of the community trusting the Voices for Indi group, rather than just the candidate.

2. There has been a redistribution of seats at this election and New South Wales has lost a seat. The abolished seat, North Sydney, was won by independent Kylea Tink in 2022. So the movement effectively starts with seven seats at this election. However, some of the area North Sydney covered has gone into the seat of Bradfield, where an independent candidate, Nicolette Boele, came close to victory last election. It is likely that Bradfield will be won by Boele this election.

The Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is an independent body and it decides seat boundaries, not governments. So the abolition of North Sydney was not due to political disgruntlement by a party. As political parties can get nowhere near the AEC.