The scope of Australian political debate has narrowed enormously over the past six months since the COVID-19 pandemic struck. The range of issues and the range of participants are both much smaller than they once were. Health and economic concerns dominate, and governments dominate over other participants. Other issues and voices struggle to maintain their previous place in the public eye.
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The deafening silence over the announcement that South Australian senator Rex Patrick had resigned from the Centre Alliance to become an independent is evidence of how much things have changed. Last year this would have been big news because of its potential impact on the balance of power in the Senate, much less the very existence of the minor party which carries the important legacy of independent senator Nick Xenophon.
Patrick's situation is emblematic of the problems that minor parties and independents in general are facing in the current political climate. The Greens and One Nation, too, as well as the independents in the House of Representatives are struggling for air.
Quite naturally the fight against COVID-19 and the subsequent dire economic and financial consequences for both the country and the world, including international comparisons, have taken precedence over everything else. News and current affairs programs hardly talk about anything else, with the possible exceptions of China and the US presidential elections. Little else is given any space.
Corresponding with this narrow focus has been the fact that politics is now centred on governments and their health and economic advisers above all else. The Prime Minister and the state premiers have our attention, and they come together behind closed doors in the national cabinet. While sometimes they may wish that they were not the prime focus because they are delivering bad news, for which they can be held accountable, at least they largely have the floor to themselves.
Some consequences of this state of affairs have already drawn public attention. Opposition leaders across the country have been relegated to the sidelines. Not only are they given little airtime, but they are put in the unenviable position of having to tread sensitively when seeming to criticise what governments are doing in the health and economic arenas during this time of national emergency.
The one institution which may have helped redress the imbalance between government and opposition is the parliament. But that opportunity has been grievously limited by the way in which federal parliamentary sittings have been truncated. The sitting of parliament should have been rated as essential, rather than an afterthought.
Little attention has been given to the impact of all this on the third sector in Australian political life, the minor parties and independents that represent from a fifth to a quarter of Australian voters. For many Australians who have lost trust in the major parties, these parties and independents represent their big hope for the future. They, too, need more recognition and more parliamentary opportunities.
Minor parties and independents have valuable perspectives to offer on health, aged care and the economic consequences of lockdowns and border controls. Unfortunately, most attention from this quarter has been given to constitutional challenges by One Nation leader Pauline Hanson (and Clive Palmer) to the border closures by the Queensland and Western Australian governments. This has been a sideshow.
The Greens, through their leader Adam Bandt, have tried to argue for a Green New Deal, free childcare, rethinking aged care, and for the extension of JobKeeper and JobSeeker to those vulnerable people excluded from these programs. But their voice has been muted because they have no leverage. The same is true of independents.
The position of the third sector is even weaker when it comes to a wider range of issues outside the relatively narrow frame of health and economics. These are issues on which it has been an important voice, in some cases the major voice.
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Many important community debates over issues such as climate change and the environment, secondary and higher education, corruption, integrity and open government, Indigenous affairs, asylum seekers and refugees have lost much-needed momentum because of the narrowing of debate during the pandemic.
The sidelining of minor parties like the Greens, and independents like Rebekha Sharkie, Andrew Wilkie, Helen Haines and Zali Steggall, has been costly to the community movements for which these issues are crucial.
Also sidelined have been those forgotten backbench members of the major parties who share some of these concerns. They have lost their voice too.
It might be thought that progressive voices have suffered most during the pandemic, but it is really all voices outside of the government mainstream. Essentially conservative causes like freedom of religion and domestic anti-terrorism have also been stopped in their tracks.
Because the trajectory of the pandemic remains uncertain, it is difficult to predict when and if Australian politics will broaden again. Just as the economy looks like it will not snap back to normal, so political life may remain narrow and flat for some time. This may set back some causes for decades, if not forever. This outcome would be to the detriment of a healthy Australian politics.
One early marker of the timing of an early return to politics as usual may come with forthcoming state and territory elections, with Labor governments going to the polls in the Northern Territory, Queensland and the ACT between August and October. If these campaigns remain focused on the pandemic, it means we're in for more of the same for a while yet.
- John Warhurst is an Emeritus Professor of Political Science at the Australian National University.