Australians are not tuning out of democracy; they are losing faith in a political system that produces constant conflict but too little capacity to solve the problems it contests.

Australians have not stopped paying attention to politics. They have begun to doubt that politics is paying attention to them.

Parliament remains intensely active. Governments announce, oppositions attack, inquiries investigate and commentators pronounce. Yet many of the problems Australians most want their governments to address remain stubbornly unresolved.

Housing becomes less affordable. Public schools absorb growing disadvantage. Essential services struggle for staff. Climate policy advances and retreats. These problems are not ignored. They are discussed constantly. But discussion has become inseparable from a contest in which each problem is also an opportunity to expose, embarrass or defeat an opponent.

Australia now produces an extraordinary amount of political activity without a corresponding sense of political progress.

Dishonesty, broken promises, poor leadership and powerful interests all contribute to public disillusionment. But another explanation deserves attention: our political system may have become more capable of conducting conflict than resolving the problems around which that conflict is organised.

This is not an argument against opposition. Governments must be questioned, evidence contested and power restrained. The problem begins when defeating the opposing side displaces the purpose for which the argument supposedly began.

Governments conceal uncertainty because it will be exploited. Oppositions amplify failure because acknowledging progress might strengthen those they are expected to defeat. Cooperation becomes dangerous, concession humiliating and changing one’s mind potentially fatal.

Citizens watch and draw their own conclusions. When familiar problems persist through successive governments, they may not simply decide that one party has failed. They may begin to suspect that the contest itself is incapable of producing an answer.

Australia did not invent adversarial politics. We inherited its architecture from Britain.

The Westminster system........

© Pearls and Irritations