Is politics in Australia one-sided?

A week before the 2016 election, only 42 per cent of Australians were happy with their leaders and system. This was the lowest in 20 years.

Imagine for a minute that you were the Prime Minister of Australia in 2016. You're about to face your first election, unaware of the narrow victory ahead of you, and that statistic lands on your desk. 

What would you do? How would you try and re-instill faith in the public's view of politics, especially in light of a slim majority? 

This issue, and the increasing rise in anti-Muslim sentiment, face Malcolm Turnbull dead in the eye as he begins his next three years in power. 

The current lack of trust in Australian politics, although at an all time high, is nothing new. 

Both Labor and Liberal parties have now disposed of their first term prime ministers in favour of a more popular likeable alternative. 

In the case of Labor's killing season, the entire process revolved around power plays and factionalism which tore a once mighty Labor party apart. 

For Malcolm Turnbull, his lifelong aspiration to become prime minister of the country drove him to seek power and revenge after he himself had been narrowly beaten by the very man he knifed. 

Within his first week of the sitting of Parliament since the 2016 election, Turnbull began to seem as if he had lost all control. The man once dubbed the people's Prime Minister had failed to produce the politics that Australia had yearned for in it's new leader.

The 2016 result acts both as an analogy and a reminder of the public's current political feelings towards their leaders. The result was too close to call on the night because the voters didn't have an alternative that was clearly better. Despite shifting the blame on the Mediscare campaign and the underlying instability caused by GetUp! and other progressive groups, Liberal Party Director Tony Nutt failed to recognise that their voter base had shifted towards independent parties and One Nation. By the very nature of the result, Turnbull's gamble of replacing Tony Abbott had barely paid off, with the solution now unclear as to how he plans to gain back those votes he lost at the election. Could Abbott have done better? 

This question becomes especially pertinent considering part of the strategy Turnbull used to justify dumping Abbott was that the government hadn't done a clear job of communicating where it wanted to to take Australia into the future. As one voter puts it:

"I would like somebody, or some political party to come up with what they think is a good idea and stand by it even if they don't get votes. But I think that they will be surprised that the votes that they receive by saying "we need to have to take this medicine. It’s a bad medicine but it’s gonna do us good in the long run", I think they’ll be surprised at how many people will vote for them." 

Due to these ever-shifting positions, the number of undecided/swinging voters between elections would be expected to increase amid uncertainty of the government's message in relation to an issue like superannuation or state taxation.

There will now be a significant number of voters who aren't attached to a party and given that voters may become increasingly disillusioned with the mainstream political parties, this poses a major risk in attempting to achieve social cohesion across the country. 

As another voter says, it gets worse with age:

"As I get older and witness more broken promises, it has become harder to know what each party stands for and how much of it is really about effective policies and how much is about political goals and stepping on others to get to the top."

While the next three years remain an uncertainty in grappling with the question of how Turnbull plans to combat the increasing trust deficit in Australian politics, one major factor is already proving to make his job a lot more harder.

Senior ministers, or their staffers will often leak information out of cabinet. It then gets reported. Each party formulates its talking points, then ministers front the media. When they do, they usually stick to approved talking points and fail to genuinely engage in the art of persuasion. Their words fill what we call the 24-hour news cycle, always rinsing and repeating party slogans. Stop the boats, jobs and growth, save Medicare. 

When a politician arrives onto the scene ad says something different-no matter how racist, bigoted and factually erroneous it may be, the media and voters leap on it. The politician is telling us what they really think, they are being honest about their opinions on a topic. Regardless of logic or moral acceptability, this is an appealing trait for the average Australian voter in 2016. 

In some ways then, the re-emergence of Pauline Hanson's One Nation party and it's successful grab of four Senate seats should come as no surprise to anyone who had paid attention to the 2016 election campaign. 

The below picture helps explain why:

In the months and weeks heading into the election, Pauline Hanson was not only given a platform to spread her messages, but was also paid to do so by Sunrise. 

