The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US…

The key to understanding Australian democracy, and how it’s fundamentally different to the European and US models some try to impose here, is not where you might expect to look. It joins dots with another Australian passion. Sport. /1 https://t.co/ulMBKLx7sI

Australia is sports-mad. But not in the same way other countries are, it’s not so much the viewing of sport (which we do as well). It’s the participation in *community sport*. A practice which many (including me) are surprised to hear is almost non-existent in other countries. /2 https://t.co/xEZMrfrtzT

9.5 million Australians are involved in some form of organised, community sport. This graph shows the inclusivity of that activity as well. That’s critical. There’s lots of talk about how all of this sport is important for our physical and mental health. /3 https://t.co/mioIPD42LS

But its importance is MUCH bigger than that. This is the training ground for how Australians learn to live as communities. Where they learn and invent the skills to mix with others, from all walks of life. Those weekend games, where entire communities mix on the sidelines. /4 https://t.co/DZHVRV6za9

And where people volunteer, to organise all of this community sport, the coaches, managers, club officials etc. All of this activity is about organising communities, sport is almost incidental to the real importance of what’s going on here. /5 https://t.co/izvY61UopI

And yet to this day, our political parties organise through a series of tired, old ideologies imported from an entirely different context, in Europe and the US. Non-Australians comment on the non-partisan nature of Australian politics, how traditionally pragmatic it’s been. /6

Voting is compulsory, and people just do it. They’re difficult to mobilise into Pavlovian political hate apparatchiks that dominate politics overseas, they don’t relate to it. They’re used to community life, which in many of those other countries barely exists. /7

There schools organise any organised sport, or physical activity is much more individualised, through gyms and sports that don’t need community organisation. Isn’t it obvious that if you teach how to organise groups of people to work together as a core part of your culture,…/8

…your overall culture will reflect that? We take it for granted in Australia, this incredible gift of community, which doesn’t fit the models of democracy from overseas. I sometimes use solar panels as a good example, how ordinary Australians installed them. /9

Look at that tsunami of renewable energy, which Australians organised themselves. They acted as a community. The technical name for this in politics is communitarian politics. Not capitalism, not socialism, all those tired war-generating European ideologies. /10 https://t.co/lcImzim7NI

European football is like European politics. Intensely territorial, aggressive, the focus much more on the local team being a competitor for other local areas. Local identity is largely defined through the local team. Compare this with Australian community sport. /11 https://t.co/lwWmKxBW8b

Our democracy, but what we have here isn’t really consistent with how that term is used overseas, is focused on community. That’s where the practical everyday work of building and maintaining Australia happens. It’s Saturday, go look at the local sporting ground. /12

Look at the diversity of people down there, from all walks of life. That’s the genius and magic of Australia happening, right in front of your eyes. We’ll lose all of this, if economy politics continues. If we keep rehashing tired European and US themes. /13

US-driven social media is already driving toxic counters to this community way of life into Australian life, with its libertarian obsessions. Creating those same Pavlovian hate apparatchiks inside Australian life. So far we’re holding them off. But it won’t last. /14

And our politicians lack the intelligence or awareness to see the difference here. The economy is the mother ship for libertarian politics. We just had a budget obsessed with ‘controlling inflation’, the great libertarian con, courtesy of monetarist politics. /15

Now is the time to be bold, to be protective of what’s unique here. Not to be just another boring set of people in business suits implementing the same economic nonsense. I’m not confident. Our institutions retain the history of our community-based politics. /16

But our politicians take all of their cues from Europe and the US. They’re career apparatchiks. And since the 1970s those institutions have irritated their petty ambitions, and they’ve been trying to destroy them. I fear it’s too late to save us. But there’s one more thing. /17

Not coincidentally, the Aboriginal Australian way of life we tried to supplant here is also resolutely community-based in its focus. It’s not the first similarity between that culture and the one we’ve developed since. A type of osmosis has happened there, I’m sure. /18

One that we don’t recognise. Just as we don’t hear the profound similarities between the Australian accent we pride ourselves on, and Aboriginal languages. There have been profound, hybrid evolutions between these cultures. We’re far more Aboriginal than we realise. /end