Oceania | Politics | Oceania

Why Australian Politics Is Shifting Right, Not Left

The prevalence of nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism explains the rise of far-right politics in Australia.

The reasons for the rise of far-right politics in Australia are often cited as financial stress, housing shortages, and frustration with the government. Yet this doesn’t explain why disillusioned voters are drifting toward the far right instead of the left. To understand this, we need to look at how far-right ideas actually connect to mainstream Australian values – not treat the far right as some separate, foreign, or imported movement.

The common assumption is that far-right politics is fundamentally opposed to democratic values, or is a kind of “sickness” in an otherwise healthy system. But Cas Mudde argued the opposite: “The radical right isn’t a rejection of mainstream values, it’s an extreme version of them.” 

This means that the drift to the right has grown out of ideas already normal and accepted, just pushed further. To see this, it helps to look at the three core ingredients of far-right politics – nationalism, authoritarianism, and populism – and ask how much of each already exist in Australian life.

Nationalist language is nothing new in Australian politics. Phrases like the “national interest,” “Australian values,” and warnings about the “nation in danger” are everywhere, and people who disagree with those phrases are often branded “un-Australian.”

This has deep roots. The dispossession of and violence against First Nations peoples was foundational to the Australian state, and Irene Watson argued that this violence remains built into Australian law today. One of the very first laws passed by the new Federal Parliament in 1901 was the White Australia Policy, which tied national identity directly to race.

We like to think we’ve moved past this. But in the lead-up to the 2016 election, then-Immigration Minister Peter Dutton claimed refugees “won’t be numerate or literate” and would be “taking Australian jobs.” 

These two claims, that refugees are simultaneously incapable and a threat, are not as contradictory as they sound. Together, they paint outsiders as both lesser and dangerous, while reassuring “hard-working families” that their fear of falling behind is justified, and that someone or some party or grouping needs to protect them from these threats. 

Cases of authoritarianism, meaning when a government uses state power to override democratic norms, have been seen in Australia. For example, the 2007 military intervention into remote Northern Territory Indigenous communities (codenamed Operation Outreach, led by the Australian Defense Force at Prime Minister John Howard’s direction) led to compulsory income management;........

© The Diplomat