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Looking on the bright side: the risks – and rewards – of political optimism

Gareth Evans Distinguished Honorary Professor Australian Nat

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Author: Gareth Evans, Distinguished Honorary Professor, Australian National University

Original article: https://theconversation.com/looking-on-the-bright-side-the-risks-and-rewards-of-political-optimism-238885

This is an edited extract of the Wyndham City Barry Jones Oration delivered on September 18 2024 by Gareth Evans, distinguished honorary professor at ANU and former Australian foreign minister.

There are plenty of reasons right now for finding the present state of the world – and to some extent Australia – anything but bright. Internationally, they include:

Domestically, among the reasons for gloom are

But my argument is that while some things are as bad as they seem, not all of them are, and believing them to be so tends to make things worse. There are plenty of risks in being what I rather bravely described myself as being in the title of my 2017 political memoir, an Incorrigible Optimist. But there are also some real rewards.

Things can be better

Being an optimist means believing things can be better. It does not, and should not, mean believing that things are bound to be better. That way lies the risk of complacency. And there are too many troubling issues in the Australia and world of today about which policymakers and publics just cannot afford to be complacent, but in fact are looking on the bright side a little more than they should be. They include the biggest threats of all: the existential threats to life on this planet posed by climate change, pandemics and nuclear war.

As to climate change, the catastrophic long-run impact of unrestrained global warming is much better and more widely understood than it used to be, and outright sceptics are a diminishing force. But a sense of urgency about taking the necessary remedial action is still by no means universal. Too many still seem to believe the problem will eventually solve itself, that technology will ultimately save us from the worst.

But meanwhile, as the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) recently reported, the world is currently on track for 2.5-2.9°C temperature rise above pre-industrial levels, far beyond the 1.5°C we need to avoid the worst impact. And none of the G20 countries are currently reducing emissions at a pace consistent with their net zero by 2050 targets.

While climate change remains a real threat, there are now far fewer outright sceptics.
Darren England/AAP

As to pandemics, complacency would be equally misplaced. Having conquered so many scourges over the last century, it was hard to believe that anything could be as bad again as the Bubonic Plague of the 14th century or the flu epidemic of the early 20th. But COVID was a wake-up call as to state of the cooperative international mechanisms, and instincts, we will need if that comfortable confidence is to be justified: both remain very fragile.

Even more disconcerting is the even greater complacency evident among policymakers and publics about nuclear war – that fears of such war are misplaced, that the bombs are for deterrence not warfighting, that no nuclear exchange has happened despite nearly 80 years of alarmist doomsaying and really won’t happen in the future.

It may be that no state, Russian chest-beating notwithstanding, will ever be crazy enough to make a deliberately aggressive first strike. But the prospects of a nuclear holocaust being unleashed by system error, or human error or misjudgement, are incredibly real. Given what we now know about the number of near misses during the Cold War, the limitations of command and control systems in a number of current nuclear-armed states, the number of weapons currently deployed and on hair trigger alert, and now the new risks posed by AI, it is nothing more than sheer dumb luck that such a catastrophe has so far been averted, and nothing more than wishful thinking that such luck will continue in perpetuity.

One more example of the risks of complacency, for Australia if not the wider world: too many Australians are excessively optimistic about the utility for us of the US alliance. The biggest security risk we face in the next decade or two is not likely to be a major terrorist attack, or invasion by some northern regional neighbour thirsting for access to our land or mineral resources. It’s being drawn into a major war not of our own making out of a misplaced sense of optimism that by doing so we will be buying lifetime insurance protection from our great and powerful ally. If the US plunges into war over Taiwan, we have far more to lose than gain by joining in, but the AUKUS submarine deal seems clearly premised on the assumption – though no-one will admit it – that we will. And the ANZUS treaty, for all that we rely on it, actually offers zero guarantee that the US will come to our territorial defence, should we need it, if it does not see its own national interests being threatened.

The case for progress

All that said, there are reasons for genuine optimism – not just ill-informed or mindless complacency – about many of the issues that many of us still find troubling. It is important to acknowledge just how much progress has been made on multiple fronts – things are not always as bad as they seem, particularly when looked at through an historical lens.

While war and violence sometimes seem to us to be ineradicably endemic in human nature, it’s worth stopping to think, as Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker reminds us in his brilliant 2011 historical overview, The Better Angels of Our Nature: The Decline of Violence in History and its Causes:

customs such as slavery, serfdom, breaking on the wheel, disembowelling, bear-baiting, cat-burning, heretic-burning, witch-drowning, thief-hanging, public executions, the display of rotting corpses on gibbets, duelling, debtors prisons, flogging, keelhauling and other practices [have] passed from unexceptionable to controversial to immoral to unthinkable.

