It may or may not be mere imagination, but there are some indications that increasing numbers of Australians are beginning to search for a different alternative in the political and cultural landscape. There is a growing sense among many that the hopes cultivated and stoked so assiduously by political parties and the media are turning out to be false in every direction.
Both in Australia and around the world, to nominate just one example, political leaders regularly enter office with sometimes stellar approval ratings generated mainly by professional makers of image, only to see them plummet rapidly and, unexpectedly, suddenly lose office when the public perception of the difference between rhetoric and substance crystallises. This has been the boom to bust pattern of significant episodes in Australian federal political life in recent years and even at the moment. The politics of bread and circuses is beginning to wear thin.
Another indication (in Australia) is the near obsession with one or two issues relentlessly, incessantly, treated as the only important issues facing the nation, and the anger generated around both. The sheer narrowness of Australian politics now indicates the underlying problem of paradigm. Other sparks point to something afoot as well. On the world stage, the Occupy Wall Street movement which has seen thousands of protesters converge on Wall Street to denounce the ethic of greed which underpins its daily operation and whose logic delivered the Global Financial Crisis is, for the US, a truly remarkable sight.
Given that both the Coalition and the Labor Party are largely governed by poll-driven politics, there is now a case in Australian politics for a new political party which campaigns for policies based not on the ideologies of the left or the right but on concepts based in the natural law and the concept of the common good. One of the interesting possibilities is that such a new force could be, in a very real sense simultaneously conservative and progressive, so to speak, right and left, without any risk of placing itself in the impossible contradictory situations so typical of recent Australian leaders and political parties. Rather than borrowing bits from political rivals and syncretising them into a new conglomerate, it could instead offer a largely new and original solution to the entrenched problems of political life. Such a development might be called a politics of the third way.
A new third force would be highly unlikely to win government. But the growing disenchantment with even the new political forces such as the Greens, who are increasingly regarded as naive and unrealistic idealists coupled with the extinction in recent years of the once-influential Australian Democrats, indicates that a moment of opportunity is at hand. A third force in Australian political life does not have to win government in order to have an effect.
It is less and less clear that either the Coalition parties or the Labor Party are really substantially different from each other on almost all major points of contention and that the victories of each have more to do with degree or style than actual substance. Both proclaim they are fundamentally different from each other but in reality both shadow each other unceasingly. What is really important is that there is a sense that growing numbers are beginning to apparently feel that this is the case as well.
The shape of a new political force, a third way, would possess features that would distinguish it clearly from its contemporaries. It would be a party which assumes as obvious that the stability and solidity of the family unit in Australia is essential and that efforts to minimise this will also detract from the national interest; the underpinning of the stable, intact, nuclear family would be a matter of great seriousness. In an unusual new sense for Australia, such a movement could be pro-woman and pro-child.
Human stewardship of the environment, which fosters responsible exploitation of natural resources without relegating human beings to second-class status, as radical environmentalists effectively propose, or as corporatised servants of exploitation, as capitalism practises, would be a key factor in creating a new social organisation and paradigm.
Economically, a new party could start a new approach, not based on the current generally accepted principle of allowing the market to substantially determine many aspects of social policy. The market is not only incapable of providing stability, it has no interest in caring for the person other than as a means to a particular end: itself. Given that capitalism was once touted as the victor over state-run economies, it is now clear from several global economic crises that this particular god has only ever had feet of clay; an economic system founded on the principle that the economy exists to serve the individual rather than vice versa is, in the Australian context, a radical departure from standard operating procedure but an achievement that is possible to pull off.
These are but a few of the distinctive features which could be generated. What is needed is cohesion of principle, organisation and imagination.