I hate Huntsman Spiders. Correction – I am terrified of them. It doesn’t matter that I know they can’t kill me. They are a HUGE, brown, hairy spider – and when I see one, my heart starts to race, the Adrenalin starts pumping and all I can think of is that it must die. IMMEDIATELY. OK, maybe they aren’t hairy – I wouldn’t actually know. By the time I’ve emptied half a can of fly spray onto one, followed by a frenzy of banging – it’s a little hard to tell.

There’s nothing logical about my fear. I know that. And ironically I’m not scared of all spiders – if I see the relatively small but extremely venomous redback spider, I will calmly and carefully get rid of it.

But that is the nature of an irrational fear or phobia – when it takes over, you’re not thinking, you’re just feeling. And no amount of reasoning is going to convince me that the eight-legged monster of death on my wall is not an immediate threat to life – or at least many limbs.

“What’s that got to do with Donald Trump?” I hear you ask. Good question.

The authoritarian voter and the Huntsman

Research released earlier this week confirmed an aspect of human nature that political scientists have been studying since World War II and which helps to explain one of the key drivers behind Donald Trump’s success with American voters. That research found that there is a high correlation between people identified as ‘authoritarians’ and people who support Trump. In the context of this research, an ‘authoritarian’ is described as being someone who:

• is more fearful than other voters of two particular threats:
  • threats from ‘outside’ (such as terrorists and foreigners); and
  • the threat of social change (like marriage equality and gun rights);
• wants to ‘impose order’ in the face of a threatening change;
• desires “a strong leader who will defeat those fears with force“.

What jumped out at me from this description is that the type of fear that seems to be driving the authoritarian’s behaviour is very much like the response you would expect from someone with a phobia. And that just like when I see a Huntsman spider, when the authoritarian Trump voter’s fear is triggered, they cannot be reasoned with and demand a swift and overly aggressive response.

“But terrorism actually is deadly” – I hear you say – “and a Huntsman isn’t”.

OK, I’m not entirely convinced that’s true – the bit about the Huntsman not being deadly that is. But let’s go with conventional wisdom for now and assume that a Huntsman is not deadly and instead compare the authoritarian’s reaction with another common phobia – aerophobia, or fear of flying.

One in fifteen people have aerophobia – an irrational fear of flying – and as many as one in four people are ‘nervous flyers’ or ‘phobic’. And yet flying is far less dangerous than driving – by a huge magnitude. The fact is that you are far more likely to be killed in the car on the way to the airport than in the plane you catch from that airport.

However it would be inaccurate to tell an aerophobic that flying is completely safe and that planes never crash. They rarely crash – but very occasionally they do.

The same is true of terrorism. It would be inaccurate to tell an authoritarian Trump supporter that terrorists aren’t dangerous or a threat. But the probability of them being hurt by a terrorist is very low. As I wrote last year, you are far more likely to be killed by falling out of bed than by a terrorist under it. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take steps to protect ourselves against terrorists – just as the fact that flying is relatively safe doesn’t mean we shouldn’t take steps to regulate flying to keep it safe.

The issue is that the level of fear that the authoritarian Trump voter feels towards groups like terrorists, Muslims and foreigners – is completely disproportionate to the threat they actually pose, as is the corresponding action those authoritarians want to take. They may or may not have a phobia in the diagnostic sense, but they are definitely ‘phobic’.

And just as I can’t be reasoned with when it comes to the Huntsman spiders – nor can the phobic Trump voter be reasoned with when it comes to their fears – no matter how irrational those fears are. Here’s why…

The physiology of fear

At a physiological level, research shows us that when we feel fear, the amygdala – or the emotional center of the brain – is triggered before we even have conscious awareness of a particular threat. Basically we feel before we think. Unfortunately, when this is combined with stress, the activity in the amygdala (our emotional centre) suppresses activity in the cortex (which is where we generate thoughts and solve problems).

Social psychologist and Professor at NYU Jonathan Haidt has also done a significant amount of research into the authoritarian voter. His research confirmed that:

“… when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare”.

This is why it can seem so difficult to argue with an authoritarian Trump voter about these issues. And why even the likes of commentator John Oliver – who did a brilliant piece recently shooting holes in all the ‘reasons’ Trump supporters give – can’t convince the authoritarian voter not to vote for Trump. When it comes to who they support, authoritarian voters arguably aren’t being driven by reason, they’re being driven by pure unadulterated Huntsman-whacking fear.

