When Anna Burke vented her rage into a Lateline interview on the ABC, it seemed inevitable that the commentariat would get all a-chattering. I expected the usual quality of navel-gazing pomposity — grandiose statements about the ancient illness afflicting the culture of the ALP, about the haunting ghosts of the all-male, all-white, all-brute age of our not so distant political past, about the way this totally proves everything Anna Goldsworthy wrote about feminism and stuff.
I was shocked — genuinely shocked — that the usual outpouring of affected authenticity didn’t erupt. Even Jane Caro seemed disconnected from her hymn sheet, writing in The Guardian:
And I’ll let you into a little secret; people like you for your weaknesses, it’s your strengths they can’t stand. You know why? Because when you reveal your weaknesses – as Burke so refreshingly did – you give the rest of us permission to reveal our own.
Inspiring stuff.
When it comes to questions about equality and politics, a quote by Oscar Wilde comes to mind: ‘There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.’ Although the commentary is usually banal, banal commentary in this case is better than no commentary. It keeps the issue alive in the broader public discussion. It prevents the issue from fading away. Despite being banal, it’s important.
But banal commentary isn’t why you read AusOpinion. You want the deeper stuff. The stuff that brings magical lions back from the dead. So here we go …
One of Anna Burke’s comments hints at a complex problem that has gone largely unnoticed during the recent merit debate:
Having left a room where I must admit the bulk of people – both men and women – didn’t vote for me to get the chief opposition whip job not on the basis of merit or perceived capability but on the numbers and the deals done beforehand, one has to question the newly found “democracy” in the Labor party, and the notion that we all have a say.
From the moment that we can understand adverts, we are taught that democracy is the single best protection of the weak and vulnerable ever. It’s synonymous with freedom, with liberty, and with justice. If a State is undemocratic, we immediately recognise that it’s illegitimate. We love it so much that we bomb the Jim Christ out of countries just so we can spread it further. We are so deeply indoctrinated with love for democracy in the Anglosphere that it clouds our judgement regarding issues of social justice and the virtuous political state.
But behind the gloss of our self-inflicted ideology, there are disturbing questions. To what extent does democracy entrench inequality rather than reduce it? To what extent do democratic institutions actually protect people who aren’t straight, white men? At first glance, these look like they should be stupid questions.
Answering the question revolves around what we mean when we utter the word ‘democracy’. When Anna Burke used the word, she seemed to mean a process that involved neither numbers nor deals. It was anti-democratic for a group of people to vote as a bloc. It was anti-democratic for a majority of people to use their vote to influence the outcome.
Yes, there are 11 women on the front bench but, yet again, the majority come from the left with no advancement by the right or the new leader.
These sentences sound odd, almost as if I’m intending some sarcastic intent. But — in a deeply disturbing way — they are entirely coherent. When we use the word ‘democracy’ — use it casually, flippantly, aspirationally, and even commonsensically — we mean something more than merely a selection process using voting. We mean something synonymous with the mysterious phrase: ‘rule by the people’.
One interpretation of ‘rule by the people’ is that the smaller group of rulers represents the population being ruled. When we apply this to Anna Burke’s case, we get an interesting result. There are 86 current members of the ALP’s caucus, 36 of whom are women. It’s about 42%. Of the 86 total members, 30 were selected for the Shadow Ministry, 11 of whom were women. That’s about 37%. If one more woman had been selected for the Shadow Ministry, it would have been 40% exactly.
In other words, the number of women selected for the Shadow Ministry was roughly proportional to the number of women in the pool of people available for selection. Of course, it does seem that whenever we say ‘roughly proportional’ when discussing minority representation, we invariably mean ‘less than exactly proportional’…
But this fancy pants division and multiplication by 100 obscures the nature of the people doing the voting. Anna Burke’s complaint isn’t that women weren’t represented in the Shadow Ministry — her complaint more difficult:
Yes, there are 11 women on the front bench but, yet again, the majority come from the left with no advancement by the right or the new leader.
