Reinvigorating the Australian Liberty Movement
So this is how liberty dies…with thunderous applause
Libertarians in Australia have spent the last twenty years being the smartest people in the room. We have wiped the floor with everyone else. No-one can hold a candle to our calm, rational analysis of the data. And as far as penetration into the consciousness of the average Australian voter goes, it has earned us precisely three fifths of fuck all. What does it get you being the guy at the party who knows the GDP of Namibia but won’t join in a backyard cricket match? It gets you five percent if you’re lucky.
Our successes to date, as immensely and personally proud of them as I am, owe more to us being good at numbers than they do to us making a connection with voters. The two-party machine has wised up and taken the numbers out of the equation. If we continue down the same road, our only destination is the footnotes of Australian political history.
And the reason for this is that the average voter doesn’t want to have to think. Thinking is hard work. As soon as you make someone think, you are challenging them personally and their defences go up. But if you meet people at their emotional level. If you make them feel that they’ve been heard and empathised with they’re far more likely to remember you in a favourable light.
We need to be a movement that tells a story. We need a narrative. That story needs to be relatable, and it needs to be a good one. The mark of a great storyteller is telling just enough of the story to keep it coherent, while allowing the listener to fill in the detail from their own imagination. We get too bogged down in the details and we lose people because of it. There might be eight percent of the country who have an informed position on the government’s fiscal management. There are eighty percent out there who are just pissed off at how much the bastards are spending. Talk to the eighty percent, we’ll get the eight percent regardless. No two people are ever going to agree on precisely what it is that they’ve had a gutful of, but we can get damn near the whole country to agree they’ve had a gutful. Stop informing people and start inspiring them.
There is a reason why we hang off every word from some speakers and others bore us to tears. Some only speak to us up here. The ones we listen to speak to us right here.
To paraphrase Hemingway, Show the voters everything, tell them nothing.
I wrote most of what I have to say tonight on December third. Two months ago, on the 166th anniversary of the Eureka Rebellion. It’s no secret that I am something of a Peter Lalor fanboy. I grew up in a small country town in the Diocese of Ballarat. Visits to the birthplace of Australian democracy were a persistent feature of my childhood. The imagery of Eureka is seared into my psyche and etched into my flesh. The oath taken by those rebels comprise some of the most powerful words uttered in our nation’s history.
We swear by the Southern Cross to stand truly by each other and fight to defend our rights and liberties.
That simple pledge is the fundamental ethos of this movement. Those words, the spirit of egalitarianism, of freedom, of defiance that they encapsulate. The flag that came to symbolise them. This flag. OUR FLAG came to represent the conscience of a nation.
And we are the standard bearers of that flag. That’s our flag. That’s our conscience. That’s our way home. That’s our story to tell and it’s a bloody good one. Get out there and tell it because, well why wouldn’t you?
Because this movement is for the sons and daughters of Eureka. If we’re not prepared to take that fight wherever it needs to be taken. If we can’t start inspiring people. If we’re not prepared to do what needs to be done to speak to the hearts of our fellow Australians. I mean we’re the smartest people in the room. If we can’t take this country with nothing but the force of our own willpower then we may as well admit we’re a bunch of posers and give everyone their money back.
I for one haven’t given up on that fight. The biggest mistake I ever made with this movement was second-guessing myself. And my pledge to you is that it won’t happen again.
Because there is a lot to love about this movement. Through this movement, this cause, I’ve made friends I would happily die for. When you connect with people on those fundamental moral and philosophical values, those bonds run deep.
I was raised in a progressive, left-leaning household, attended working class catholic schools, my formative years were spent under Hawke / Keating Labor governments. Had the Labor party stayed true to their values of the 1980s, I’d be the member for Ballarat and we wouldn’t be having this conversation. But they didn’t stay true to those principles, and so I left. I spent some time with the Democrats before quickly coming to the realisation that they too were full of shit. I spent years in the political wilderness. The square peg, the odd one out.
The relief that I felt when I found out that I wasn’t alone. That I hadn’t misunderstood some fundamental principle of fairness and justice in the world. That there were others who felt the way I did. That some of them were right here in Australia trying to do something about the things I thought someone ought to do something about. That was intense. That was life changing. That sparked a fire. The deeper I got the more invested I became and the hotter that fire burned. It’s a flame that gets recharged any time I come to one of our get togethers, or attend the Friedman conference, or spend any time with people who share my values and my vision. When you bring two candles together, that single united flame burns bigger and brighter than the individual ones ever did.
There’s a reason why Liberty is depicted carrying a torch. Because it is a flame. It’s a white-hot rage, fuelled by the injustice we see around us. Liberty and justice are a package deal. We can’t have one without the other and only through the stringent defence of liberty can we achieve justice. There’s a reason why Justice carries a sword.
If we’re to drag this country out from the mire of authoritarianism we need to not only light the way but clear the path. Liberty, and justice for all should be our mantra. We can debate and argue and quibble amongst ourselves. Out there we must appear to be a force united in the passionate defence of individual freedom. We can be as dry as we like at home, but as soon as we’re reaching out we need to be dripping wet.
It won’t come easily. The baby kissing, the three word slogans, the emotional bleating of the other parties is nauseating. But it’s what the voters respond to. We need to find our sheep’s clothing or they’ll never accept us into the flock.
And the way we accomplish this is by repositioning our approach from telling the voters how we are going to do things, to telling the voters why we want to do things. If we tell people what we’re going to do and how, we can only speak to their rational thinking brain. No-one likes having their thinking challenged. There’s a reason why we only accept hard truths from people close to us. We need to believe that the person challenging our thinking is doing so from a place of love and acceptance instead of self-interest.
At an elemental level, at that raw, fundamentally human level, nearly everyone wants exactly the same things. We want a planet that maintains a range of temperatures that we’ve evolved to feel comfortable at. We want a planet where it is easy to grow and obtain food. We want a planet where people are free to exercise control over their own lives without interference from others. We want a safe, healthy, prosperous and peaceful society in which to live out our days and in which our children, and someday grandchildren, will go on to live their best possible lives.
That’s our starting point for raising our EQ to the same heights as our IQ. If we can all agree we want the same things. If we all want to go in the same direction and get to the same place then all we’re arguing over is which shortcut will get us there quickest. If we can get out there and meet people at that level, then we can begin to challenge their thinking. We have to wear our hearts on our sleeves. We have to connect.
And if we don’t. You know what the chances of the electorate coming around to our point of view under their own steam are. If we fall at this hurdle we are gone. A new phoenix may rise one day, but we will have had our chance. We will be forever a day late and a dollar short.
To bring it all together. As men have done for centuries when forging new paths, I want to look to the stars for guidance. You can probably guess which five.
In reality, they’re meaningless, they have very little in common. They’re nowhere near each other physically. Just as all of us come from different parts of the country, from all walks of life, with different backgrounds, hopes, fears and ambitions. But from one corner of a random, completely insignificant speck, orbiting a pathetically dim star on an outer arm of one of two trillion galaxies in the universe those stars converge in spectacular fashion.
The Latin name for this constellation is Crux. Crux is a word we use in English to mean either the most basic, essential feature of something; or the decisive, pivotal moment in a story. This is our crux, and this is our pivotal moment.
Only from this completely arbitrary point in space and time do we feel the stars aligning. They come together to form the Southern Cross and it means something remarkable to everyone who believes in it.
Those five little stars. The simple words they represent. The people that carry those words in their hearts. They show us the way home.