Importantly – and I can’t stress this enough – this doesn’t mean the authoritarian voter is never in a rational state of mind, nor that they are stupid – it just means that in regards to this issue, their fear has control of their actions and while not impossible, it is very difficult to reason with them.

Hear the fear

Once you know this, it can help in understanding otherwise seemingly nonsensical comments from authoritarian Trump supporters. If you listen to the words of Trump supporters in the video below from vox.com, you will be able to spot some authoritarian voters. For example, one of the guys interviewed, when asked if it was fair to say that Muslims are ‘the problem’, responded with:

“If you break it down. Yeah. They’re a problem. Sorry to say it. But I can’t help it. I can’t help but feel that way. Right now – I don’t feel safe.” [Emphasisis mine to highlight key words.]

The irony of course, is that while these authoritarian Trump supporters talk tough, underneath it all, when it comes to these issues at least, they are anything but tough. Their show of bravado, their talk of wanting to be tough disguises the fact that they are actually very very afraid. Trying to argue with them will just convince them that you don’t ‘get it’.

And this is where Donald Trump – the Fear Whisperer – comes in….

Donald Trump: The Fear Whisperer

Whether consciously or unconsciously – and I suspect it’s the former – Donald Trump is playing the tune that he knows the authoritarian voter wants to hear. To them – he “gets it”. And like flies to honey, they are drawn to him. Trump does this in two ways:

1. He gives a voice to the authoritarian voter’s fears

The first thing that Donald Trump does to draw in the authoritarian voter is that he gives a voice to their fears. He calls Mexicans ‘rapists’ and ‘criminals’, and says things like “there is a Muslim problem in the world..there is something out there that brings tremendous hatred.”

Trump expresses their fears in a way that authoritarian voters wish they could – but can’t for fear of being condemned if they do. In their words:

“He says what people think when no-one else can. He’s not politically correct.”
(unnamed Trump supporter from the video above)

A theme amongst authoritarian voters seems to be that ‘political correctness’ means they can’t voice their fear – across both sides of the political spectrum.

Certainly, while authoritarian voters are more likely to be Republican (or right-wing) supporters – there are also authoritarian voters who would traditionally be Democrat (or left-wing) voters. And unsurprisingly, at least some of them are Trump supporters – albeit often in secret. The Guardian ran an article this week with quotes from traditional Democrat voters who are secretly Trump supporters. Here’s what a 50-year-old college professor who lives in California had to say about why he would vote for Trump:

“I’m a liberal-left college professor in the social sciences. I’m going to vote for Trump but I won’t tell hardly anybody… I’m also furious at political correctness on campus and in the media. I’m angry at forced diversity and constant, frequently unjustified complaints about racism/sexism/homophobia.”

2. Trump promises to defeat their fears with decisive quick brute force

Having given voice to their fears, Trump then promises a seemingly powerful, swift solution to the authoritarian voter’s fears saying things like:

• “I would bomb the s— out of ’em. I would just bomb those suckers. That’s right. I’d blow up the pipes. … I’d blow up every single inch. There would be nothing left.”
• “And the other thing is with the terrorists, you have to take out their families.”
• [The 11.3 million illegal immigrants] have to go” – “I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will make Mexico pay for that wall.“

This is the authoritarian equivalent of me spraying half a can of fly spray onto a Huntsman spider and then whacking it into oblivion. But Trump’s “simple, powerful, punitive” response – to use the words of political scientist Stanley Feldman – is very attractive to the authoritarian voter. Here’s what one of them; a 48-year-old scientist and self-declared Democrat (left-wing) voter who lives in San Francisco – had to say:

“I voted for Obama. I am a closet Trump supporter and I haven’t told any of my friends or co-workers… I’m very concerned about radical Muslims, and liked Donald’s idea to stop all Muslim immigration. I’m a patriotic socialist, but my strong-borders patriotism wins over my socialism if I have to choose. As Donald says, we either have a country or we don’t.”

Aren’t authoritarian voters just Islamophobes, Homophobes and racists?

Technically, I guess this is true – although not all authoritarian voters will fear the same thing. But when people use the words ‘Islamophobe’ or ‘Homophobe’, even though they have the word ‘phobia’ right in the name, typically we are focusing on them as being descriptors of hatred rather than fear. We speak of ‘hate crimes’ and ‘hate speech’ as being expressions of this.

Now there’s no doubt that Islamophobia, Homophobias and any of the other phobias that come under authoritarianism do result in hatred. Just as an aerophobe’s fear of flying results in them hating flying. But the difference is that the primary emotion behind a phobia isn’t hatred, it’s fear. This is an important distinction.

