Counting down the months til the next Federal Election, it’s hard not to feel totally depressed. Anthony Albanese and the gang have obviously been hard at work, pursuing change on a broad range of issues behind the scenes, trying to clean up the mess left by the LNP. But there’s no joy. No sizzle to the democracy sausage.
Not just because ordinary people are doing it tough, and many of us wish for more ambitious policies and programs. It’s the depressing spectre of facing more of the naysaying and negative hysteria that the Coalition and mainstream media see as the “meat and three veg” of contemporary Australia’s compulsory political diet. And the resulting gutlessness of the party of Gough Whitlam and Paul Keating in the face of this shallow fearmongering.
And the latest advent of the “Libertarians,” or antipodean MAGA equivalents, successfully taking a small foothold in local government elections, suggests the federal “No Voters” and campaigners will be out in force again, backing another nasty, narky political bitchfest.
Meanwhile, “the people of Australia” are trapped inside an echo chamber container, walled in by “the Overton Window”, a concept developed in the 90s by the American policy analyst Joseph Overton, who proposed that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within a certain range of acceptability (thanks to Wikipedia here): “According to Overton, the window frames the range of policies that a politician can recommend without appearing too extreme to gain or keep public office, given the climate of public opinion at that time.
“Another political commentator Joshua Trevino postulated that there are six degrees of acceptance of public ideas: Unthinkable; Radical; Acceptable; Sensible; Popular; and Policy.........