[Intro Music]
[Applause]
Who in this room is really, really excited about this year's Federal election?
I mean, so excited, that it's the most important day of the year for you, you're going to cook
a special meal, you're going to have the family over,
you're going to put on your best clothes.
No? OK. Who in this room is really terrified of this year's Federal election?
I mean really terrified, frightened for your life?
OK, one or two. Let me try this one.
Who in this room is really frightened of our Prime Minister? [laughter]
What about his main opponent? [laughter]
How about the leader of the Greens Party? No? OK.
Well, we're an apathetic lot, aren't we?
But actually you're representative, we're representative,
of most people who live in democracies around the world.
Here in Australia, over a million Australians, most of them young, haven't enrolled to vote.
41% of Australians don't trust the Government to do the right thing,
and that's about the same proportion of other democracies around the world.
But I'd like to suggest to you that these levels
of apathy about politics are actually
one of democracies greatest achievements. You've just told me that no one's terrified
of Kevin Rudd or Tony Abbott. We may be a bit sickened by them,
exasperated, absolutely, but terrified, no.
And the reason for that is that every three years
we get to sack one of them, and hire the other,
or rehire one and say to the other one, "don't call us, we'll call you",
or maybe just, "don't call us". [laughter]
So in many ways, our apathy about politics, and politicians of all stripes,
is one of democracies greatest achievements, because what democracy has done,
is to take passion out of politics, and in its place, put process.
In the place of passion, we've got now, the instantly anaesthetic Rudd-speak,
the infantile antics of our national parliament, the mindlessly dull processes of federal budgets
and, uh, estimates hearings. We in this room are the heirs of a five hundred year campaign
to get passion out of politics. It all began with our language.
Democracy didn't start to, uh, to appear in England
until the English language changed into the precise,
passionless, emotionless, stiff upper lip, whoops, sorry,
I've gone, I've gone past myself.
But passion in politics is good isn't it?
It's good to be passionate about things. Well no, I don't think so.
Passion in politics can get people killed. Passion in politics can lead to great famine.
Passion in politics can lead to the destruction of great works of art and culture.
So we are the... the heirs of a five hundred year
campaign to get passion out of politics.
And we have this stuff up lip... lip language, that helps us get the passion out of politics.
Because, you had to have a language where people
could disagree with each other, without one or both
of them ending up in a coffin, before you could
get democracy. Now, I would argue the central symbol
of getting passion out of politics, is the election.
Think about it. An election is essentially a regular,
and highly stylised political revolution. Think about our last federal election.
The Australian people rose up, and overthrew their
government. But there was no blood in the streets,
there was no rioting. There was no storming of barricades,
there weren't even any grubby hippies in bad t-shirts,
wait, scrub... scrub that last bit. [chuckles from audience]
So we found a way to tame, and regularise, political revolutions, and make them really,
really boring. We've taken passion out of politics
and in its place we've put process.
And its process that builds roads, bridges, and electricity grids,
it's process that makes the trains run on time,
except here in New South Wales.
So maybe we've become so apathetic about politics though,
that we've failed to notice the silent revolution
that's bringing passion back into politics. Now what's the agent of this silent revolution
bringing passion back into politics? Is it a deeply charismatic politician?
Is it a new ideology or religion? No, it's technology.
This, is the agent, that's bringing passion back into politics.
I'm talking about communication technology,
the synergy of old and new communication technology, that allows people to interact as never before.
I'm talking about the 346 million blogs around the world.
I'm talking about the 175 Facebook users around the world.
I'm talking about the 75 million twitterers, and rising fast, I'm talking about reality
TV,
which twins an old communications technology, television,
with a new communications technology, the mobile phone,
with its 4.1 billion users around the world. And it's not just in rich, complacent democracies,
like Australia, that this silent revolution is occurring.
Over two thirds of all mobile phone users
are in the developing world. Cable TV has a 95% penetration rate
in the Arab world.
And so, as long ago as 2003, we had the phenomenon of Super Star, which was the American Idol
spinoff
in the Arab world. The finalists in Super Star
were a Lebanese woman, a Syrian man, and a Jordanian woman.
When the Lebanese contestant was voted off, there was rioting in the streets of Beirut,
or should I say, more rioting than usual, in the... in the streets of Beirut.
In Syria, the phone company put up billboards and dedicated phone lines, to allow Syrians
to vote for their, uh, contestant. In Jordan, the King
ordered the army to vote for the Jordanian contestant.
[laughter]
Now remember, this is Syria, a military dictatorship, and Jordan a sheikdom.
No one votes in these places, and yet, over 30 million
people watched to final of Super Star,
and 4.8 million people finally voted for it. But what's all this got to do with politics?
The real effect of the new media has been on people's
expectations. People, whether they live in democracies,
dictatorships or sheikdoms, are now increasingly expecting
their opinions to matter in ways that are changing
the way that governments think and act. This is the silent revolution I am talking
about.