Don’t get me wrong here – that doesn’t make the hatred right. But it does change the way we should think about how we respond to it. And this is exactly what Trump has done. Listen to the words of one of the Trump supporters from the video again:

“I – I don’t have a racist bone in my body – I’m not that way. I just think we need to vet people a little bit better and find out why they are here and that kind of thing.”

Authoritarians object to being called racists, homophobes, islamophobes etc – exactly because those words are associated with hatred, and the primary emotion they are feeling is fear – or more accurately terror. If you were talking to someone who was afraid of flying, you wouldn’t tell them off for hating aircrafts or call them stupid. Instead, if you were trying to change their behaviour, you would focus on dealing with their fear.

And this is how Trump has become the Fear-Whisperer to authoritarians – he’s made them feel understood. And then he promises them the destructive over-reaction that their fear desires

If Trump were playing ‘fear-whisperer’ to aerophobes, he would be promising them that he would blow up every aircraft on the face of the earth, or alternatively ban all aircraft from entering the United States.

So what’s the answer then?

Answers are always much more difficult than questions unfortunately…

In many ways Trump has half the answer – he’s speaking to the authoritarian’s fear rather than at the resulting hatred. That’s definitely a start. The key is to work out how to do that while at the same time promoting a solution to the fear that is constructive rather than destructive and generates less (rather than more) hatred.

I don’t know what the answer to that is. But if I had to throw an idea out there, I suspect it lies in appealing to the authoritarian’s bravery rather than – as Trump has been doing – encouraging a cowardly response. (And there is nothing brave about bombing something into oblivion with drones from the other side of the world.)

If you look at World War II, you could argue that Hitler manipulated the German people with hatred and fear while the many of the allies motivated their citizenry through a call to bravery. In the end, it was obviously the allies that won. There are some that say that Trump’s strategies are inspired by Hitler – that he was a student of Hitler’s speeches. I have no idea if that is true or not – but if it is, we know what won the day back then – bravery and courage. We need leaders who speak to peoples’ fears in these terms to counteract the proliferation of hate that could otherwise ensue.

A final footnote

Now just to be clear, I’m not saying that everyone who votes for Trump is an authoritarian, nor that this is the only reason people vote for Trump. Nor am I saying that everyone who is an authoritarian will vote for Trump – or even vote conservative. Authoritarians are just one subset of voters. But since the research shows that this group is not small and is likely to fluctuate in size based on the perceived threat level – which appears to be growing right now – they are a group large enough to potentially decide the next US election.

There’s also signs of a similar trend here in Australia. Our previous Prime Minister – Tony Abbott – was not above a bit of fear-whispering himself, and given half the chance, I’m sure he’d be all too happy to take that tack again.

This article was first published on ProgressiveConversation.

There’s been a lot of noise over the past few weeks about how changes to negative gearing could lower housing prices. According to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull:

“[Labor] is putting at risk Australia’s most important asset; they’re putting at risk the fundamental asset base of our economy.” (Malcolm Turnbull, 29 February 2016)

But in the words of Daryl Kerrigan from the movie The Castle – “it’s not a house, it’s a home”. My house isn’t an asset, it’s where my family lives, sleeps, eats, laughs and plays together.

The way Turnbull talks, you’d think we could decide tomorrow to sell the house and buy some shares or bonds instead. Perhaps he sees Australian families sitting around a stock portfolio for dinner or sleeping under some well placed monetary bonds at night.

Maybe that’s the key difference between the way the right see the world – as a series of dollars signs – and the left, who see it as a place where we live.

For Australians who live in their own home, their house’s value is only really relevant if they decide to sell. And even then, unless they decide to downsize or move to a cheaper city or town – then the money from selling their house goes straight into another house to live in, and there is minimal if any net gain – particularly when you factor in the costs and taxes associated with a property sale.

The only Australians who see a house as an investment asset are the 5% of Australians who own investment property and benefit from negative gearing. Oh – and bankers of course. They don’t seem to be able to lose.

For the rest of us, our house is a home, not an asset class.

Increasing housing prices could cost us all more than we realise

As Turnbull and the rest of the LNP celebrate increasing housing prices, they neglect to mention the very real cost those increasing prices have to the country as a whole in many different ways. Here’s some examples…

Firstly, because mortgages – and the corresponding interest charges – now take up a lot more of a family’s income than they did last century, families have less disposable income to spend on other things. Lower spending means fewer jobs which in turn means lower economic growth.

