Jenny Hocking’s recent lament in The Echo that many of the ALP government’s legislative achievements haven’t cut through is understandable. It’s the familiar complaint of incumbent governments and indeed of anyone seeking to penetrate the fog of daily ‘news’ (or infotainment). Dis- and mis-information, skewed media ownership and journalistic biases and incompetence only add to the myopia.
To be sure, Labor has done some good sensible things, all recounted in Jenny’s article. But it has also done some dodgy stuff too, like inflicting more cruelty on refugees, granting more licenses to fossil fuel companies, and failing to respond strongly enough to the slaughter in Gaza, the West Bank and Lebanon. Labor’s is, at best, a patchy record, albeit preferable to what might have been the case had the Coalition won office back in May 2022.
Minority government
The current government’s parlous electoral standing, as evidenced in recent polls, is extremely worrying for party mandarins. At this juncture, it seems that the party’s best prospect of achieving power is minority government, which as a Greens supporter, I would welcome (up to a point).
That said, the Albanese government faces an uphill battle to even get to this point. Yes, it confronts the usual challenges of trying to sell its message through the ‘mainstream’ media. Not that there is a distinct mainstream anymore. Such is the proliferation of ‘alternative’ algorithmic news outlets – good, badn and very ugly – that it’s far from clear how the government can get its message across in such a diffuse landscape. The rapid shift from analogue to digital news, from print and TV media to oddball podcasts and assorted (often crazed) online media commentary makes any attempt at so-called ‘balanced reporting’ difficult, if not impossible. To make matters worse, florid conspiracy theories now percolate through these compressed mediums as do tribal messaging and straight up lies. It’s all dark and messy. But it is the new reality.
It’s people’s lives
The government can issue as many press releases as it likes, it can pepper TV screens with talking heads that boast of advances and achievements, but this might not count for much at the ballot box. When it comes to household economies, the daunting challenges of affordability and debt management tend to rub up against triumphalist narratives of economic success.
The ‘economy’, as most of us have come to realize, is more than the usual capitalist indicators. The actual economy is about people’s everyday lives, how they deal with financial struggles and future-proofing rather than the abstractions of ‘economic performance’. It’s important we understand this.
The routine pressures of getting by in a precarious economy have led, in significant part, to Trump’s recent electoral triumph. It’s one thing, as former President Joe Biden discovered, to boast about the government’s performance in the main frame economy, and quite another to convince people that you’re the go-to fixer of their economic woes. According to various capitalist criteria, Biden did much better than Trump in terms of economic growth, productivity, employment, and the rest.
Yet for Biden and his successor, Kamala Harris, this wasn’t enough to sway hip-pocket voters. The so-called ‘cost of living crisis’ (aka the profit-price spiral), indebtedness, precarious employment and crappy pay and conditions framed how people chose to vote, as did the perception that the Democrats were more concerned with identity politics and ‘woke’ issues than the material struggles of ‘ordinary people’. Toss in some good old racist dog-whistling (the ‘migrant invasion’) and generalized anger, and you have all the ingredients for a corporate-bro takeover.
Victimhood
The story being sold here and elsewhere to people in the margins is underpinned by a sense of victimhood, and of being constantly ignored or done over by self-serving, profligate elites. Populist leaders in the US and beyond thrive on this stuff. Listen to right wing shock jocks and the grievances repeatedly aired on cable ‘news’ channels and you’ll soon get the drift.
One of the right’s most effective techniques of neutralizing the opposition has been to coopt its rhetoric and imagery. As Naomi Klein points out in Doppelganger – surely one of the most incisive books of the past decade – the ‘mirror world’ of social media provides the perfect setting for the creation of conspiracy-oriented tribes that appropriate the language and symbols of the more progressive side of politics.
So ‘racism’ is used to dismiss affirmative policies, meritocracy to eradicate inclusive policies, and freedom to justify wholesale deregulation. And so it goes. This is the mirror world where Bannon and his ilk are portrayed as class warriors and the arbiters of freedom and justice.
It’s all BS, of course. But it works. Yet this is not a movement that emancipates the poor and marginalized. It’s about building an even more powerful plutocracy that further enriches itself while upending civil rights and social justice.
So, it may not be enough to extoll policy accomplishments. A story has to be told: a narrative that brokers common interest and recognition of the real reasons for hardship and inequality. As suggested in a recent ABC 4 Corners investigation, life on struggle street is making people fearful and angry. The two-party system is breaking down.
We cannot let the void be filled by charlatans.
For four decades The Echo has printed the stories some people loved, some people hated, and some pretended not to read. If you want us to keep telling the truth, the real truth, not the sugar-coated version. We’ll need your support to keep the presses rolling. 