Closer to home, it’s worthwhile contemplating just how immeasurably more civilised and decent our own country has become – for all our continuing problems – over the lifetime of those of us born during or after the second world war.

Think of this early 1960s check-list, as I for one was coming to maturity:

There have been stunning shifts of community sentiment on all these fronts. For me, whose first-ever published article, over half a century ago, was an attack on the White Australia policy, perhaps the most moving of all has been the acceptance now of ethnic and cultural diversity in our community to an extent inconceivable when I was growing up. The 2024 Lowy Poll records 90% of Australians as feeling mostly or entirely positive about the “country being open to people from all over the world”, with just 1% as entirely negative.

Perhaps most miraculously of all to those of us who spent our early Saturday afternoons standing in the muddy outers of suburban football grounds, the kind of cringe-making racial abuse (not to mention “poofter” insults) that one used to hear all the time from the crowds around us now earns its perpetrators lifetime bans from attending matches.

None of these changes happened by themselves. They were campaigned for, endlessly and indefatigably, by legions of community agitators, occasionally supported by political leaders with visions equal to their own – all of them not only passionate about the need for change, but undeterred by setbacks and relentlessly optimistic about the possibility of its achievement. Barry Jones’s leadership of the campaign to abolish capital punishment is an iconic example; but so too was the role of the Women’s Electoral Lobby on women’s rights; and a legion of others fighting against racial discrimination, censorship, gay persecution and for a host of other civilizing causes.

Legalising same sex marriage is just one of the many ways Australia has changed for the better in the past decades.
Lukas Coch/AAP

The will for change

Of course it is the case that a great many battles still remain to be fought if we are to achieve a safer, saner and more decent Australia, and wider world – from continuing conflict and atrocity crimes internationally to closing the gap on Indigenous advantage domestically. The degree of difficulty in achieving change for the better obviously varies enormously as between all these challenges. But with the right kind of mindset, and leadership, a great deal more is achievable than we all too often pessimistically assume.

Internationally, as gloomy as the present outlook seems to be, the world of conflict prevention and resolution, human rights protection, economic fortune and misfortune, and political and diplomatic competition, never stands still. If things are no longer what they used to be, they never really were. Both new thinking, and the adaptation of old thinking to new circumstances, is constantly necessary. It’s happened in the past, and can happen again.

One example of the power of new, and optimistic, thinking from my own experience in international policymaking was the peace settlement in Cambodia in the early 1990s, which at the time seemed almost as intractable a problem as Israel-Palestine is now. The key to unlocking it was to give China a face-saving way of stopping its support for the Khmer Rouge by identifying an unprecedentedly hands on role for the United Nations in the government of the country during an agreed transitional period,

A second example, in which Australia also played a leading role, was the creation in the early 2000s of a new global consensus, which had never previously existed despite the Genocide Convention and other post-second world war human rights treaties, about how to respond to the horror of mass atrocity crimes of the kind that seared the world’s conscience when they erupted again in the Balkans and Rwanda in the mid-1990s. The key to forging that consensus was to change the language of the debate away from “the right to intervene” to “the responsibility to protect”, and shift the emphasis away from military response towards preventive strategies and non-lethal response mechanisms.

My observation from long international experience is that very few problems totally defy rational solution. If the will and capacity, and leadership, to address them is there the solutions are there. That has always been true of Israel-Palestine; it was demonstrably true of the Iran nuclear program until Donald Trump tore up the painfully negotiated Joint Comprehensce Plan of Action (JCPOA); it may well be true in Ukraine if both sides, with some more stalemated military exhaustion behind them, could accept the historical reality of Russian Crimea, and likely support – through a plebiscite – for a Russian Donbas; and it is certainly true of the potential for US-China détente, if both sides are genuinely prepared to focus on the benefits of cooperation rather than posturing confrontation.

It’s even true of the most obvious potential flashpoint in our own region, China-Taiwan. Although developments in Hong Kong have obviously not been helpful, it has always seemed to me at least conceivable that, if cooler heads can maintain the status quo long enough, common ground might ultimately found in the concept of a loosely federal “Greater Chinese Union”.