Secondly, the LNP conveniently fails to mention the impact higher housing prices will have on people’s retirement savings. The size of the average mortgage today is so high, that many people will need to wait until they retire to pay it off. Already today, nearly 45% of superannuation benefits taken as lump sums are used to pay off debt. As housing prices increase, more and more people will need to use their superannuation to pay off their homes. This will leave them with less money to pay for their own retirement, meaning more people will need to claim the government pension, completely undermining the whole purpose of the superannuation system – which was to reduce people’s reliance on a taxpayer funded pension. This will mean higher taxes for those in the workforce – even further reducing their ability to afford to buy their own homes.

Tell him he’s dreamin’

In the words of Daryl Kerrigan – Malcolm Turnbull is dreamin’ if he thinks that Australians are wealthier in real terms because the value of their home has increased. There is a housing affordability crisis in this country – and with increasing numbers of homeless Australians corresponding with a massive number of vacant houses – that’s where Turnbull and the LNP should be focusing their attention instead of protecting the wealth of investors like himself.

This article was first published on ProgressiveConversation.

“The operation of any electoral system, any voting system, should be to clearly and transparently translate the wish of the voter into a parliamentary result.”

.. .so said Malcolm Turnbull yesterday as he introduced legislation into parliament aimed at curtailing the potential of independent or micro-party senators to achieve election by stealth – solely through the distribution of preferences.

Nick Xenophon – one of the few cross-benchers who expects to hold his place in the Senate if this legislation is passed, also came out in support of the proposed legislation yesterday, saying:

“I want a Senate voting system that is fair, a Senate voting system that reflects the will of the people, a Senate voting system that takes away from the back room deals and the preference whisperers and gives the power back to the people “

OK. As someone who wrote on the weekend that the power of our vote has been diminished by the operation of our political system, it’s hard to argue with this sentiment. But two quick questions….

What is the actual problem in the make-up of the Senate?

Let’s look beyond Turnbull’s example of Ricky Muir’s miracle election to the Senate with only 0.5% of the primary vote in Victoria – and examine the big picture.

If you look at the primary votes of Australians as whole for the Senate in the 2013 election and allocate them into three main groups – Labor, the LNP and the Minor Parties (including the Greens, micro-parties and independents) – it turns out there is indeed a discrepancy between the percentage of votes received and the number of seats allocated.

In fact each of those ‘groups’ received roughly a third of the primary votes. One group – the LNP – got slightly more than a third (37%), and another – the Labor party – slightly less (30%). So, for the allocation of seats in the Senate to be a true representation of the will of the Australian people as a whole – based on our primary votes at least, which is where Turnbull is focusing his attention – you would expect each of these ‘groups’ to have won roughly a third of the seats.

However that’s not the case. It turns out that the Minor Parties received one in three votes, but were allocated just over one in four seats (27.5%) in the Senate. The winners were actually the LNP and the Labor parties, who between them won 72.5% of the seats in the Senate with only 67% of the vote.

So, the current method used to determine the allocation of seats in the Senate is – as Turnbull suggested – not ‘translating the wish of the voter into parliamentary results’. However to rectify the situation, any changes made should arguably result in a greater allocation of seats to Minor Parties – and not a lesser one.

What about the House of Representatives?

Since our pollies are moving swiftly to fix this so-called ‘transgression’ against democracy in the Senate in the name of protecting the integrity of our votes, you’d have to assume they’d be equally as concerned about any problem in the House of Representatives.

Not so much. As I wrote on the weekend, the House of Representatives is more ‘representish’ than representative, and seems to be suffering from the same sort of problems that the Senate is – only on an even grander scale.

In the last Federal Election in 2013, again looking at the primary vote of Australians across the country for the House of Representatives, only 45% of Australian voters – yes, less than half of us – picked the LNP first to be in government. And yet, the LNP ended up with 59% of the seats thanks – at least in part – to the help of the much-maligned preferential voting system. The same preferential system in fact that got Ricky Muir elected in the Senate.

Conversely, the Minor parties and Independents – who received just over 21% of primary votes – ended up with just 3% of the seats.

So what’s really going on?

Turnbull and Xenophon are right. Our current voting structure does not result in a parliament that is representative of what the Australian people as a whole want. But if the driver behind the Electoral Reform legislation was truly concern for our democratic rights, then they’d be looking at far greater reforms across both the House of Representatives as well as the Senate. Instead, they are arguably putting measures in place to fix a threat to their power bases.

The Senate is supposed to be the House of Review not the House of the Rubber-stamp. The method of election and term of Senators is different to MPs so that the Senate can act as a watch dog, a fail-safe to ensure that the Australian people – all Australian people – have a voice.

