2023 has taught us good government’s no longer good enough

As a one-time internet evangelist, I feel like I have a lot to answer for. Readers who’ve been following my scribbling over the long term — there’s no accounting for taste, eh? — will recall the “war in the internet” stuff I used to write, and my basic thesis that the then-relatively new platforms of social media would act in a similar manner to previous historical waves of interconnectedness, like printing and literacy, or factories and mass production.

Looking back, the problem with that argument was less that it was wrong and more that it was wildly optimistic and rather dismissive of the dislocations generated by, say, little things like the Reformation. More than a decade later, it’s a lot easier to see the dislocations that have been caused by social media than the positives, in the same way that, say, Germans who’d just had their city razed in the Peasants’ War might have been inclined to see the negative aspects of Protestantism in the 1520s.

In other words, I suspect it’s not just me who thinks that, somewhere in the past decade, something got badly broken in Western society and it hasn’t been repaired yet. The connectedness that was the hallmark of what was sloganised as web 2.0 — user participation, interoperability, constantly available connectedness on portable devices — seems to have been used far more effectively by malignant, cynical and exploitive forces than forces for anything positive — and we now live in their world.

More recently I’ve argued that this dramatic moment in media history — the most significant since the printing press — happened to coincide with a deeply damaging phase of neoliberal economics, from the financial crisis onward, marked by income stagnation, corporate greed and a growing belief that the economic and political system operates not in the public interest but in the interests of corporations and the super-rich.

At the same time, the collapse in the economics of public interest journalism has created a vacuum that sucked in misinformation and propaganda. Throw in on top of that minor things such as our heads being substantially rewired by screens and the internet, and the anxiety and confusion that causes. And each of these has reinforced the damage of the other. The backlash against neoliberalism, often in the form of tribalism and resentment, finds the perfect vector in social media; the decline of journalism and its replacement with propaganda, misinformation and clickbait fuels resentment and alienation; opportunists exploit all of them to sell division and grievance.

Division and grievance make for great campaign tools but aren’t much chop for governing competently — if that is even your goal. It wasn’t the goal of Donald Trump, or Boris Johnson, or Scott Morrison, whether they were capable of governing or not. They weren’t interested in dealing with the complexity of responding to real-world problems and didn’t view government as a mechanism for achieving public policy objectives, only for delivering for donors. The rest was marketing, culture wars, presentation. All got found out by COVID-19, although Morrison’s cavalier, I’m-still-going-to-the-footy approach was overruled by state premiers. Issues within his own control, such as protecting people in aged care, a COVID-19 app, or the vaccine rollout, proved well beyond him.

The common factor, however, between Trump, Johnson and Morrison was the focus on marketing and presentation over governing. Trump hailed from The Apprentice. Johnson from that British institution, the panel show. Morrison, notoriously, from marketing. They were all about politics-as-drama, in different guises: the reality TV show spiv, the clownish pseudo-intellectual wisecracking his way across British TV sets, the sloppy, second-rate tourism marketing campaigner.

What’s this got to do with 2023? The UK, because of its longer election cycle, is still limping towards the end of the shambolic aftermath of Johnson’s disastrous time in power. In the US, the Biden administration faces a Trumpian House and the near-certainty that Trump will be the GOP presidential candidate next year, even if — particularly if — he is in jail.

But Anthony Albanese’s government, 18 months on from replacing Morrison, is engaged in a fascinating experiment: to see whether the profound damage that has been inflicted on our polity by the combination of neoliberalism, social media and the decline of journalism can be reversed. Its strategy is to try to govern competently and actively, with a belief that government can, and should, intervene effectively in the economy, to restore trust in government by being reliable and delivering what it promises, and to achieve an economy that works much more in the interests of workers and consumers than corporations.

This strategy isn’t universal across government. There are key areas where Albanese and his government richly deserve criticism. The biggest is climate change. Labor is simply not serious about meaningful climate action. It is certainly far more serious than the Coalition, which remains dedicated to the cause of climate denialism. But Labor’s climate goals are low-ball, insufficient for what is needed to prevent disastrous levels of global heating, and offset by its enthusiasm for encouraging more fossil-fuel exports to help the planet cook.

And just as the Coalition is addicted to donations from fossil-fuel interests, so Labor takes large sums from climate criminals — and unlike the Coalition, Labor has climate denialism built into its very institutional and financial DNA via the Australian Workers’ Union and the maritime and mining divisions of the CFMMEU, which oppose meaningful climate action.

