BY SUE BOLAND
In 1964, only 29% of people in the United States agreed with the statement, "The government is pretty much run by a few big interests looking after themselves". By 1984, that figure had increased to 55%, and by 1998 to 63%.
In Disaffected Democracies: What's Troubling the Trilateral Countries?, Susan J. Pharr and Robert D. Putnam analyse the results of surveys conducted in the rich industrially developed countries. They find a sharp decline in confidence in politicians in the United States, Germany, Japan, Britain, Italy and Sweden, with only the Netherlands showing clear evidence of increasing confidence.
The loss of confidence is not limited to the politicians. In 11 of 14 countries surveyed, the public had also lost confidence in the parliament, the armed forces, the judiciary, the police and the civil service.
The surveys also noted a decline in political participation, with declines in the membership of political parties and in the proportion of people who turn out to vote. A University of California study, reported in the Economist (July 17, 1999), shows that in 18 out of 20 rich countries, the proportion of the electorate voting was lower than it was in the early 1950s, with a median decline of 10%.
In the US, massive disillusionment with the political system began to show up in the 1960s at the time of the civil rights movement, the anti-Vietnam war movement and the beginning of a youth radicalisation. These social protest movements weren't exclusive to the United States. The youth radicalisation, sparked by the anti-Vietnam war movement, and other social protest movements spread across the globe.
However, loss of confidence in the political system didn't halt after the 1960s. The trend continued.
Australia joins trend
Australia is not isolated from these trends. According to the World Values Survey, between 1983 and 1995 the proportion of Australians with a great deal of confidence in the federal government fell from 56% to just 26%. The surveys also found that Australians' trust in key institutions such as the media, the public service, the churches and the legal system had decreased.
Since 1995, the trend has continued with a Bulletin Morgan poll (April 1998) finding that only 7% of Australians believed that politicians were honest and ethical, and that 66% were unhappy with the major parties. A similar poll in 1976 found that 19% believed that politicians were honest and ethical.
As voting in Australia is compulsory, there has been only a small decrease in voter turn-out; disenchantment has shown up in protest voting, however.
In the 1998 federal election, the combined primary vote for the three major parties was the lowest ever, below 80%. The result in two-thirds of all electorates was determined by the distribution of preferences, up from 44% in 1996.
The high level of voter disenchantment has resulted in the majority of state governments, as well as the federal government, losing control of their upper houses.
Folding parties
In common with the trend in other industrially developed countries, the major political parties in Australia are also in decline.
Paul Sheehan, writing in the Sydney Morning Herald (May 13), described the Liberal Party as "literally dying". Using the Prime Minister John Howard's home state of New South Wales as an example, Sheehan says that more than 80% of Liberal Party members in NSW are over the age of 55, with almost two-thirds of the membership being aged 65 or older. Membership in NSW has dropped from about 50,000 in 1975 to about 6000 active members now.
The Labor Party faces similar problems - no longer is it the mass political party that it once was. While the ALP may not have suffered the membership loss that the Liberal Party has experienced, it has lost active members.
Its membership figures are considerably inflated by branch stacking. For example, the federal seat of Fowler, despite having 3500 ALP members, couldn't staff all of the electorate's polling booths in the 1998 federal election.
Until recently, the National Party had an active membership base equal to the combined membership base of the Liberal and Labor parties. In 1996, according to Sheehan, the Nationals had 110,000 financial members, compared with about 64,000 in the Liberal Party, 57,000 in the ALP and 6000 in the Democrats. The National Party's membership began to drop in the 1980s and plummeted in the 1990s after the Coalition won government.
Lack of participation in "official" politics is even more pronounced amongst young people, with an Australian Electoral Commission survey (March 1998) finding that more than 20% of 18- to 24-year-olds were not registered to vote. The comparable percentage for those aged 35 to 49 was 1.7%.