A representative democracy is not supposed to be a set-and-forget arrangement. Despite what many politicians and their good pal Rupert Murdoch would have you believe, a truly representative democracy is not a political system where any one political party should be able to do whatever they want without question. There are supposed to be checks and balances in place so that politicians have to talk and consult with all MPs and Senators – and not just those within their own party. All MPs and all Senators are duly elected representatives of the Australian people, and all deserve a say and a vote – not just those on the government side of the House.

In my opinion, the current Senate has been doing exactly what it is supposed to do – reviewing and questioning, and where appropriate, compromising. I may not agree with every one of their decisions, but at least they are doing their job and not passing legislation from the House of Representatives without challenge or question.

While the proposed Senate Electoral reform legislation will – according to election analyst Antony Green at least – result in a voting system that does more accurately reflect what voters want in the Senate, it’s still falls way short of being the system Turnbull and Xenophon claim it will be – one which “reflects the will of the people” across our democracy. And if it results in the Senate becoming a rubber-stamp for whatever the current government wants, then our democracy will be much weaker and not stronger.

(This article was first published on ProgressiveConversation.)

Note: the numbers reflecting the percentage of seats won by each party in the Senate were adjusted 9 hours after they were originally published to fix an error identified by a reader! Thanks for the pickup.

It’s a federal election year – and although a date hasn’t yet been set, all the political ducks are starting to line up in rows as the triennial wooing of the Australian voter begins.

They aren’t really wooing ‘us’ of course – what they actually want is our votes. And with the focus put on polls by both politicians and the media, you’d be forgiven for thinking that your vote is a valuable commodity. But exactly how valuable is it?

How much say do we really have?

Voting is arguably the most prominent cornerstone of democracy – the means by which we each get to participate in the democratic process. Your vote is supposed to represent ‘your say’, and collectively the outcome of the voting process should represent ‘our say’ in how this country is run – the will of the Australian people as it were.

But what is your vote worth? When you trot along to the polling booths later this year, run the gauntlet of ‘How to vote pamphlet’ pushers, enjoy your democracy sausage and cast your vote – what exactly are you getting a say in?

The following are some common expectations people have about the power of their vote:

1. Elections are about picking which party you want to vote for
2. The election outcome represents the will of the Australian people
3. All votes are equal
4. We determine which policies will be used to guide the direction of the country
5. The Australian people elect a Prime Minister
6. Your vote determines who will represent your individual electorate

Let’s take a look at each of these, and see exactly how well our expectations about what our vote is worth match up with reality…

1. Are elections about picking a political party?

When people talk about who will win an election, they are typically referring to which party will win. Election results (and polls) are framed in terms of what percentage of the vote each of the two major parties received. And if people talk about how they are going to vote in an election, they will typically express it in party terms “I voted Labor/Liberal/Greens Etc”.

So certainly, there’s an expectation that our vote gives us a say in which political party is in charge of governing the country.

But here’s the problem with this…

You can’t actually vote for a party

Even though many people do cast their vote for whoever happens to be representing the political party they support, that individual isn’t bound to stay in that party. Most do of course – but they certainly aren’t obliged to. There have been plenty of examples of individuals who have resigned from their party during their term and subsequently become an independent. Notable recent examples (albeit in the Senate) include Clive Palmer’s PUPs: Jacqui Lambie and Glenn Lazarus.

Theoretically, the person you voted for can even align themselves with a party that you would be least likely to vote for. That’s probably unlikely, but it’s not impossible. Whilst not quite a defection from one party to another – when National-Party-turned-Independent member Tony Windsor sided with the Labor government in 2010 to enable Julia Gillard to take the reigns of government, it was considered by much of his largely conservative New England electorate to be an act of betrayal. In fact he was arguably acting as a true independent in selecting the option that he believed would best serve his electorate. However because people are so focused on which political party is in power, many didn’t see it that way. But there wasn’t anything disenchanted voters in the New England electorate could do about it – not for at least three years in any event.

So you can’t technically vote for a political party, only for an individual. That said, defections don’t happen that often. If we assume for a moment that all elected candidates continue to dance with the party that ‘brung’ them, that brings us to the next question….

2. Does the election outcome represent the will of the Australian people?

Politicians love to talk about ‘the will of the Australian people’ as though somehow all 24 million of us think exactly the same way, and that they – and only they – know what our singular will is. This is particularly the case after an election, when the winning pollies love to claim that they have a ‘mandate’ from the Australian people for any policy they ever dreamed of. In putting forward his repeal of the Carbon Tax shortly after his election in 2013, then Prime Minister Tony Abbott told parliament:

“The Australian people have already voted upon this bill” (Tony Abbott, November 2013)

This claim to a mandate from the Australian people is based on the assumption that the make-up of the House of Representatives is – as its name suggests – ‘representative’ of the Australian voters’ will.