On transparency, too, Labor has failed. It has finally delivered a national anti-corruption body. Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus shuttered the obscene prosecution of Bernard Collaery, and is engaged in overhauling whistleblower protections and reducing government secrecy offences. Hopefully the major review Dreyfus initiated into the appalling National Security Information Act — which garnered little mainstream media attention — will lead to big changes there as well. But Dreyfus has played a lone hand. On the eve of 2024, we’re still waiting for Labor to implement its election promise of reforming political donations disclosure laws. And the Commonwealth remains a backward jurisdiction when it comes to transparency basics such as ministerial diaries and FOI laws.

But economically, 2023 has been a year of delivery for Labor. Inflation has fallen. Wages growth has improved significantly. The economy continues to tick over despite being relentlessly hammered by an ideological and out-of-touch Reserve Bank. The government has delivered one budget surplus and is poised to deliver a second. Unemployment still has a three in front of it and participation is at an all-time high, more than 20 years since we were warned its persistent decline would herald the perils of an ageing Australia. The industrial relations playing field has been titled a little less dramatically in favour of employers.

Labor’s economic threats and failures fall into the category of failing to address lingering problems of neoliberalism. The post-pandemic spike in foreign students and temporary workers, as in other countries, is placing pressure on housing, prompting a belated response from the government to curb poor-quality migration. The disgraceful pandering to Qantas remains unexplained, although Treasurer Jim Chalmers’ establishment of a competition taskforce to examine competition law within Treasury is very welcome. But compared with most of the 2010s, Labor has delivered outstanding results for workers and fiscal policy.

Why then is the government finishing the year amid polling gloom and a resurgent opposition? The selling of its economic message has been poor. Its agenda has infuriated not just the usual Labor haters in the Murdoch camp but the business cheerleaders at The Australian Financial Review too. Its handling of the NZYQ case and the resulting freeing of a number of criminals from indefinite immigration detention was — like most things the Department of Home Affairs touches — sloppy, and handed Opposition Leader Peter Dutton a boats-like issue to hype. And the defeat of the Voice referendum appeared to completely halt Labor’s momentum.

Despite the eccentric view of media figure Stan Grant, the Voice proposal was indeed modest, and consistent with Labor’s competence-based, steady-as-she-goes approach to government. It amounted to a recognition that First Peoples were, well, the land’s First Peoples — something even many overt racists on the No side could come at — and the establishment of an advisory institution at the heart of the governmental process to formalise and expand genuine partnership in policy development and implementation for Indigenous peoples — a partnership focus that was one of the few achievements of the Morrison government, delivered as it was by its then-Indigenous Australians minister Ken Wyatt.

The Voice at its heart was driven by the goal of making government more effective, of ending decades of announcements, extra funding, stunts like spending a week in an Indigenous community and top-down, white-centric policymaking, in favour of building Indigenous expertise and knowledge into policy at ground level. Its very focus on administration and policy development was exactly why many Blak sovereignty supporters objected to it, both in its legitimisation of a colonial power structure and its lack of genuinely radical change.

That a rational measure intended to enhance the competence of government and recognise basic historical facts was defeated so heavily by a campaign of lies, conspiracy theories, blatant racism and appeals to white grievance, should give pause to Labor believers who think that providing rational, competent and trustworthy government will be enough to win voters back from the world of incompetence, irrationality and theatrics characterised by Morrison, Johnson and Trump. That thing that has been broken in the past decade might be voters’ belief that governments can ever be trusted, that governments can ever be active and interventionist in the public interest, rather than sectional or corporate interests.

All that can be relied on, perhaps, is self-interest, the resentment that someone, somewhere, is getting something you’re not, and the secret, and increasingly not-so-secret, sadistic delight one might feel in seeing those less fortunate than oneself get kicked by the powerful.

In other words, division is a hell of a drug. And a very profitable one for those who peddle it, even if the long-term effects are hideous.

We’ll see how true this is this time next year, assuming Albanese elects not to go to the polls before 2025. Come December 2024, we may be seeing preparations for the inauguration of Trump’s second term, and his quite explicit promise of retribution and dictatorship fuelled by clear Nazi rhetoric.

The Biden administration, whatever its faults, has delivered for American workers, with high wages growth, lower inflation and probably the biggest, most protectionist industry policy seen since the 1960s, designed to onshore whole industries and bring high-tech manufacturing jobs back to the US. But it may be swept aside by that avatar of hate, white resentment and division, Trump, backed by the machinery of the corporation that, more than any other, generates profits from hate, white resentment and division, News Corp.

If that happens, a nightmare awaits. Trump, to give what little credit he is due, has made no pretence this time of what he wants to do to American democracy.

It could be I’m old, and my daughter doesn’t let me sleep enough, and I’m too pessimistic. But it’s hard to see evidence that whatever broke at some point in the past decade is healed, or healing at all. The damage may be irreparable. Perhaps 2024 will surprise me. I fear not.