In this sense, we don’t mean merely that democracy is when the group of people with power is statistically similar to the people who are governed. We mean that the democracy engine selects and promotes our best and brightest, rewards the virtuous, and culls the imbeciles. This becomes a question of the character of the voters: will they vote disinterestedly, guided by principles and the bigger picture?
It also means something more confronting: how do we pry the reigns from the cold, dead fingers of the old boys club? If the pool of voters is dominated by the old guard who show no intent, desire, or inclination of giving up their old power base, ‘democratic’ processes merely legitimise their ‘undemocratic’ (in the Anna Burke sense) influence.
Unfortunately, this is harder to demonstrate objectively. Anna Burke interprets her inability to secure a position as an example of these old power bases having undue influence over the process. Unfortunately — and this comment is meant in no way to reject the legitimacy of her complaint outright — in order to work out if the claim is correct, we have to compare it to some ideal outcome. Of course, Anna Burke would think that a Shadow Ministry in which she features would be superior to a Shadow Ministry in which she does not.
Privately, I completely agree with her, but I’d have no way of demonstrating this conclusively to somebody who disagreed with me.
Ignore Burke for a moment. People are pointing to Senator Kate Lundy as an example of these old power bases using ‘democracy’ to legitimise their punishment of people who upset the hegemony. On the other hand, I’d respectfully disagree with that assessment for a variety of reasons.
See also the discussion about Senator Jacinta Collins being dumped. The Australian once said that it was ‘easy to take aim at Jacinta Collins if you’ve never met her. Anti-abortion. Anti-euthanasia. Anti-gay marriage.‘ It turns out that it’s easy to take aim if you’ve met her as well.
So between Senators Lundy, Collins, and Ms Burke, how do you show which were dumped due to a lack of merit and which were dumped due to ‘undemocratic’ forces?
Some people — especially if they’re afflicted by a chronic case of libertarianism — will conflate ‘merit’ with ‘successfully elected through a “democratic” process’. The meritable are those who were best at being elected. The meritable are the ones who succeed. The invisible hand. The invisible hand. Amen.
But those of us who are cultured and civilised can smell something rotten in this state of affairs. Our disquiet is unable to be soothed because there’s a lack of contrary evidence empirical or rational. And this should concern us. We can’t let ‘democracy’ shield ratbag behaviour. More than that, we can’t even let ‘democracy’ be plausibly suspected of shielding ratbag behaviour.
And this is the paradox of the democratic system. Democracies really only work when there’s the right culture — the social, civilised, communitarian culture — at play among the voters. A culture where ancient power imbalances don’t continue to be re-enlivened. A culture that’s moved beyond scratching some guy’s back just because he’ll scratch yours in return. A culture that’s transcended popularity contests and genuinely engages with the question of ‘merit’ and ‘worthiness’.
And the best way to foster this culture — I would assert — is decidedly undemocratic: have the dear leader appoint the meritorious directly.
As it stands, Bill Shorten can wash his hands of responsibility. The democratically democratic caucus democratically decided through a democratic process to select (democratically) the Shadow Ministry. If we have a problem with the selection, the problem isn’t with his ability to select a competent team. Far from it, it was the Will of the Caucus.
Sure, he was exposed to criticism whichever way he played his hand. Had he appointed the Shadow Cabinet, somebody would have penned an article declaring Shorten to be yet another autocrat, incapable of working cooperatively with his colleagues.
Regardless of whether or not you agree with my ‘undemocratic’ promotion of ‘democracy’, we really need to get a handle on these deeper questions about what we want our democratic systems to do. We can’t be happy with our uncriticised intuitions about what the word ‘democracy’ means, hoping that we’ll just know it when we see it. We cannot be content to take it for granted that our democratic systems are not being used to launder dirty power structures.
Anna Burke claims that a system where people casted votes of equal value to select their leadership team was undemocratic. The most troubling part is that we can’t definitively prove that her seemingly ridiculous oxymoron is actually incorrect.
Mark Fletcher is a Canberra-based blogger and policy wonk who writes about conservatism, atheism, and popular culture. He blogs at OnlyTheSangfroid. This article was originally published on AusOpinion.com.
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