Australia, Wake Up: Apathy Is a Political Act
Australians are showing up to vote to grab a snag and avoid a fine but our quiet disengagement is allowing radical policies to slip by unchecked.
There is a strange psychological fog drifting across our nation. Not one of confusion, but of quiet indifference. Australians, for all their proud larrikin defiance and backyard political rants, are exhibiting a collective shrug when it comes to serious political engagement.
The most glaring example? A potential 30% tax on unrealised capital gains in superannuation funds. Yes, a tax not on money you make, but on money you might make in the future.
When this idea was floated by the Biden administration in the United States at a proposed 25%, it triggered bipartisan backlash. Economists, retirees, and even the most rusted-on Democrats screamed blue murder. It was swiftly shelved.
But here in Australia, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese can float a worse version of the same idea, and the dominant public reaction is... silence. Apathy.
As a psychologist, I’m interested in why. How can something so consequential barely raise a ripple in the collective conscience? The answer lies in the slow psychological erosion of political engagement.
Politics is no longer something we engage in with conviction or debate around the dinner table. For most Australians it’s background noise, annoying, persistent, and largely irrelevant to daily life.
And yet, we mandate participation in this system. We fine those who don’t show up. We celebrate our 90%-plus turnout rates without acknowledging that many of those votes are informal, donkey votes, or decided in the car park five minutes before casting the ballot.
This is not democracy in action. It’s democracy on autopilot.
For decades, Australians have been lulled into a false sense of distance from Canberra. Our compulsory voting system, while effective at maintaining turnout, has had the side effect of giving people the illusion that their civic duty is fulfilled once they’ve numbered a few boxes on polling day.
We show up, but we tune out. Who can blame us when the current parties' campaigns have been so lacking in big visions for future Australia?
Add to this our increasingly transactional view of politics. We see leaders less as visionaries and more as managers of a business we never wanted to work for.
The Albanese government, with its focus on technical policy announcements and media management, seems to operate under the assumption that if you just keep things complicated enough, no one will object. And they might be right.
Consider how little real public reaction there has been to recent Chinese naval ships circling our shorelines. Or how the public often disengages once slogans like “net zero by 2050” are thrown around, ignoring the granular details of transition costs.
There is a proportion of Australians who are unaware there is even an election being held this Saturday.
Australians are tired. We are mentally overstimulated, economically stretched, and emotionally disconnected from politics that feels increasingly irrelevant to daily life.
But make no mistake, policies such as taxing unrealised capital gains are not irrelevant. It threatens the core principle of fairness that underpins our retirement system. It penalises aspiration and punishes those who have planned for their future. If this kind of proposal doesn’t spark outrage, what will?
Our indifference isn’t harmless. It emboldens policymakers to slip through radical ideas under the radar, counting on our fatigue to shield them from scrutiny. The less we care, the more they can do. It’s a dangerous cycle.
This election is no time for apathy. We must snap out of our psychological slumber and realise that quiet disengagement is not neutral - it is a political act in itself. It says: do what you like, I won’t stop you. And for a nation that prides itself on fairness, mateship and speaking out, that should be deeply uncomfortable.
We owe it to ourselves, and to each other, to start paying attention.
Great assessment, Claire. Our apathy is hopelessness in disguise. We do not trust that our politicians will follow through on their promises and we disengage accordingly.
Agree with you, Claire. Alexander Tytler’s 9 stages of democracy comes to mind.
As a mum, I often ask myself how to instil a sense of civic responsibility in my two kids. My thirteen year old developed an appreciation for an active role in democracy through the COVID-period, when we saw the adoption of new restrictions on human rights and freedoms. Since then, we’ve seen (simply) bad laws and policies introduced when few pay attention.
This election, my brother in law said he didn’t even know which political party Albanese represented, let alone policies. My concern is that - shocking as that may be - it is representative of a larger proportion of the population than we’d like to believe.
Add to this, decades of left ideology pumped through the education system, AI in schools that replaces human thinking and we have new generations of graduates who lean left - not through careful thought but by default. The left and right need each other, but the prevailing view is that left is good and right is bad, or that neither matters.