The fate of the nation - what can we expect?

Can we avoid a Trumpian Australia?

This is the fifth in a series of five about ACFP’s recently released report on The State of Australia 2025. View the first article here.

ACFP has recently published a major evidence-based report on the state of the nation. It’s called The State of Australia 2025. The report does not paint a happy picture of either our current state or our prospects for a better future if we persist with the policy directions we have followed for the last two decades.

If we imagine that Australia might be exposed to the sort of social and democratic decline so obviously on display now in America under Trump, then The State of Australia 2025 shows where, how and the degree to which we might be most exposed to a similar fate of complete breakdown in social cohesion, personal safety, rights and freedoms.

Broadly, the report shows that Australia is most exposed to such a fate due to:

1. growth in inequality – especially political inequality and inequality of opportunity;

2. a lack of human rights;

3. an increasingly secretive and unaccountable apparatus of government that operates at a very unhealthy distance from the expressed wishes of Australians for peace, safety and security;

4. a corporate sector intent on attacking participation by Australians in their own economy and democracy;

5. a succession of governments that have refused to specify and abide by decent ethical standards in their decision making;

6. slavish idolatry of a failed economic system – neoliberalism (a system of grand theft by the few from the many);

7. a vulnerability to divisive dogma about other cultures and ethnic groups (in other words, a vulnerability to racist tropes); and

8. a system of governance which has offered neither equal suffrage, nor a reasonable share of power for the people, nor a process by which trust can be established in parliaments and governments.

Any one of those factors would probably be enough on its own to turn the nation’s fate from a positive to a negative. But the combination of them all is extremely dangerous for Australians, especially at a time when a growing number of other countries and alliance partners are falling prey to the same divisive influences and declining into forms of neo-fascism.

Australia has not yet declined as a society to that extent, but The State of Australia 2025 provides evidence about the adverse effects of the above combination of factors over the last two decades and how this is predisposing our nation to a further decline of our quality of life. The decline is evident in literally hundreds of indicators of our social cohesion, individual health and wellbeing, environmental sustainability, economic resilience, democratic inclusion and strength, and security in the face of growing international conflict and climate change. For insights into the data on this, see the previous articles in this series here or read ACFP’s summary of The State of Australia 2025 here.

However, it’s Chapter 12 of the full report that provides the most comprehensive insight into these and other factors of our decline and the extent to which our options for a better future are still open to us or are closing. This chapter draws on the factual data and information provided elsewhere in the report in relation to our nation’s performance on the 368 indicators of our wellbeing and security in the Australia Together National Wellbeing Index. It then summarises features of the decline in our fortunes over recent decades in twenty of the areas where remedial action is most urgent if we wish to restore the chance of a better future. It then examines what continuing poor performance in those areas implies for our capacity to restore our fortunes and sifts out actions that can give us the best chance of reversing our current trajectory of decline before time runs out.

Where can we halt and reverse the decline in our fortunes? What can we do to stave off a Trumpian future?

There are several areas of policy where it would be feasible or even quite easy to halt or reverse our nation’s declining fortunes. One example is in the area of growing inequality. Based on recent performance, expectations are that most forms of inequality are likely to continue growing in the 2020s due to current policy settings on tax, housing, education and electoral funding. But Australia’s performance on reducing gender inequality has been improving and if this trend of improvement can be sustained it offers a good and stable platform for reversing other forms of inequality and the policy settings which have caused them. Participation of more women in Australia’s economic and democratic life can be a crucial factor in helping Australians as a community to establish universal income and services security. That’s a systemic reform that would re-create Australia as a place of equal opportunity for all.

Another example of an area where we can reverse our fortunes quite easily is in the economy. Here we can see the damage done to so much of our quality of life by the stubborn support the last few governments have given to neoliberalism. Nevertheless there have been improvements in economic management during the 47^th parliament which can be – if we choose – just the beginning of a program of reforms to restore our fortunes as a nation and to re-establish the fair sharing of returns on our labours. At present, expectations are that some advances in economic management achieved during the 47th parliament may well be defeated if future governments throw those advances away or refuse to take on the necessary systemic reforms. But this can be fixed if governments simply decide to fix it.

