We are in deep trouble, Australia. We are guilty under international law of crimes against humanity for our colonial past, our enduring racism, our mistreatment of asylum seekers and now, colluding with Israel, the United States and other nations in the ongoing travesty that is the genocide of Palestine.
Humanity has gone quite mad. We always were mad to some degree, but we seem to be getting worse. Such is our foolishness and arrogance that we refuse to learn from history. Nor, it seems, do we learn from the present unexamined, unquestioned, acceptance of partisanship that we mistakenly believe is democracy. So much so that a minority government or hung parliament is deemed to be a political disaster. It is not! Such an outcome is, rather, a public demonstration that the nation is arbitrarily divided by the very partisan system it holds as sacrosanct. Moreover it is an unavoidable and therefore excellent opportunity to actually reflect on and negotiate something that might end up being the ‘public good’. Heaven forbid!!
The idea of democracy didn’t start out with the party. The party is a ‘Jonny- come- lately’; an aberration that is convenient for the privileged, wealthy and powerful, and inconvenient for the rest of us. Our parliamentary system of government and opposition is, really, an indefensible nonsense. By default (as we imported it from Britain where it continues to beleaguer the nation) it is adversarial and violent. It is wasteful in the extreme of every resource – particularly including the most qualified and competent people for leadership roles. It is particularly wasteful by those in opposition who can’t seem to rise above the personal ego; who oppose for the sake of opposing rather than offering alternative ideas and working with the government for the benefit of the public. Ahh, but that’s not the game: the game is to win government in order to stroke the ego and pretend that you are running the show; the show that is still being run by the real government – the privileged, wealthy and powerful partisan interests in the private sector throughout the world. The plutocrats, not the democrats; the ‘kakistocracy’ – a delightful label for those least qualified to govern; the self-important, self-interested wealthy who exercise their influence on elected governments to further their personal interests at the expense of the majority of citizens and the trashing of the earth.
Parties are held together by collective passion that demands loyalty to the party ideology. The individual conscience is neutered. On the rare occasions when a conscience vote is permitted, those who depart from the party line are noted and generally sanctioned in some way at some time. And our parliamentarians dare to call this a ‘robust democracy’. Thankfully it’s robust at least in its constitutional demand for compulsory voting.
Parties are also held together, perpetuated and their policy directions either influenced or set by the individuals and corporations that fund them. It’s no secret. If you spend your money, you expect something for it. Those who donate to parties are no different. And why should they be? This is the system we accept as the norm because no one has successfully challenged the validity of the party system and the money it floats on. And no one has successfully challenged the goodness (or otherwise) of the party system either. Nor has anyone successfully challenged the absolute insanity of allowing corporate donations to political parties while at the same time expecting that donors would not have any influence on political decisions and outcomes. Denial lives on.
Perhaps the most succinct, intellectually and ethically valid challenge has come to us from Simone Weil, the French philosopher, educator, activist and mystic. In her little book, “On the Abolition of All Political Parties” (1957, Paris) she asserted that for something to be retained, it needed to be ‘good’. She put forward a sound argument that the political party does not do one bit of good – goodness being truth and justice and then the public good.
Weil posits that the first quality of a politician is integrity. Integrity requires independence of judgement, independence of judgement rejects partisan edicts, partisan edicts stifle a person’s conscience and the very sense of truth and justice is silenced. The party depends on members succumbing to collective passion – the antithesis of individual, reasoned conscience and active intent. Tellingly, she identified three criteria of a political party: a machine to generate collective passion; an organization designed to exert collective pressure on the minds of all its members; its first objective and also the ultimate goal of any political party is its own growth without limit.
Because of these three characteristics, every party is totalitarian – potentially and by aspiration, and each party member cannot not lie; they either lie to their party (that they wholeheartedly support the platform), to their constituents (that they will wholeheartedly lobby for their interests above all else) or – worst of all – to themselves (that their conscience is in harmony with the party position).
Political partisanship can do nothing other than deny truth and justice and the public good. Change for the good always comes from the voices of dissent outside the dominant system. Always. Because partisanship and its associated collective passion has come to be so normalised in our political system, that normalisation flows also to the economic functioning of the system. So we accept both the existence of billionaires (many of whom have legally privatised public assets), together with other billions of citizens in abject poverty. Robust democracy? Arguably not, depending on where life has landed you.
But there’s another dark aspect of partisanship: alliance – be it local, national, or global. And depending on the interests of the various parties to the alliance, the outcome can be truth and justice and the public good, or destruction and death on an obscene scale. The alliance of Israel and the United States is the latest unholy example of the latter. To our as-yet largely unacknowledged shame, Australia is complicit in this genocide. In fact, we were founded on occupation, dispossession, genocide and apartheid, and have not yet acknowledged that shameful and inconvenient truth. Nor have we begun effectively redressing the destructive impacts of our colonisation either on the first peoples or on the land.
We are in deep trouble, Australia. We are guilty under international law of crimes against humanity for our colonial past, our enduring racism, our mistreatment of asylum seekers and now, colluding with Israel, the United States and other nations in the ongoing travesty that is the genocide of Palestine. Anthony Albanese and ministers of government have been named by the ICC for their complicity in genocide. We share their guilt unless we do everything in our power to require them to withdraw from our alliance with those perpetrating the genocide.
Our blind and foolish alliance with these nations must be severed. It takes guts to stand against the bullies of the world. For decades we haven’t seen leadership for justice and truth. We only see pathetic political gamesmanship while the world goes to hell. Rather than visit Israel, the best thing our top law man could have done was to invite Netanyahu to Australia – not to say a word to parliament or anywhere else – but to arrest and detain him and deliver him to the ICC where he is to face charges as a war criminal.
John White
John White was raised in Mount Barker, Western Australia, in a traditional working family, and attended the local state school. He worked as a farmer, singer and radio broadcaster before training and working as a secondary school teacher. Later John retrained, and has worked and taught for the past forty years in psychotherapy, counselling, group dynamics, restorative justice, spiritual direction and clinical supervision. John is the author of three books – No Bars Hold (Xlibris, 2010), Uncommon Sense: Reclaiming Humanity (Coventry Press, Melbourne (2019) and Making Australia Fair: Challenging Privilege, Wealth and power (Coventry Press, 2021).
John is married to Jennifer. They have two adult children and four grandsons. John and Jennifer live in Toodyay, WA, and are active advocates for truth and justice.