Georgina Safe, writing in the Australian (July 3, 1998), quoted an Edith Cowan University study which found that 65% of 18- to 24-year-olds had experienced no active political involvement and only 2% had been members of a political party.
Social cohesion
Sheehan worries that the loss of members and support for political parties "raises the spectre of a decline in the legitimacy of government, and a weakening in civic cohesion".
As evidence of a decline in "social connectedness", Sheehan refers to the decrease in the membership of religious congregations, charitable organisations, the Red Cross and Lions and Rotary clubs.
Sheehan blames the higher level of "social disengagement" on television and the internet, and on increased urbanisation. He quotes favourably ALP member and historian Miriam Dixon who believes that social cohesion has been damaged by the trashing of what she terms Australia's "Anglo-Celtic core culture".
If there is less "social cohesion" in Australia, both Sheehan and Dixon are mistaken about the cause of it.
The federal Coalition government and state and territory governments actively try to undermine social solidarity amongst the majority of the population - by a combination of scapegoating and the promotion of a law and order agenda.
Governments engage in vicious media campaigns in an attempt to demonise and blame migrants for unemployment, Aborigines for using up the welfare budget, unemployed people and single parents for "bludging" on the welfare system and trade unionists for being greedy.
Similarly manipulated media campaigns seek to whip up an hysterical fear about violent crime, which is out of all proportion to the actual risk of violent crime. These "law and order" campaigns serve to justify increases in the number of police, security guards, prisons and increases in police powers, but they are also designed to undermine social solidarity.
It is also not true that it's criticism of the dominant Anglo-Celtic culture which is responsible for a decline in social cohesion.
Social cohesion and solidarity amongst working people occurs when people join in common struggle for common interests. In order to unite in common struggle, working people need to reject the politics of scapegoating which governments use to divide us - including the racism of the dominant "Anglo-Celtic core culture".
It's not surprising that it was during the anti-Vietnam war movement and the youth radicalisation of the 1960s that the public began to lose confidence in the political system.
In the course of these struggles, large numbers of people became conscious of the relationship between the major political parties and their unelected political masters, the owners of large corporations.
The struggles of this period also deepened the democratic and egalitarian expectations of working people in the advanced capitalist countries, expectations which have been repeatedly shattered each time that a new scandal exposes the corporate elite's control over the political system.
Collective action
While it is true that there is widespread disillusionment with the political system in Australia, this does not mean that Australian people are incapable of acting collectively. There have been plenty of examples:
- The reconciliation walks this year became political protests in support of Aboriginal rights. Half a million walked in Sydney, 55,000 in Adelaide, 50,000 in Brisbane and 1500 in Lismore.
- August and September demonstrations, the biggest in Melbourne and Sydney numbering 30,000, called for Australian troops to be sent immediately to East Timor to stop the bloodbath; many were unionists mobilised by their unions.
- During the East Timor crisis, high school students staged a high school walkout of 9000 students in major cities around the country. Previously, high school student walk outs had been organised against the racist politics of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party in 1998 and against French nuclear testing in the Pacific in 1995.
- There were large demonstrations in most capital cities and several regional Victorian cities against the federal government's second wave of anti-union laws throughout 1999. The largest demonstration of 70,000 was in Melbourne.
- Fifteen thousand supporters demonstrated to save the South Sydney Rabbitohs football club from destruction by corporate interests in October.
- Tens of thousands of people around Australia demonstrated their opposition to the establishment of the Jabiluka uranium mine in Kakadu National Park, with 2500 visiting the blockade in 1998.
This is just a snapshot.
These demonstrations have all run counter to the government's strategy, which is to appeal to the self-interest of some to help it attack the rights of others — they have rather been based on principles of solidarity.
Sheehan might bemoan the loss of faith in the political system's "democracy", but this was always an illusion; the loss of that illusion is a good thing. What's far more important is that, in spite of this society's rampant individualism, a commitment to collective action is still strong and can only grow.