But is it?

Perhaps it would be better named the House of ‘Representish’

If you look at the primary vote from the last Federal Election, the LNP got only 45% of the votes in the House of Representatives. And yet, despite the fact that they were first choice for less than half the country, they still claimed a ‘resounding victory’, ending up with 88 seats – or 59% of the 150 seats in that House.

The Labor party got only 33% of the primary vote, but still claimed 57 seats (38%) in the House of Representatives. Combined, the two major parties were first choice for just under 79% of Australian voters – and yet they claimed 97% of the seats.

Conversely, the Green party got 9% of the primary vote – but only one seat (0.7%). In fact, more than one in five Australians (21%) cast their primary vote in the House of Reprentatives for a candidate who was neither in the Liberal nor the Labor party – and yet those candidates won only 3% of seats.

Put bluntly, our House of Representatives is more ‘representish’ than representative – when you look at the Australian population as a whole. This is due to the now arguably outdated tradition of assuming that people who live in the same area – or electorate – have similar views and needs, and that therefore Representatives in the House should be allocated by the physical location of the voter, rather than by their political persuasion.

3. Are all votes equal?

‘Political equality’ – the notion that all citizens get to vote and everyone’s vote is equal – is critical to democracy. It is a key part of what makes a democracy:

“government of the people, by the people, for the people”
(Abraham Lincoln)

However, in reality…

All votes are equal. But some are more equal than others.

As we just saw, Australia’s political power is primarily divvied up between the two major parties, whittling down the Australian voter’s choice of government to one of two options – the LNP or Labor. But in practice, because a large portion of voters don’t change the way they vote from one election to another, around 41% of seats are considered to be ‘safe’ seats (which means it would take a swing of more than 10% for them to change hands, making it highly unlikely). Another 25% of seats are considered ‘fairly safe’, and therefore reasonably unlikely to change. The remaining 51 seats (34%) are considered to be the swinging (or marginal) seats – which can change hands at any election.

If you live in a ‘safe seat’, the political parties will not really be wooing you in the upcoming federal election for the simple reason that unless there are exceptional circumstances in your particular electorate – such as a high profile independent member running, or you live in Tony Abbott’s electorate – your individual vote in the House of Representatives will have no impact whatsoever on which party ends up winning government. If you live in a ‘fairly safe’ seat, you might get the odd political sweetener thrown your way – just in case. But it’s really the voters in marginal seats who get all the political love.

This means that while in theory we all have an equal vote as to who is in government, in practice, it’s primarily the one in three voters who live in the 51 marginal seats whose vote actually determines the outcome of our federal election. If you’re a voter who lives in a safe seat, your vote – to determine who is in government in the House of Representatives – is really just a formality.

4. Do we get to determine what policies will guide the country for the next three years?

In arguing their case at election time, politicians put forward the policies they say they will govern by if elected. Voters are encouraged to make their choice of who to vote for on the basis of a party’s policies.

Who can forget the following policy promises from Tony Abbott the night before the 2013 federal election:

However…

Political parties are in no way, shape or form bound by the policies and promises they make at election time

You need look no further than the video of Tony Abbott above to prove that politicians are not bound by their pre-election promises. There’s not a single promise made in that video which hasn’t either been broken or put on the table for discussion. Further, according to the ABC promise tracker, if you look at all the promises made by the LNP prior to the last election, and compare the number of promises kept with those that have been broken, the ratio is nearly one to one.

While I personally believe that politicians should be given some leeway to change policies in response to new circumstances, that should be the exception and not the rule. It’s completely incongruent with our broader legal system that voters are not able to hold politicians accountable for the promises they used to convince you to vote for them.

If a company were to entice you to buy something from them by lying to you, you have protection under the law and can hold that company to account for that promise.

And yet, if politicians entice you to vote for them with blatant lies, nobody bats an eyelid. As Australian columnist Niki Savva said last year on Insiders:

“pretty much everyone assumes that once they see a politician’s lips move, that means that…you’re not necessarily going to hear the truth”

5. Do we get to decide who gets to be Prime Minister?

If ever you needed proof that there is a group of people who cast their vote based on who they think should be Prime Minister, the improvement in LNP’s fortunes in the polls following Abbott’s replacement by Malcolm Turnbull should convince you. Changing Prime Minister had a significant impact on the way a percentage of the population said they would vote at the next election. Clearly, at least a proportion of the population believe that their vote gives them a say in this decision.

