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Aside from the shellacking Peter Dutton’s Liberals received in May, there are other reasons to think Australia won’t automatically lurch to the right. First, and most obviously, compulsory and preferential voting push electoral politics towards the centre rather than the fringes – safety valves that are winning newfound public approbation. This year’s first ABC Boyer lecture, delivered by US-based Australian academic Justin Wolfers, became a love letter to the democracy sausage. Australia’s democratic institutions, he declared, were “freaking amazing”. (He had wanted to use another f-word.) Later this month, also on the ABC, Annabel Crabb launches a new series exploring the historical roots of Australia’s democratic robustness. She has published a children’s book, There’s a Prawn in Parliament House: The Kids’ Guide to Australia’s Amazing Democracy, providing timely lessons in civics. “How an ancient land became a great democracy,” is the subtitle of Tony Abbott’s new history of Australia. In this teachable moment, there is growing awareness that Australia’s electoral system, if not its politics, is something of a national treasure. Numerous national character traits also erect useful guard rails. The piss-taking streak has a puncturing effect on puffed-up political posers. Finely tuned bullshit detectors spot phoniness and pastiche. Voters are not only willing to countenance prime ministers who lack charisma and main-character energy, but seemingly prefer that personality type. Clive James once joked about the “rumour that the young John Howard looked like Ben Affleck, but the Liberal Party’s cosmetic surgeons went to work on him to make him more electable”. It helps, too, that Australia experienced a populist mini-quake 30 years ago, with the emergence in the 1990s of Pauline Hanson. In her incendiary maiden speech to parliament, she not only warned of the country being “swamped by Asians” but she demanded the Howard government stop “kowtowing to financial markets, international organisations, world bankers, investment companies and big business people”. In blending anxiety about immigration and globalisation, she foreshadowed the anti-establishment grievance politics that later fuelled Brexit and Trumpism.
