The 2010 election campaign and its result have proved inadequate one of our unspoken assumptions about the political process. We accept that we are most intensely involved in the political process during the election campaign. Our involvement ends with the casting of votes and the election of the new government. We then leave the shaping of public life to the government that has been chosen, with whatever expressions of sadness, delight, fear, shame, relief, distaste or lament at lack of leadership we care to indulge.
Many aspects of the 2010 Federal Election exposed this assumption. Most obviously, nothing has yet been decided. We shall wait for counts and recounts, for negotiations to form a government. For a while we shall not be able to hand over responsibility. We shall not be clear to whom we are who are leaving responsibility, nor even who are the 'we' who hand it over.
The campaign, too, was dominated by the calculation of political professionals and by attention to the whims and prejudices of small groups of Australians in marginal electorates. As a result the large challenges that will face us as a society in coming years received only cursory attention.
These challenges include our response to climate change — the major criterion by which our generation will surely be judged; respect for the human dignity of marginalised groups like Indigenous Australians and asylum seekers; and how we use the prosperity created by our mineral resources to enhance our human resources.
It is clear that it is self-indulgent to decry the lack of political leadership in the hope that it will be found in another election. Unless there is concerted demand for hard thinking and appropriate action on the issues that will shape Australia’s future, the next election will be fought on the same narrowly focused and negative terms as was this election.
If anything is to change, it must begin with Australian public opinion. That can change only if those who care for Australia's future keep an active interest in public life and participate in it in modest ways. We should ask to be offered leadership from the top only after we have committed ourselves to provide it within the small groups that form the basis of our public life.
To involve ourselves in public life is less about acting and speaking visibly in public forums than about acting and speaking more