Public ideas
A radical experiment in democracy: the 2025 Boyer Lectures
A celebration of Australian democracy, with some warnings.
The first two of this year’s five Boyer lectures – Australia: a radical experiment in democracy – have already been delivered and are on the ABC’s website. This year, rather than presenting a single speaker for all lectures, each speaker comes to the subject from a different perspective. (And no, this isn’t some insipid ABC exercise in political balance: the five speakers have very different histories in public life.)
The first – Australia is freaking amazing – is by Justin Wolfers, now a professor of economics and public policy at the University of Michigan. It’s an upbeat celebration of our democratic traditions and institutions. He covers our world-leading initiatives including the secret ballot (recognized worldwide as the “Australian ballot”), universal male suffrage, and female suffrage. He goes on to cover compulsory voting, preferential voting, our independent electoral commission, and even the social context of voting in Australia – a community event on a Saturday topped off by a democracy sausage.
It’s clear that his time in the US, observing their electoral processes, has sharpened his appreciation of our electoral institutions and conventions. He also reminds us that democracies, with their inclusive institutions, become more prosperous over time than those countries whose institutions are set up to benefit economic elites. In this context he cites the natural experiments of North Korea compared with South Korea, and of Argentina and Australia in the early twentieth century – two equally prosperous countries in 1900 which took very different political and economic pathways.
One could comment that Wolfers omits to mention that most of the democratic practices he mentions have arisen through legislation rather than enshrinement in our Constitution. What Parliament gives Parliament can take away. But he is not in academic mode, giving a lecture to students. Rather he seems to be provoking us to value what we so easily take for granted.
The second lecture – Our civilisational moment – is by former deputy prime minister John Anderson. It’s more sombre than Wolfers’ presentation. He does not disagree with Wolfers on the value of our democratic institutions, but he wonders if we are committed to nurturing and strengthening them, or even if we even understand them. He points out, for example, that our school curriculums tend to overlook civics education.
He is also concerned that we seem to have lost the ability to conduct political discourse in a civilized way. The problem isn’t that there’s too much political disagreement: airing and resolving political disagreement is an essential aspect of democracy. Rather it’s that we’re losing the capacity to deal with difficult issues, which either become matters of extreme polarization, or get pushed off the agenda altogether.
His broader theme, as the title suggests, is about the global phenomenon of democratic backsliding, resulting in part from citizens’ complacency and mistrust in government. (Anderson’s lecture is also in text on the ABC website.)
Few would disagree with Anderson’s view that we need a more civilized way to resolve political differences, but some would question whether the situation has worsened over the years: fifty years ago in the Cold War era the political landscape was dominated by hysterical accusations of communist and pro-Soviet sympathy, directed at anyone on the left of the political spectrum. Now, as it was then, misrepresentation and vitriol are directed mainly against those who advocate political, legal and economic reform, and the loudest and most strident voices are those of the right-wing populist media. Anderson’s erstwhile political allies must take some responsibility for damage to the public forum.
There is certainly evidence to support Anderson’s findings on trust. While Australia ranks at #11 out of 167 countries on the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index, we’re not up with the very top countries because we fall down somewhat on “political participation”. And as is the case in other democracies, Australians have been losing trust in government.
Anderson draws on the 2025 Scanlon Survey Mapping Social Cohesion for his findings on trust in government, which relies on questions about the extent to which people can rely on governments to “do the right thing by the Australian people”. It’s a moral notion of trust, rather than a technical notion of trust based on reliability and predictability.
That’s about our measurement of trust, but what forces have driven our loss of trust in government? Maybe it’s the influence of the neoliberal “small government” movement, which represents government not as a body intertwined with society providing for the collective welfare, but as some external exploitative entity, with its own interests. Ronald Reagan was a master at portraying government as an extractive and irresponsible monster. Maybe it’s about the way we talk about taxes as a “burden”, rather than as our payment for those benefits that markets cannot provide. Maybe it’s because our governments erect a wall around themselves, separating themselves from the citizens who elect them. The most recent manifestation of this is the present government’s proposed strengthening of restrictions on Freedom of Information, covered in recent roundups and updated in a Radio National interview with Independent MP Sophie Scamps on Wednesday morning.