One more example of an area where it would be feasible to reverse our poor performance is in our declining health and wellbeing. The report shows that this is one of the worst areas of our performance as a nation in the last five to ten years. It is evident that the physical and mental health of Australians has been declining steeply. Millions more Australians are suffering from chronic diseases and mental illness:

• The proportion of the population living with one or more chronic conditions rose from 11.4 million people (47%) in 2017/18 to 12.7 million people or 50% in 2022. This equates to an 11% increase in the number of people or 1.3 million more with chronic disease in only four years.

• In the ten years to 2022, the number of Australians with a mental or behavioural condition more than doubled from 2.996 million (13.6%) in 2011/12 to 6.632 million (26.1%) in 2022.

That does not augur well. Unhealthy people cannot build a strong and prosperous economy. It’s little wonder that young people do not feel that they will have the same quality of life as their parents. Still, the evidence is that Australia’s social cohesion and equality is not yet so broken that conditions are being set for the sort of democratic upheavals being experienced in America. But it could be headed that way if policies for equitable and affordable access to services and universal income security are not invoked and if Australia’s constitution continues to accord almost no rights to the people of Australia and no obligation on governments to respect and uphold those rights.

This is a particular area of weakness for Australians. In America, where they have human rights inscribed in their Constitution, Trump and his billionaire friends and enablers in the Project 2025 movement have had to work incessantly and spend billions over the last decade to trash the rights of Americans and all their democratic institutions. In Australia, the Constitution is silent on all but a few rights, and doesn’t even accord Australians security of their right to vote. Our Constitution presents no barrier at all to those who would trash our rights and democracy.

If we wish to prevent a Trumpian Australia, the Constitution needs a holistic reform to establish a democracy of political equals.

Expectations are that if Australia’s social cohesion and quality of life and trust in their governments continue to decline, Australia will be more susceptible to the sort of social and democratic breakdown evident in America and it will take less time to drag us there than it has for Trump. Strategies to reduce income inequality and gaps in access to education and information, as well as a program of constitutional reform, will be vital in heading off Australia’s democratic decline before it is too late to head it off.

Most, if not all, of our options as an Australian community for securing a better future are a matter of choice. There is nothing to prevent us from freely choosing these options and it is not too late to invoke them. Nothing about either our present standard of living or our prospects as a nation for a better future need be sacrificed if Australians act together to make the better future they have repeatedly said they want a reality. The critical success factor is the timing of the choice. The window is closing. Soon it will be too late for the choices to be effective, particularly against climate change.

On one level, a reading of The State of Australia 2025 might suggest that Australians have been behaving like frogs in a slowly heating pot – as though the decline in our fortunes has been creeping up on us so slowly that we haven’t fully noticed it. If that metaphor applies to Australian society, then it would be as well to attend to the fact that the data especially on climate change show that the metaphorical pot is now getting hot quite quickly and we are on the verge of missing our chance to jump out.

Despite the nearness of more decline, a full-on collapse of our society and dreams of a decent future is not something that is inevitable for Australians. The depressing expectations set out in Chapter 12 of the report are not some ineluctable force of destiny. If we arrive there it will be because we chose to, and chose to when we knew it need not be. It will be because we chose policies that we knew would hurt us in the long run. Australians can organise themselves to make better policy choices by becoming involved – as I have said in earlier articles in this series – in National Integrated Planning & Reporting. National IP&R gives Australians the most efficient way of participating in their own democracy and substantially increasing their influence with the parliaments and governments they elect. You can find out more about National IP&R and how to become involved on the ACFP website at https://www.austcfp.com.au/national-integrated-planning-and-reporting. Everyone is welcome to participate.

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