As discouraging as the international environment may now be in so many ways, it is important to keep things in perspective. Pendulums do swing, wheels do turn, presidents and prime ministers do change. Some recent elections in Europe, notably in Poland, have reversed the apparently inexorable tide of authoritarian populist nationalism. And in the US, the alarming prospect of a second Trump presidency now seems rather less certain.

The prospect of a second Trump presidency is now far less certain than it once was.
Charlie Riedel/AP/AAP

The protective effects of Australia’s democracy

In Australia, we are blessed with a political and electoral system that not only makes the ascension to power of extremists much harder to achieve than in presidential systems, parliamentary systems based on first-past-the-post voting, and systems without compulsory voting. It also means that – frustrations of very short terms notwithstanding, and notwithstanding also periodic difficulties with a Senate whose minority party and independent members I once described as reminding me of the bar scene in Star Wars – we have a system which is not condemned to gridlock, one that does make change possible if governing parties want it badly enough.

There are always practical constraints – more often than not driven by economic winds and budgetary pressures – on how much any government can realistically achieve in any given period. But particularly when it comes to social policy – what I like to call decency – issues, and tackling the kind of big institutional governance reforms that would improve the quality of our democracy, how much can be achieved depends more than anything else on how much our political leaders want to achieve. It depends on their willingness and ability to articulate a vision of why we would be a better society with these reforms, to communicate and argue effectively for them, and demonstrate a capacity to deliver them effectively.

Nervous, defensive crouching, cautious plodding, and seeing survival in office as being above all about making yourself a small target won’t cut it. Nor will focusing overwhelmingly on the risks of offending some sections of the community rather than the rewards of exciting many more of them .

The Albanese Labor government has enough obviously first-rate talent in its ministerial ranks to be a great reforming government in the Hawke-Keating tradition, one that sees political capital as something to be spent in office, not hoarded indefinitely while its value gradually erodes. But its instinct, on an increasing number of issues, has been to move into cautious, defensive, wedge-avoiding mode – on gambling advertising, on electoral funding, on census questions, on the Makarrata, on any further commitment to constitutional reform of any kind, including the republic, and – perhaps most disconcertingly of all given the security and sovereignty stakes involved, AUKUS.

The government’s reward for all this has not been an increase but a decline in its popularity. Other factors have of course contributed – not least cost of living and housing availability concerns, difficult now for even the most competent government to address – but one can’t avoid the impression that more and more people are asking what exactly this Labor government is for.

It’s time for the Albanese government to recover its political mojo.
Lukas Coch/AAP

It’s time for the party leadership to recover its mojo and tell them: a prosperous, secure and above all more decent society, of the kind that only a Labor government can deliver.

It has long been my belief that Australian politicians have underestimated the inherent decency, and over-estimated the cynicism and preoccupation with self-interest, of the Australian people.

To take just one example among those I documented in my recent little book on Good International Citizenship: The Case for Decency, successive governments have allowed our overseas development assistance contributions to fall to lamentably, internationally-embarrassingly low levels, essentially because of an entrenched belief that these are among the easiest budgetary cuts to make: that Australians believe that charity begins at home, and many surveys have shown significant majorities saying we spend too much on foreign aid.

But when one digs deeper, a quite different story emerges. A Lowy Institute survey in 2017 revealed that community perceptions about the actual size of our aid spending were wildly inflated: people thought we spent 17½ times the amount we actually did – and when pressed to identify an acceptable amount, were happy for us to be 12½ times more generous than we actually were!

Of course, having a decent vision has to be accompanied by real competence in explaining and selling it, something that was arguably not at the level it should have been in the management of the Voice referendum, the failure of which has been a major contributor to the loss of heart the government has shown about pursuing major institutional and social reforms.

But above all, what matters, to return one last time to the theme of this lecture, is maintaining a spirit of optimism about the art of the possible. If we want change for the better, it is crucial to maintain hope. Whether we be in governments or parliaments or intergovernmental organisations, in academia or think-tanks, or in the media, or in NGOs, or with influential social responsibility roles in the private sector, or just plain ordinary citizens with a passion for decency, we have to go on believing that what we do can and will make a difference.

The crucial point is that in public policy, as in life itself, outlooks can be self-reinforcing. Pessimists see conflict, horror, prejudice and crude self-interest as more or less inevitable, and adopt a highly wary approach to the conduct of just about everything else they do.

But for optimists of all stripes and colours, what matters rather is believing in and nurturing the instinct of cooperation in the hope, and expectation, that decent human values will ultimately prevail.If we want to change the world for the better, we must start by believing in the possibility of change.

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