How much longer are we going to go on imagining things will get better if only Labor or the Coalition could get their acts together or find the right leader? Folks, it’s over. We need to reinvent the way we do politics, writes Tim Dunlop.
It’s time we faced it: the image we have of democratic politics as one where major parties use the power of office to generate a viable and coherent platform for governing in the name of a majority of citizens is dead.
The divisions that caused Labor’s leadership ructions, and that are causing the current unrest within the Coalition, are not some passing phase that the parties are going through and that can all be put to rest if they could just find the right leader to unite them.
They are part of the wider disruption of how we organise our society.
Tony Abbott and Bill Shorten are not the problem, any more than they are the answer: they are the symptoms of a crumbling paradigm. They have risen to the top because the system rewards a particular sort of operator.
Division and mediocrity are not bugs in this system, they are a feature.
This means that most analysis and commentary on political events is starting from the wrong premise, which means, in turn, that we are all being chronically ill-informed.
It’s time we looked at all this much more honestly rather than working from the assumption that what is happening now is some sort of aberration.
How much longer are we going to go on imagining that things will get better if only Labor or the Coalition could get their acts together and we could somehow replicate the “good old days” of a Howard, or of Hawke and Keating, or of a Menzies?
Folks, it’s over …
Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. You can follow him on Twitter.
