Simon Holmes a Court tries hard to be politically unaligned, but I wonder if it is time for his baby, Climate 200, to grow up overnight and banish the scourge of our Two- Party-Preferred electoral duopoly (2PP).
Byron Bay of Climate 200 is alarmed by the “Backroom deal to kill independents”, and is worried about our catching the Trumpian virus.
He has asked for more donations to fight this dystopia.
No doubt, we must take action to ward off despair.
But will doing more of the same be sufficient to keep the mutant Trumpian virus at bay?
The “Electoral Reform” Bill, the fig leaf for Labor’s revenge upon the intruders (Teals & Indies) which was presaged by Albo’s drastic cutting of staff to CIs upon taking up his reins, may be rammed through to “legally” execute the drawn-out death sentence upon the CI movement, in the new year.
Is it time for Climate 200 to precociously take on an existential threat?
- The mafia-like duopoly will execute Labor’s plan. The Teals have given the Libs a lot of grief, and Labor no doubt wants to get rid of the Greens in the Lower House. Regrettably, the 2PP electoral system furnishes the duopoly with the legislative power to do so.
- The voters cannot be fully relied upon to see the duplicity, the corrosiveness, and the need to rise against this eventuality.
They are jaded.
- For instance, reports of children killed by daily bombings in Gaza are now normalised. Voices of pain and outrage barely heard.
- Morrison’s unloveliness is now a distant memory, and cries and angst about the cost of living and housing crises dominate the media.
- Trump, a convicted felon, with an unlovely persona, promising to Make America Great Again but revenge for his political enemies, has triumphed. Our richest woman, Gina Rinehart, attended the victory party at his personal palace.
Peter Dutton’s Trumpian-light promises of fake hope might just be the floating straw for our jaded population, should nothing else, iconoclastic, intervene.
- More of the same unlikely to cut it
The recent Qld elections tell us that.
- Steven Miles, always smiling, hopeful, and with nothing to dislike about him, offered a wonderfully embellished basket of more of the same, but got trashed.
- The Greens failed to increase their votes in their four targeted inner Brisbane seats, despite significant increase in more of the same: door knocks, leafleting, corflutes, etc.
- A DISRUPTION might be the answer
In an ideal world, Community Independents and Citizen Juries would flourish within a robust and untarnished democratic polity. But we are a long way from that.
One poll, some months ago, suggested that four Teals and at least one Green are at risk of being swept away by Peter Dutton’s planned tsunami.
The tide that floated the Teals and the Queensland Greens in 2022 seems to be going out.
A Disruption that might work is a high-octane campaign for Proportional Representation (PR) as a response to the Electoral Reform Bill.
PR is no panacea. It will not banish all the bad habits of the two old Parties in one fell swoop, but it will change the culture of our political system overnight, with salubrious impacts on the tenor of debates on the floor of the house, and on the quality of candidates who will come forth and be elected in successive parliaments. We have had the foretaste of that with the presence of the Teals and Indies in the last two years.
Just imagine for one moment: had there been 14 to 18 Greens in the last four or five parliaments would we have sent soldiers to Iraq? Or allowed Robodebt to be introduced? The litany of Morison’s ineptitude, deliberate or otherwise, would likely to have been nipped in the bud or interrupted soon after. With the established voting pattern, minority governments would become the norm under PR – STV, and a civilised parliament would ensue, out of grudging necessity at first and affirming experience in due course.
The first 14 pages of the JSCEM Report in November 2023 summarised succinctly the pros and cons of PR, citing amongst others the relevant submissions made. But the Chair, a young Labor MP declined to recommend PR, saying that it is a complex issue that the government should investigate further. Instead, she recommended a vastly increased number of MPs – music to her faction bosses, with more spoils to doll out to the anointed. The truth of the matter is that in due course PR would spell the end of the power of faction bosses. Thus any aspiring Labor MP would be dead in the water to be seen to be promoting PR.
The Reform Bill should provide the lightning rod to spearhead a campaign for Proportional Representation. The 2PP is anachronistic, and now thoroughly dysfunctional. The Greens got 10% of the votes in 2019 and less than 1% of seats in the Lower House – a cardinal sin against the canon of one-vote one value; and the winning at any cost mentality that largely gave us Abbott’s Climate wars, and quite likely now Dutton’s cold war – modular nuclear power stations.
The gladiatorial show goes on, led by two adversarial hermetically bred he-men, but they are now ganging up to kill all intruders, as if to preserve the gold of their televised TV wrestling show, season after season.
Only PR will break up this mafia-like duopoly.
- Not for Climate 200?
The Greens burst into the political scene after their founders’ successful campaign to save the Franklin River wilderness. But look at what the Greens have moved on to! Housing, homelessness, integrity of public life, and the list goes on.
Climate 200 will evolve similarly. The Teals have got rid of Morrison, and injected rigour into our legislature. Climate change is no longer a politically do-or-die issue. Unfortunately, like the killing that goes on in Gaza, it is old hat. Thus, the duopoly feels emboldened to enact laws that will strangle the (Commie) Indies and the (blocker) Greens. There are even talks of their teaming up to preference the Greens last on their How to Vote cards.
Is it not time, for Climate 200 to move on to their next stage of growth?
When the foundational structure of a heritage mansion is rotten, no interior refurbishment will endure, despite best current practice. To wit, Don Farrell’s electoral reform bill, that hails loud on transparency and limiting campaign expenditure, that not only ignores the pre-eminent part of the 2023 Report from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, but provides the enrichment of the two old Parties through public funding whilst at the same time set in train the legal strangulation of Teals and Indies. Aye, one stone, two birds.
The country needs Climate 200 more than ever, to muscle up and put out this “Donfather’s” wildfire, for good.
Chek Ling arrived in Melbourne in 1962, on a Colombo Plan scholarship, to study electrical engineering. He never left. He has been an activist in the Chinese community since 1984. In 1988 he was spokesperson for the Queensland Chinese Forum to denounce the State Liberal Party. He is the author of Plantings in a New Land, an oral history of the Chinese in Queensland, published in 2001 under the auspices of Centenary of Federation Queensland.