No One to Blame but Ourselves

As I – and many commentators – have written, this is surely the worst Australian election campaign in living memory. It’s also the most dangerously stupid. As Professor Geoffrey Blainey, one of the world’s most eminent historians, recently pointed out, the world is edging closer to the brink of war yet Australia is more cluelessly unprepared than even in 1914.

It’s easy – and not wrong – to blame the political class: but who elects them? An electorate that increasingly doesn’t seem to care. Not only has the election campaign at this dangerous juncture in history devolved into a pathetic game of who can throw out the most ‘free’ handouts, but more and more people appear to regard democracy as a mere inconvenience.

The last few elections have seen a dramatic rise in early voting. This time is no exception: more than half a million people – three per cent of enrolled voters, more than enough to decide government – have already voted since pre-poll voting commenced on Tuesday. That’s nearly double last year. With the number of early voters sure to rise over this week, this means that likely a million or more people will vote without even seeing the parties’ full policies, nor the Treasury costings of each.

Do we really even deserve democracy? In an election not coincidentally timed to span the Easter holidays and Anzac Day public holiday, the rush to early voting seems a sure sign that millions of Australians just don’t care how their decision will affect the country’s future at such a critical junction. They just want to get it done with and go on holiday.

We are sleepwalking to disaster and have no one to blame but ourselves.

Not that the political class are blameless. With war looming, Labor are grotesquely negligent on defence and the coalition inexplicably waited until late in the campaign to launch perhaps their most important policy: defence.

Peter Dutton will pledge to pump at least $21bn more into defence than Labor over five years, lifting military spending to 2.5 per cent of GDP by 2030 and vowing to meet the Trump administration’s three per cent target within a decade.

The promised funding boost sets the stage for a battle over ­national security in the final 10 days of the election campaign amid growing concerns over Chinese and Russian threats.

The opposition leader will ­release the coalition’s long-­awaited defence policy in Perth on Wednesday and accuse the ­Albanese government of making the nation less safe by leaving ­defence spending languishing around two per cent of GDP.

“The prime minister and the deputy prime minister (Richard Marles) regularly tell Australians that we live in the most precarious period since the end of the second world war,” Mr Dutton said.

“Yet, over the last three years, Labor has done nothing about it, other than rip money out of ­defence, weakening strength and morale. The coalition will strengthen the Australian ­Defence Force and support our servicemen and women to keep us safe today and into generations ahead.”

So, why did the coalition wait so long to announce such a critical policy? Have their strategists paid no attention to the trend in early voting?

To call this a dumb election doesn’t even begin to get the point. This is an election with global power being transformed, with wars in Europe and the Middle East, a Trump-led America ditching its past global leadership role, with China and Russia on the strategic offensive and the assumptions guiding Australia’s defence policy for the past 70 years demanding urgent reassessment.

Yet defence policy is the poor relation in this campaign. It is hardly mentioned by the politicians. It is rarely the subject of a question by the media. It is almost as though a secret agreement exists among all campaign stakeholders to suppress the defence agenda.

It’s not as if we don’t, or can’t, know just where we’re heading. The problem is, we don’t want to know, which isn’t going to save us: we may not be interested in war, as the saying goes, but war will be very interested in us.

History defies prediction. One can speculate, however, how this election may be seen in another decade or two: perhaps as an example of a profound national failure, when the challenge was manifest but neither the leaders nor the public was ready for the task.

We shake our heads at the blindly foolish leaders of the 1930s who ignored the obvious intentions of Germany and Japan, determined to buy ‘peace in our time’ at any price. Yet, here we are, not only repeating their mistakes but inventing new ones of our own.