Public ideas
A renaissance person in public life
A glimpse into a mind dedicated to the public purpose.
Big Ideas host Natasha Mitchell describes Barry Jones as a politician who, in office, had the audacity to read and to think for himself, rather than relying on talking points prepared by ministerial minders.
That’s her introduction to a 54-minute discussion between Jones and veteran journalist Kerry O’Brien about complexity, politics, and love to use the ABC’s title. The discussion is also about Jesus, Margaret Thatcher, Gough Whitlam, Bob Hawke, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Abraham Lincoln and Donald Trump.
But it’s not a ramble. It’s a highly structured discussion, starting with an insight into how Jones thinks, how he seamlessly moves between the humanities and the sciences, before going into public policy (particularly industry policy), Labor politics (it’s ugly), and the resurgence of the authoritarian right (never underestimate Trump as a communicator who can relate to people’s pain).
The public’s report card on democracy
In spite of a few gains in Australia, democracy is struggling to sustain public support. This is serious.
A long way from where 98 percent of Australians live
Labor stalwarts are probably heartened by finding that public trust in government, parliament and other institutions has bounced back since we dispatched the Morrison government in 2022. But that recovery was from a very low base, and trust in the Commonwealth remains low – we are still far more likely to trust our local and state governments than we are to trust the Commonwealth.
These are some of the findings in Martyn Goddard’s post Democracy’s crisis of confidence, where he pulls together research not only from Australian sources, but also from global sources, about trust and confidence in governments and public institutions. The results are mixed, but Goddard sums them up in a headline “Autocracy is popular democracy isn’t”, a point illustrated by a graph revealing that while 83 percent of Chinese generally trust their government to do the right thing, only 47 percent of Australians and 41 percent of Americans trust their governments to do the right thing.
When one looks through Goddard’s well-presented data, it is apparent that on many dimensions relating to trust in democracy, the media and public institutions, Australians are not very different from Americans, lending weight to the idea that our good fortune in avoiding America’s woes can be at least partially explained by the mechanics of our electoral practices – compulsory voting, a federal electoral commission, and preferential voting – rather than any basic cultural or historical difference.
Another general finding, confirming many other surveys, is that democracy seems to be in best health in the Nordic and other northern European countries.
The enduring lesson from the Weimar Republic
Hitler’s rise to power was helped by centrists too concerned for their parties’ electoral legitimacy.
The rise of the Nazis to power in the 1930s is explained not only by the misery of the 1930s Depression, an established culture of antisemitism, or by Hitler’s convincing oratory. It was also aided by parties in the centre, and on the centre-right, that made successive pragmatic accommodations with far-right movements.
This is the warning in Daniel Ziblatt’s Foreign Affairs article Warnings from Weimar: Why bargaining with authoritarians fails. He concludes:
Democracy rarely dies in a single moment. It is chipped away via abdication: rationalizations and compromises as those with power and influence tell themselves that yielding just a little ground will keep them safe or that finding common ground with a disrupter is more practical than standing against him. This is the enduring lesson of Weimar: extremism never triumphs on its own. It succeeds because others enable it – because of their ambition, because of their fear, or because they misjudge the dangers of small concessions. In the end, however, those who empower an autocrat often surrender not only their democracy but also the very influence they once hoped to preserve.
It's a strong message for so-called “moderates” in centre-right parties, such as America’s Republicans and our Liberals.