But you can’t actually vote for a Prime Minister

The irony of course is that the sheer volume of Prime Ministers we’ve had leading the country over the past five years illustrates that there is no guarantee that if you cast your vote at election time on the basis of a particular person becoming Prime Minister, that he or she will remain Prime Minister for any length of time.

In the words of Malcolm Turnbull:

“it’s very important to remember that the leadership of the Liberal Party is, as John Howard said, in the unique gift of the party room” (Malcolm Turnbull, February 2015)

6. An individual to represent your electorate

In his farewell speech about Warren Truss last week in parliament, Malcolm Turnbull said of Truss that he was a ‘formidable advocate’ for his electorate:

“That is our primary obligation – to the people who actually put the No. 1 against our name on the ballot paper—the citizens of our electorate.”
(Malcolm Turnbull, 11 February 2016)

And that is definitely the theory. As I’ve written previously, it’s called the House of Representatives, not the House of Rulers. In Ancient Athens, their democratic model meant that every citizen had the right to attend monthly sessions where issues and laws were discussed and voted on. Of course this type of direct democracy is impractical on a large scale or for those who lived a fair distance away. So it wasn’t too long before a form of ‘representative’ democracy was developed – the theory being that rather than everyone voting individually, each district sent someone to represent them and vote on their behalf.

It is this model of ‘representative’ democracy that our political system is loosely based on today. The individual that the people in your electorate decide will represent you in parliament – your Member of Parliament (or MP) – takes their seat in the House of Representatives (or House of Representish) in Canberra. And in theory, their ‘primary obligation’ is to be the voice of the people in their electorate.

Sounds great – but in practice…

It’s party first, electorate second

Unless you are represented by an Independent, your MP in the House of Representatives will typically vote the way their party tells them to. As a member of one the major political parties, MPs can’t vote in a manner that represents their electorate if doing so would go against the way their party wants them to vote – at least not without risking censure and even expulsion.

Put simply – it’s party first, electorate second.

All MPs are equal. But some are more equal than others.

Malcolm Turnbull has made much of the fact that he runs a truly consultative style of government:

“We have a Cabinet system of government. It’s a collective form of decision making.”
(Malcolm Turnbull, 20 September 2015)

Sounds good – at least on the surface. But what this means in reality is that decisions about our country’s future are not really debated on the floor of parliament with every elected MP getting the opportunity to put forward the views of their electorate and vote on their behalf. These debates happen – but by the time they do, the outcome is a forgone conclusion. Instead, decisions about the future of this country are made behind closed doors in Cabinet meetings. There aren’t public minutes to Cabinet meetings, which means that we only hear what happens in these meetings if there is a leak – which, while reasonably frequent, is actually illegal.

And since Cabinet is only made up of the Senior Ministers of a party, even if your MP happens to be on the governing side of parliament, they really only get a deciding vote on matters of major policy if they happen to be a Senior Minister.

Even worse – if your MP is in opposition or is an independent, unless they happen to hold the balance of power, they don’t get a voice in the policy development process – not in any meaningful way at least.

This leads to a situation where instead of parliament being a time for Australians to be represented by their MP on issues being discussed, it becomes a time of name calling and political point scoring. But let’s face it, if all policy decisions are made behind closed doors, there’s really nothing else left for them to do.

Many MPs don’t really know what their constituents want

Even if your local MP is a Senior Minister in Cabinet, many of them don’t interact regularly with their constituents. The recent debate around marriage equality was a good example of this. Despite the fact that poll after poll shows that a majority of Australians are in favour of marriage equality, many MPs talked of their personal position on this rather than their constituents’ position. (There was one notable exception in Queensland where the local MP actually took a poll of his constituents – but he was the exception and not the rule.)

And many constituents don’t even know who their MP is

On the flip side, many people don’t actually know who their local member of Parliament is either. In a recent poll done in the UK, only 22% of people knew who their elected representative of parliament was. I suspect the situation is similar here. So clearly, if many people don’t even know who their local MP is, they haven’t spent a lot of time interacting with them or even caring about who they are.

So what does your vote count for then?

Let’s do a quick recap.

