During the election campaign neither of the major parties addressed seriously the major challenges facing Australia: climate change, inequality and the forced movement of peoples.
That makes it inevitable that following this election, sovereignty, mandates and other weighty words will continue to dominate public conversation.
They usually function as political knives to cut through the messiness of our democratic order. But they also carry a cultural, and specifically theological, weight that may illuminate our present condition.
In theological usage, election is an evocative, top-down word, referring to God's choice of people for salvation, not to people's choice of a God. It also referred to God's choice of particular people for positions — priests, bishops and kings. That is still symbolised in the British coronation ceremony.
The reference to God was politically important because it emphasised that people in authority were under a higher authority.
Theologians debated whether God's election of people was to be understood primarily as an exercise of will or as an expression of mind. Although apparently recondite, the question was important because, if election is an exercise of intellect, it presupposes that it is made for reasons we could in principle understand, even if we cannot know them. If it is simply an exercise of will no reasons can be found.
This had implications for the authority that rulers exercised. If their choice was an exercise of God's will, they had to obey God's commands. But these did not reflect an intelligible human order. They simply demanded obedience.
It followed that the ruler's laws over his people were similarly exercises of will, mandates to be obeyed because the emperor had made them. They could not be measured against a universal moral order. As God's representative, the ruler's sovereignty was unlimited.
"In modern representative democracies the place of God is taken by the people, who are sovereign. There is no overarching moral order."
If the choice of rulers was an expression of God's plan for the world, they were accountable to an intelligible world order that they had to serve. Their own law making and governance was an exercise of reason, and could be measured against a moral order. As God's steward the ruler's sovereignty was limited.
In modern representative democracies the place of God is taken by the people, who are sovereign. There is no overarching moral order. Through elections the people choose the government. This is an expression of will. But the candidates' proposal of policies and later parliamentary debate upon them suggest an intelligible order of what is right for the nation
The party that can gather an effective majority in parliament is said to have a mandate from the people to govern and to propose legislation. But its mandate is deliberately and severely qualified. It must persuade the representatives of the people in parliament, whose mandate is to consider and pass judgment on legislation proposed to it.
In a conflicted parliament the inability to translate a mandate to govern into a mandate to implement policy through legislation causes frustration. This is created by the fact that the people, unlike God, does not give a set of values or overarching understanding of society to guide governments. The mandate to govern contains many rules governing procedures but it is silent about what kind of a society governance should seek. So where representatives do not share values and where societies are conflicted, a government may find it difficult to pass legislation.
Proposals to deal with such a blockage will differ according to whether the mandate conferred on the government is defined in terms of reason or of will. When those who conceive it in terms of will see the inability of the government to execute its economic policies because of a divided parliament, they will judge the nation to be ungovernable. They will argue that members of parliament have no right to obstruct the government's mandate. Those who obstruct the government, of course, will claim that they also have a mandate to oppose what they believe harmful. So there is a clash of wills.
Those who conceive the government's mandate in terms of mind will argue that it must commend to the people and their representatives the kind of society it wishes to build, and must persuade them that its policies will serve that society. In a divided society public conversation must embrace social goals as well as economic means.
The theological debate about election suggests that in a sharply divided democracy in which no party is trusted to push through its legislation unimpeded, it is not possible to produce concerted action by appealing to an agreed moral order accepted by all.
It is tempting to enable action by modifying the constraint placed on government by the nation's founders to persuade representatives of its case. This assumes that governance is a matter of will. It forgets the Enlightenment roots of democracy, with its suspicion of absolute rule and respect for reason.
What remains is the messy business of thinking, persuading and negotiating, attentive to what a good society would look like as well as to the ways in which the economy can be structured to serve it.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.