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\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\nWhen the Coalition was in power, its supporters found ways to rationalise administrative sleight of hand as a trivial detail. An evaluation report of the controversial Cashless Debit Card program is withheld for months and only released under pressure. The body that oversees freedom of information is starved of funding. A prime minister secretly becomes another five ministers.<\/p>\n
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By continuing, you agree to our\u00a0Terms & Conditions<\/a>\u00a0and\u00a0Privacy Policy<\/a>.<\/p>\n When Labor came back to government, some of its supporters made various arguments in defence of opacity and parliamentary trickery. Actually, freedom of information laws should be watered down. Senate inquiries are annoying. Climate change is not as important as winning power in the next election cycle. And so on.<\/p>\n The debate teams had swapped sides, but the arguments were largely the same because the problem remains the same between governments of different political persuasions. Power is its own constituency. It exists to protect itself.<\/p>\n And so the little things do, in fact, matter. There is no guarantee that Australia will get a full-blown populist in ultimate power, but there is no guarantee that we are, despite our best assumptions, immune to this outcome. What sclerotic rules and oversight mechanisms will meet them when they come to office?<\/p>\n Nobody wakes up to sudden authoritarianism. Yes, it is a form of power that ultimately takes \u2014 liberties, speech, more power for itself \u2014 but not all at once. People relinquish themselves to it, much as a public might make allowances for one government to get away with bending norms or rules. Over time, these bends become clean breaks.<\/p>\n Donald Trump is an odious figure. A liar, a grand narcissist and abuser surrounded by key figures and billionaire backers who are, in some respects, even worse than he is. To name just a few of them, Stephen Miller and Elon Musk didn\u2019t have to ruin half as much of the American state as they might have needed to. That job had been done for them in the decades prior. Graft, capital and an increasingly muscular, politicised layer of bureaucratic management neutered oversight. People routinely became targets of state power, not its principal object.<\/p>\n Certainly, the distance to a more fully authoritarian ruler in the Australian context may be much greater, but why should we wish to bridge this gap by giving up today the institutional protections we can save?<\/p>\n Pauline Hanson has been having a dream run in the Australian press of late. A poll, of all things, suggested she could be prime minister one day. She was even grilled about foreign policy on the Murdoch channel \u2014 she did not know the Indonesian president\u2019s name<\/a>, but why would she, knowing things isn\u2019t really part of her platform \u2014 in an apparent gotcha that seemed to only work for her and her supporters.<\/p>\n \n\t\t\tRelated Article Block Placeholder<\/p>\n \t\t\t\tArticle ID: 1262496\n\t\t<\/p>\n
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