2015-02-27
Ben Moroney
A common accusation levelled at young people is that we “don't engage with politics.” In particular, it is even levelled at young people when young people are out on the streets making loud, public complaint about yet another piece of legislation that attacks us and undermines our ability to live, work and build a future, or that knocks away the pillars of society and razes the environment to the ground, ensuring that whatever else we do, it will be atop a scarred, barren husk of a planet.
To this, of course, young people respond, “but we are engaging with politics! Didn't you see our marches and actions?” The reply inevitably resembles something like, “yes, but you don't engage with politics properly.”
What this means is that the way young people engage with politics doesn't resemble what the complainer is used to — what is considered good, right, and the natural order of things. You dutifully turn up every three-to-four years, depending on the electoral cycle, you cast your vote for your team, and you let them slug it out in Parliament as you cheer from the sidelines. The policies you support, the rhetoric you follow and the sum total of your political engagement is focused solely through the lens of this sports-team approach to governance. If you're an especially dedicated fan, you join the party, much in the way one buys a Dragons jersey, and you wear that branding as a badge of honour.
This approach is a rather glib way of describing what is commonly called “parliamentary politics” or, if one is feeling especially radical, “bourgeois politics.”
It's the idea that politics is something that happens above your head, mediated by sensible, sober men (and, grudgingly, women) of calibre and capability who are chosen to understand the things we plebs have not the time nor inclination to understand. You just pick the right people for the job (again, your team) and just trust that they will handle things.
It's been the way of things since liberal democracy began (or, depending on your viewpoint, far longer than that) so it must be the best way of doing things, right? Even the unions, once the bastion of extra-parliamentary politics, who wielded significant political power no matter whether their MPs were in government or not, have been almost completely co-opted by the parliamentary process. Increasingly, even wielding political power as a unionist boils down to attempting to get Labor MPs elected.
Young people are shying away from this approach. While of course campus clubs are full of political tragics, young people as a political bloc have incredibly low voting turnouts, and often do not engage with parliamentary politics. In an increasingly connected world, where your thoughts and opinions can be broadcast to the world at the speed of light, where reaction and impact are near-instantaneous, the slow and conservative processes of Parliament seem even more disconnected than ever.
People want to get involved and active now, make their voices heard now, not writing a submission to a parliamentary inquiry that will come up for debate in a few months to be, let's be fair, roundly ignored by a chamber of people whose agendas are set by their donors and interest groups, not their constituents. Young people are disengaged from bourgeois politics because it offers them nothing for the way they engage with their lives, and the act of voting has become almost entirely disconnected from the results they seek. Instead, they are getting out on the streets and on the Internet.
Now, I'm not pulling a Russell Brand and advocating that people don't vote, or disengage entirely from bourgeois politics. Your vote is still important; nobody could claim that decisions DON'T get made in Parliament, and as far as bare minimums of political engagement go, casting a vote is as low-effort as you could find. Parliament is still going to be, for the foreseeable future, the primary driver of Australian politics.
What we do need, however, is to recognise the limitations of Parliament and rebuild lost ideals of personal and collective political action, retuning and reshaping them for a new information economy and media and messaging landscape. Parliament may well always be one of the tools with which we engage in decision-making, but it should not be the only one. Unions, community groups, clubs, action groups, and now Internet communities — all of these and more can and should be our means of expressing our political beliefs and transforming will into action, forcing politicians to engage and exercising the power we have by right in a democracy.
Young people do engage with politics — just not always in the way politicians would like.
Ben Moroney is co-convenor of the Australian Young Greens