• If you cast your vote for a particular party, there’s nothing that says the candidate you elect must continue to represent that party – it’s completely up to them.
• The House of Representatives should be renamed the House of Representish – since politicians who do end up as Members of the House of Representatives are not a particularly accurate representation of the primary vote of Australians as a whole.
• All votes are equal, but some are more equal than others – the decision as to which of two parties gets to govern the country is primarily made by only a third of voters.
• All our elected representatives are equal, but some are more equal than others – for your MP to have a voice in parliament, they really need to be in government. And for it to count, they really need to be in Cabinet.
• When voting in parliament, your MP will typically put their party first and their electorate second – unless they are an independent of course.
• Your vote doesn’t determine who is Prime Minister – that is the ‘gift of the party room’.
• Your vote doesn’t even guarantee you that the government will follow a specific set of policies – as there’s absolutely nothing that requires the party that was voted in on a particular policy platform to govern according to that platform.

Ok – so who really gets the deciding vote on all these issues?

I guess Mark Twain was mostly right…

Mark Twain famously said “if voting made any difference, they wouldn’t let us do it” – and to a certain extent, he’s right. He’s not entirely correct of course, we do get some say – just not quite as much as we might think we do.

The thing is that our vote used to count.

Our current democratic model and conventions were largely adopted from the UK model at the time of Australian Federation in 1901. At that point, the UK model of democracy had been evolving since the 13th century. And when the basics of democracy were put into place in Britain back then, every man’s vote was equal – every man, not woman, but that’s another story. Further, back in the 13th century, the King needed the vote of the people in order to collect taxes – no vote, no tax. There were no political parties, so each electorate’s representatives (they had two) actually represented the people who sent them.

Voting – it’s all about the Money

But that was back then. Since democracy was introduced to Britain in the 13th centurty, the power of each individual’s vote had diminished significantly. And it’s all because of – yep, you guessed it – the money. In my next article – Voting: it’s all about the Money – I’ll outline how this happened, and how money continues to drain the power of our vote today.

Now for some good news….

It’s not all doom and gloom. The good news is that a lot of the problems with our democracy are there by convention rather than law – the bones of a truly representative democracy are still enshrined within our constitution. But it’s up to us to decide that we want to claim it back.

I spoke a little about this in my first article on this topic – Democracy: The Genie is out of the bottle – and there’s more to come. So stay tuned!

This article was first published on Progressive Conversation.

Around 70 million people have no safe permanent place to put their feet

It’s unlikely to get better any time soon

“Peace is today dangerously in deficit.”

1. There are so many more of us

2. There will be less land, not more

3. A whole new category of displaced feet – Environmental Refugees

Burmese refugees in KL, Malaysia (http://www.pleasedontsaymyname.org)

So Australia – we’ve got a decision to make

• have a safe place on land OR
• they risk death – either by staying in an unsafe place or by drowning.

Don’t we already do our fair share?

“The average taxpayer is sick of the Labor Party and the Left advocate groups making us feel guilty about the number of refugees we settle in our ­country.” (Peter Dutton, 8 August 2015)

“We are a country that takes our international obligations seriously, on a per capita basis we actually take more refugees and humanitarian entrants than any other country.” (Tony Abbott, 5 September 2015)

• There were an estimated 19.5 confirmed refugees at the end of 2014
• Many refugees are just waiting and hoping to return home – they aren’t looking to be resettled, they just need a place to live until they can hopefully return to their home country. Most are based in huge refugee camps, often in a neighbouring countries, the vast majority of which are in developing nations. Turkey, Pakistan, Lebanon and Iran between them host a third of the world’s unsettled refugee population – or 5.2 million people – mostly in large refugee camps. By contrast, we have just over 3,000 asylum seekers in Australian detention facilities – and the government recently cut funding to the UNHCR.
• There were a total of 3,368,157 refugees who were recognised and resettled globally during 2014. Of these:
  • Only 105,197 refugees (3.1%) were resettled by the UN – and we took 11,750 (or around 11%) of this subgroup, and per head of population, we were the country who took the largest number of this group.
  • The balance – some 3,262,960 refugees – applied directly to the countries they were resettled (or recognised) in. We took only 2,780 of these, or 0.09% of them
• When looked at as a whole, here’s how we really rank when compared with other countries in regards to resetting refugees:
  • 23rd overall,
  • 27th per capita, and
  • only 46th relative to our national GDP.

What would it mean to start pulling our weight in the region?

What if we don’t start pulling our weight?

Prime Minister Tony Abbott has overseen a ruthlessly effective effort to stop boats packed with migrants, many of them refugees, from reaching Australia’s shores. His policies have been inhumane, of dubious legality and strikingly at odds with the country’s tradition of welcoming people fleeing persecution and war.