Because reality TV, blogging, and the like, not only leads people to expect their opinions
to count,
it increasingly is making them opinion entrepreneurs. It's the belief that their opinions matter
that lead
people to spend large amounts of their time blogging,
tweeting, and posting on the net,
with no prospect of monetary reward. It's the belief
that their tastes are important,
that makes people put some of their most personal details
on social networking sites.
It is the thrill about being part of the story as it unfolds,
that helps people endure endless series of Big Brother,
and Survivor, and So You Think You Can Dance. Now, we're seeing the way that this new culture
of interactivity is starting to affect politics. We wouldn't have a President Obama without
the internet
and the mobile phone. We wouldn't have a Prime Minister
Rudd without morning TV, and Facebook.
These two politicians, used the new media to circumvent,
or more accurately, to burst through,
their own party's nomination processes, and then to totally
dominate their opponents in the election campaign.
But Rudd and Obama weren't the only ones to have woken
up to the possibilities of the new media.
What made Rudd and Obama so successful, was that they found
for themselves the secret of using this new media
most effectively. That secret is, that the new media most
favours causes that are encapsulated in simple messages.
Why? Because in the vast jungle of the internet and the twitter-sphere,
people will only invest time in issues and causes that arouse
their interest and their passion.
And so, Rudd and Obama found the ideal cause encapsulated
in a simple message. And that cause was change.
Not just change of government, change of politics. What both promised to change was the entire
system
of national politics that had so turned people off.
What Obama was able to do with the new architecture
of interactivity was stretch the active voting from a chore,
that takes a few seconds on an allotted day,
to a continual engagement, that lasted weeks or even months.
Now, a continually activated support base is a potent
political tool. It allows a politician to totally dominate
the processes of election, and, uh, and leaders,
keep their followers, uh, mobilised, by promising change.
Big change. And what they promise to change
are the processes that have... that have attracted such bad press. I'm talking about core and
non-core promises.
I'm talking about vested interest, federal-state blame games,
bureaucratic bungling, partisan division.
And Rudd and Obama found these causes and they used them
to great effect, and the audacity of their victory,
convinced each of them, that they were the agent of change,
they were the agent of great change.
They promised to harness the will of the people, that authentic democratic force, to cut through,
and bring about, real transformation. Well, it sounds good, doesn't it?
Finally technology is allowing us to construct direct
democracy, rather than just having to vote for venal
and self-interested politicians. Well, as the old witticism goes,
it might work in practice, but it doesn't work in theory.
Because the problems with the politics of passion,
with its big causes and its simple messages,
is it leads to overreach. The politics of passion
only works, that inspire hope, or anger.
Happy voters don't mobilise, unhappy ones do.
And so leaders overreach because they have to find
big causes to keep their voters mobilised.
And supporters invest great hope, in leaders, to deliver on their promises.
And so, we've got to the stage, where you inevitably
get to, where the politics of passion runs into
the realities of the political process. Last June, in Tehran, we saw a genuine political
movement,
motivated by the politics of passion and the new media.
And it ran, headlong, into a very old reality
of political process, the process of brutal repression.
Last December in Copenhagen, we had another example.
Copenhagen was never meant to be a make or break meeting.
It was meant to be a train stop on the way to a final
agreement on climate change, but along the way,
a popular movement started, that was motivated
by the Make Poverty History campaign. And suddenly there was enormous pressure,
popular pressure on politicians, to do a real deal,
do the final deal at Copenhagen.
Even governments, this is the British Environment Minister of the time, Ed Miliband, were encouraging
more popular pressure on them. And so we got Copenhagen,
an unholy mix of Woodstock and Bretton Woods.
You had thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists and activists advocating hundreds
of different, uh, positions, and all trying to outdo each other with the politics
of the celebrity stunt. It was going to be hard
enough to get agreement just among the two biggest
emitters in the world, America and China, how hard,
was it going to be then, to get agreement
among all of these hundreds of positions. So we have the politics of passion,
uh, driving out process from politics, and, and coming
into conflict with process.
But the big question is whether the politics of passion are going to help or hinder us
in dealing
with the big challenges we face. And then there are issues
about how the new media is going to affect
our political processes. On the one hand, the fact that
people can choose where they get their news from,
and audiences are chased with ever more extreme opinions,
could divide our electorate even more profoundly
along partisan lines than it already has been. On the other hand, uh, there, there are positive
possibilities
as well. The new media are bringing young people back
into politics. The new media are making authoritarian
regimes much more responsive to their own, to their own people.
My hope is that we can bring about a positive synergy
between the new and the old politics.
We can clean up the old politics by using the,
the new politics, and we can bring about a real
improvement in the politics of the 21st century. Thanks very much.
[Applause]
Captioning services provided by Michael Lockrey