She was called upon after the Paris attacks to provide context both Sunrise and the Today show. In January, she was asked about the topic of vaccinations. A week later, she was on again to speak about literacy and numeracy in schools.

"Hanson isn't an expert on terrorism, international conflict or radicalisation. She is a Senator who took advantage of maximising the opprotunities to afford her views, often by commercial networks keen to attrac viewers in the marketplace." ~Osman Faruqi

While it is unclear exactly what percentage of disillusioned/dissuaded voters in QLD voters shifted towards One Nation due to their feelings on the major parties, it has at least been clear that their support in the Senate was around an average of 3%. The highest percentage the party obtained was in the electorate of Wright in Southern QLD: 21%. 

By these statistics, it's becoming clear that Pauline Hanson's representations sit on the fringes of society. Sure, they have grown exponentially over the past year due to terrorists attacks across the globe amid worldwide instability, but this still doesn't justify why she gains so much air time. 

Sadly, the emergence of far-right populists has only sought to make these tensions and differences deeper. There is, however, one group that has defied the cynicism and fear of global politics to strive towards a more progressive and tolerant future.

Despite reports to the contrary,  the group of Australians aged between 18-25 (or more broadly anyone born between 1981-2002) are amongst the most politically active and engaged within Australian society. 

Often in politics, it's popular to rail against using quotas in Parliament to represent minorities/different genders. Ideally elected members of Parliament and senators should represent the broad range of views and ideals of the people who elected them there in the first place. 

Do you notice something wrong then, with this picture?

Before accusations of bias are thrown around, it's important to mention that the Labor Party also failed to address this problem prior to the 2016 Election being called. With nearly half a million Chinese and over 430,000 Indians living in Australia, Asian cultures are woefully under-represented in politics. Pauline Hason can claim Australia is being swamped by minority groups because it suits her narrative and allows it to go unchallenged in a predominantly white mainstream media. But should she take a look around the Senate, she'd know that these "dangerous" people are severely under-represented.

"There are a lot of people from ethnic communities that are members of the Labor Party or involved in some politics in some way but...most of the time they are in support roles or rank and file roles. It's very rare to see them in leadership roles." ~student politician Deborah Wu

So if both sides of politics are struggling to accurately represent minorities, how are they dealing with age groups generally in Australia? 

After Wyatt Roy lost his seat in the 2016 election, the youngest person currently serving in parliament  right now is Victorian Liberal Senator James Paterson. He's 28. 

In terms of visual representation, that looks like this:

That infographic comes from the Guardian and it's actually pretty telling to see the lack of diverse representation for younger Australians.

Let's take into account the ongoing Safe Schools issue, in which some politicians claim would groom LGBT kids for pedophiles. How many of those LGBT young adults are represented in Parliament? 

Yikes. For a country where people in the 18-25 age bracket make up 13.3% of the nation's broad demographic age estimates, that's practically non-existant. That means that of the 71% of 18-19 year olds who enrolled to vote in the latest election, 0.4% of those are actually being represented in the parliament.

This statistic can be crucial, especially in cases where governments hold a slim majority.

"One of the things that we see with young people is that feel like we don't see our views being represented, and then we don’t vote, and it becomes this negative cycle. But young people don’t realise that their vote could literally swing the outcome in different seats." ~Y Vote Founder Skye Riggs

While the major parties may be making some attempt to engage younger voters to enrol in the election process, they aren't actually placing these young people in Parliament itself. Remember, the youngest member of Parliament is a member of the Liberal party at 28. Labor talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk. 

Politics to me doesn't represent Australia in all it's beautiful, widespread and terrifying glory. I wrote this essay at a time in which global uncertainty has never been more apparent. 

What unifies us as a human species is the notion that we're all in this together for one another. If we let businesses and foreign donors control and dictate our actions, they don't speak with us, they speak for us. 

If we are going to ban people from entering this country due to their religion without properly engaging those who believe in the religion, we can't speak with them, we're now speaking for them. 

And if we constantly allow the voices of millions of Australians to go unheard in a democracy that faces greater global threats than ever before, who's really being heard?

Nothing can be worse in 2016 than silence.