If the liberal international order is dying, what comes next?
The liberal international order has served us well: what replaces it will look different but we shouldn’t assume the worst.
Who killed the liberal international order (and what comes next)? is the title of a wide-ranging speech by Andrew Phillips of the University of Queensland, author of War, religion and empire: the transformation of international orders.
It is broadcast on the ABC’s Big Ideas program and is also available as a podcast with a transcript.
Phillips is not ready to declare the order dead, but he does believe it is in a state of advanced decomposition. It served the world well in the post-1944 period – think of the extraordinary reduction of poverty – but it is running out of energy and can no longer draw on those who once gave it such strong support.
From its inception the order was shaped by people who had experienced the horrors of the first half of the twentieth century, who understood their underlying causes, and who were determined to prevent their recurrence. But those memories have faded from the collective political consciousness. He goes on to state:
There is nothing foreordained about the survival of liberalism, and in fact, liberalism could prove to be a historical blip, if enough people choose order over liberty. And to present this in stylised form, it suggests as a simplification, a pax sinica, a Chinese dominated international order in which the PRC is able to say, we don't claim democratic legitimacy, but we claim performance legitimacy.
But he doesn’t go along with Graham Allison’s idea that the rise of China and the corresponding descent of America is developing into a Thucydides trap, in which one power forcibly overthrows the other. For a start the liberal international order was not purely an American or a “western” development: it was forged by many hands. What could emerge will probably be post-western, but there is no inevitability that it will be illiberal.
The same question of China-US rivalry is the topic of last Sunday’s Global Roaming, whose guest is Neil Thomas of the Center for China Analysis. It’s a refreshing presentation of the rivalry, because it’s not about military dominance or some takeover of the global order. Rather it’s about the rivalry of economic models – China’s central planning and America’s gung-ho capitalism (although neither exists in its pure form). For a long time cold war warriors conflated the idea of central planning with communism as an economic model, but China has demonstrated that the association is unnecessary.
Phillps doesn’t find any individual or organized movement who killed the liberal international order. He notes that Trump “has inflicted serious self-harm” on the order, but to attribute its demise to him alone would be to overlook other causes of its demise.
Do voters pursue their economic self-interest?
Not always.
In a short article on the Belfer Center website James Harpel of Harvard’s Kennedy School outlines four reasons why voters often vote against their own economic interests.
The first is that politicians deliberately mislead us. It would be hard to think of a stronger Australian example than Tony Abbott’s stream of promises in his 2013 election campaign.
The second is that politicians try to implement their promises, but are blocked politically, perhaps by court challenges, or by scare campaigns run by well-resourced lobbies. The government’s backdown on promised taxation provisions applying to large superannuation balances is a case in point.
The third reason is that people do not understand the economic consequences of policy proposals. In America the standout case is people’s faith in the benefits of tariff protection. Our most salient current example is the political attraction of demand-side subsidies for people to buy housing.
The fourth reason is that people vote on the basis of a deep ideological belief, or cultural identity. Maybe there is an issue such as abortion about which people feel so strongly that it overrides their economic interests, or maybe it’s because economic issues have become cultural issues, such as opposition to renewable energy.
He goes on to report on US evidence that during the Biden administration voters consistently reported that they were doing well economically, but they believed that the economy was performing poorly. We observe something similar in the Australian Unity Wellbeing Index, referred to in the section on opinion polls. (Link)
There is a strong stream of academic thought, particularly in what is known as “public choice” theory, that economic self-interest is the prime driver of voting behaviour. It’s a neat theory, because it meshes easily with the rational choice models of traditional microeconomics. But it overlooks the other, far more complex, set of ideas that influence people’s choices when they are in the voting booths.