The twentieth century was a long experiment in governing people by their desires — sometimes through their manipulation, and at other times through their creation. The old ruling classes adapted to a new era of mass politics by learning to operate the machines of ideology, education and bureaucratic control. Getting the balance right between consent and coercion was an often-awkward balancing act, which sometimes skewed too heavily towards force. But outside of wartime, most democratic governments tried to gently push rather than shove.

For commentators like Paul Bongiorno, this is how Albanese is conducting himself: seeking consensus on all fronts. This might explain why, after tens of thousands of anti-migration protestors took to the streets last weekend, he responded by pointing out that there were “good people” among the marchers. It might also explain why, faced with the reality of hundreds of Neo-Nazis helming and speaking at these events, he made a vague appeal to the “Australian way” rather than a direct condemnation of fascism on our shores.

In reality, Albanese’s weak response to the rallies is telling. His administration has proven time and again that it is singularly uninterested in governing by consensus or consent. In the months since October 7, 2023, the Australian state has become increasingly cavalier about the consent of the people it governs. The Albanese administration has managed to maintain near-total opacity about its relationship with Israel, and has proven itself quite content to lie about things like weapons contracts with Elbit. To deal with internal dissent, they have introduced hate speech laws, which threaten mandatory sentences for people displaying “terrorist symbols” (including the insignia of Hezbollah, the party responsible for the defence of Lebanon against Israeli aggression).

Public opposition to these measures has been significant, but Australia’s headlong lurch into genocide denialism has been fascinating precisely because of its insensitivity to public backlash. When hundreds of thousands of protestors marched across the Harbour Bridge, Albanese’s response was a chat on the phone with Netanyahu, some bluster, and the symbolic move to recognise a Palestinian state (or what’s to be left of it). No attempt to meet the actual demands of the protestors, or to pressure Israel into ending the genocide.

Since the 3rd of May, it seems that Labor believes it has been given a supreme mandate to keep doing what it’s doing.

In NSW, Chris Minns introduced protest laws earlier this year, imposing colossal fines and prison sentences for protests targeting infrastructure or places of worship. The violence with which these laws are visited on civilians is terrifying. At a rally in June, Hannah Thomas was brutalised by thuggish police from the riot squad. As she put it herself in an article for Crikey, the cop who punched her “had good reason to think he’d get away with it, as indicated by how unfazed his colleagues were by my mangled face, and the way senior cops and politicians quickly closed ranks around him.” Police responded that they would not investigate. Minister for everything — including Home Affairs — Tony Burke responded that “nobody is above the law”. Albanese said nothing.  

This might be news in NSW, but over in WA the violent repression of protest has been par for the course for half a decade. When Joana Partyka from Disrupt Burrup Hub joined a series of direct action protests three years ago, she brought down the full force of WA police’s ire. A campaign of intimidation, surveillance, raids and lawfare ended in early July with huge fines and the narrow avoidance of a prison sentence.

On the other hand, direct repression of speech seems to have become the preferred alternative to the old hack work of turning dissent into consent. Jillian Segal’s “Plan to Combat Antisemitism” is an incredible document in so many particulars. It trades in such extreme conviction of the stupidity of Australian people that it fails to mention once the words “Israel” or “Palestine.” Its recommendations are so vast, and encroach so heavily on the civil liberties at the centre of our democracy, that one would think some concerted assault had taken place. But the justification for these measures rests on events which, in many cases, have either been proven to be hoaxes, or have at least not been proven to be motivated by real and local antisemitism. When Albanese announced that the recent attacks on synagogues were the responsibility of the Islamic Republic of Iran, he might have revisited the urgency of the Segal report. But there’s every chance that this will still become Australian law.

I would say something about how strange and Pynchonian it is that Albanese has not wheeled out the usual rhetoric about antisemitism when actual Nazis promenade the nation’s major cities. But nothing about these inconsistencies is shocking anymore. Really, Labor’s conduct is part of a global pattern of disdain for mass democracy which has found fertile soil in our major political partners. In the USA, Trump rules by executive order and is happy to either lie or gaslight his way out of charges of sex trafficking and paedophilia. In the UK, Starmer has listed a Palestinian protest group as a terrorist organisation, making it illegal to speak about them. In July, British police arrested a man for displaying a pro-Palestine sign, and another for brandishing a cartoon.

But while there is a larger context, the situation here is uniquely Australian. This is a state that put innocent people into concentration camps in the twenty-first century. A state that sent the military to occupy one of its own territories, and imprison its own indigenous population while the world looked on. A state that has followed its military allies into every military conflict since World War 2. This willingness to do things that are deeply unpopular with its electorate has created such a colossal rift between the political class and the Australian people, that apathy has become part of the political calculus.

The country is being run like a corporation, with our political representatives acting from a sense of responsibility to shareholders, rather than to its people. Violence is used to stabilise our extractive markets, and to provide a welcome environment for investment in the cities. Meanwhile, the processes of neoliberalisation and privatisation have removed the organs of control ever further from the hands of the public. The spate of oversights, negligence and racketeering in private childcare, healthcare and aged care is a symptom of this gradual erosion of popular power.

The state has leaned into this divorce from civil society. All major parties have become reliant on a decision-making apparatus kept away from public view and oversight. The appeal to consultants and sectoral focus groups to solve political issues may make logistical sense, but it is an obscure world populated by people without a mandate to govern. The new use of “special envoys” to provide policy frameworks has rightly rankled people who remember the case made two years ago against an “Indigenous Voice to Parliament”. Why does someone like Segal, with shady connections to peak Zionist bodies in the country, and whose husband donates to a semi-fascist anti-democratic organisation, have the power to direct our democracy?

With an inflated sense of its renewed mandate, Labor seems poised to concretise its anti-democratic potential. The obsession in Canberra with Ezra Klein and Derek Thomas’ Abundance — a book that argues for cutting regulation in order to allow for the expansion of public works and spending — makes sense for the party of privatisation. The idea of a political party implementing some voguish crankery from above in a bout of dizzying technocracy dovetails with the neoliberalism that Labor architected in the 1980s. The ALP seems happy to leave the noisy sphere of public exchange, and will come to increase its reliance on a shadowy army of professionals, experts and podcasters. Their isolation from reality was all too clear when Chalmers happily bashed his neoliberal bible at the Productivity Summit in August; waxing Abundant while union representatives looked on in disbelief.

I watched in person the “March for Australia” in Sydney on Sunday. I’ve kept an eye on the new Right in Australia since the Covid days, and wanted to know what shape of this new “diagonal” alliance between Sovereign Citizens, Neo-Nazis and the extended cookerverse was taking. One tonic across all speakers was the indifference of the Labor administration. That the new form of reactionary opposition is taking the form of violence against state representatives makes sense, when Labor has staked its claim to becoming the populist Party of Order. It seems resolved to govern by coercion and domination, rather than concentrating its efforts on organising consensus. The “mirrorverse” (as Naomi Klein calls it) of Far-Right agitators feeds on these feelings of abandonment and anonymity — feelings readily exploited for gain by grifters like Tom Sewell, Bec Freedom and Hugo Lennon.

Whatever the reasons for Labor’s authoritarian turn, we are approaching the second half of the 2020s with a new, strange and frightening political reality. Faced with a rising tide of fascist street violence, we can’t expect support from the state. Nor, I would argue, can we stick to the old models of mass protest and the fomentation of public outrage, to which those in power remains indifferent. It’s time to think about how alternative structures and solidarities can be built beyond the state.

Image: Wikimedia Commons