The new parochialism stifling Australia

One of the milder assessments of Britain’s exit from the European Union came almost two years after the referendum to leave, when leaders across the continent were still trying to figure out how to do what the British people had voted for. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem like they thought all of this through,” said the Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, after another endless round of Brexit negotiations. Like many of his compatriots, the Taoiseach had a light touch with a joke.

Brexit came after years of populist frustration with a distant political capital among people who felt left behind while others prospered. It was driven, at times, by the basic emotions of human rivalry: envy, jealousy, spite. And it worked wonders for political leaders in an endless cycle of blame and retribution.

Illustration: Simon Letch Credit:The Sydney Morning Herald

Sound familiar? Australia is no stranger to the blame game in a union that routinely pits prime ministers against premiers. Friction is a constant feature of a federation in which Canberra pays the states and territories to deliver essential services. And the heat soars in a pandemic that puts every leader under pressure.

The forces seen overseas are at work here even if there is no Brexit ahead. Communities are not agitating for an Auxit to take their states out of the federation. Even the West Australians, some of whom think proudly of their vote for secession in 1933, have not reached that point.

Yet the forces that divided Europe can be divisive elsewhere. They can create the same frustration without a solution. They can change the way the Australian federation works, or does not, for years to come.

There is a new parochialism in Australian life, deepened by the way the coronavirus puts a premium on what is local, not national. It is a human reaction to an extraordinary time. Fate can turn on the exposure site at the local shops, the outbreak in the nearest hotspot, the lockdown in the local government area, the closure of a state border.

The assertion of state rights, and local interest, will be with us for years. State premiers issue their edicts at daily press conferences that run for an hour and are carried live on multiple channels. The optics, as much as the health orders, shift the balance of power with Canberra.

State loyalties come to the fore. The premier who fights for a state wins the loyalty of that state, which means the pandemic rewards the Australian caudillo. The virus comes with a new mindset. “My state, right or wrong,” is one side of it. “My premier, right or wrong,” is another.

This is an extraordinary reward for leaders in a country that usually treats its politicians with scepticism, if not outright disdain.

State rivalry is a potent part of the glue that now bonds voters to their premier or chief minister. A little drop of schadenfreude turns the glue into Tarzan’s Grip. Victorians were told over and again last year that NSW Premier Gladys Berejiklian had set the “gold standard” in defeating COVID-19 without lockdowns. Every time he made this claim, Prime Minister Scott Morrison tried to brand Andrews a failure but compounded the impression that he favoured one state over another.

Is it any wonder the people of Melbourne see some karma in the shock to Sydneysiders this month?

“It will do Sydney some good to be knocked off their high perch,” wrote columnist Jon Faine in The Age two weeks ago, in a column that contrasted kind and unkind thoughts about the NSW experience. That line could be written in Melbourne on any subject, on any day. It could be about a barista competition, a football game or literary award. It is more cutting, though, when the pandemic supercharges state rivalries.

Politicians know how to play on the populist sentiment to dodge accountability and shift attention to someone else. They have all been at it, to differing degrees, even if this is hard to admit for people whose loyalties run along state or party lines.

The tactics work even if the victory is cheap. Anyone can play: they only have to pick up the crayons, follow the numbers and colour in the spaces. For proof, think of the way Queensland Health Minister Steven Miles took a video of himself ripping up a bill from NSW about sharing the costs of hotel quarantine.

The federation was weak before the pandemic. The duplication between Canberra and the states had grown like weeds to the point where Morrison and his ministers wanted to finance changing rooms at sports grounds and car parks at suburban railway stations.

The last attempt to fix the federation was when Kevin Rudd talked about a “seamless national economy” and tried to harmonise rules and regulations, but even this turned out to be too hard. Tony Abbott scrapped the reform effort when the Coalition took office in 2013.

“The reform agenda had great potential to get unity in diversity,” says Geoff Gallop, the West Australian premier at the time. “Once that was gone, it was very, very hard to get it back.”

The new parochialism could make that ideal even harder to recover. What cannot be known is whether the power of the premiers wanes if and when the pandemic passes.

The lessons from Brexit are about crowds and power. Brian Hughes, a professor of psychology at the National University of Ireland and the author of The Psychology of Brexit, says the experience was shaped by tribal division.

“All societies can descend into tribalism and social acrimony, no matter how sophisticated they consider themselves to be,” he told the British Psychological Society. “In fact, psychologically speaking, we are all susceptible to them.”

In other words, the blame game taps into deep rivalries. Politicians love them. But that does not mean everyone else has to join in.

David Crowe is chief political correspondent for The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.

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