Thread by @KirstiMiller30

The #LNP Govt in Australia is restricting FOI, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them, delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

https://twitter.com/GretaThunberg/status/1412371328741658625

The populist “anti-politics” frame is constructed by the far right dictators like Trump & Morrison to further undermine faith in democracy and lead to autocratic answers.

The Democracy 2025 project of the Museum of Australian Democracy and the University of Canberra released a major piece of research finding that trust in democracy in Australia has plummeted from 86% in 2007 to 41% in 2018.

Through quantitative and qualitative research over many years, they found compelling evidence of an increasing trust divide between government and citizens.
theguardian.com/australia-news…

This was reflected in falling trust in politicians, political parties and other key institutions (especially media), and a lack of confidence in the capacity of the government to address the public’s concerns.

Importantly though, the researchers found strong ongoing support for the principles of democracy.

Together, these seemingly contradictory statements show Australians like democracy, just not the version we have....

..our systems and our institutions of government are not doing the job we need them to do. This is vital, because it points us to what we need to do in response.

After a centuries-long struggle to demand democratic franchise for more and more people, we’ve become complacent as those in power have made that franchise less and less meaningful.

We now need to re-engage people in democratic decision-making about our common future; we have to re-enfranchise ourselves by truly cultivating democracy.

It’s about seeing democracy as a muscle which we need to exercise in order to build core strength. It’s about cultivating ethics and mechanisms of participation, interdependence, interconnection,...

resilience, that actively bring the community in, inviting everyone to be part of making the decisions that shape our common future.

Vitally, this is about more than “consultation”, or “direct democracy” referenda and popular votes on issues.

It’s about creating meaningful forums for deliberation, discussing ideas deeply, with expert advice and facilitation, enabling people to come up with creative solutions which satisfy as many people as possible.

The two-party-preferred system in  🇦🇺 politics isn’t working for people, & it sure isn’t working for the planet. My collapse of faith in our democracies isn’t an accident. It’s one of the central victories of the neoliberal project,

delivered through 2 generations of privatisation, outsourcing & deregulation, underfunding of gov services locked in by tax cuts, restricting FOI, targeting whistleblowers and raiding the media who report on them,

delegitimising and gagging public interest advocacy, and criminalising protest.

Politics in Australia today relies hugely on the fact that most people don’t know most of what’s going on so as to get away with stuff that couldn’t be done under real scrutiny we have seen a clear example of this with the National Coronvirus Cabinet.

Decisions are made for narrow interests at the expense of the common good, and deep reforms necessary to care for people and the planet are shoved off the table.

Even worse, the extreme right #LNP capitalise on this by identifying the disenfranchisement and misdirecting public anger away from the real causes and towards some scary “other” ie trans people & “look at the boat People” mentality.