Keeping the Bastards Honest

I will preface this by stating that, as per usual, this is simply my opinion. However, it is a point I feel very strongly about.

When Don Chipp founded the Australian Democrats, he famously spoke of the need to “keep the bastards honest.”

Perhaps we need to revive that principle — but apply it rather more broadly.

Because if we want to keep governments honest, we also have a responsibility to be honest about what governments are actually doing. And that applies regardless of what we think about the government of the day.

There are a number of exaggerated claims doing the rounds on social media currently. One in particular concerns Australia’s Digital ID legislation, which was passed TWO years ago.

There are perfectly legitimate concerns about Digital ID.

Privacy. Data security. Cybersecurity. Function creep. The increasing involvement of the private sector. And, importantly, whether something described as voluntary in legislation remains genuinely voluntary in practice as its use expands.

Those are debates worth having.

They are also precisely the debates we risk undermining when legitimate concerns are buried beneath a mountain of hyperbole.

One widely circulated post claims that without Digital ID Australians will eventually be unable to access a bank account, cash, Centrelink, MyGov, flights, fuel, medication or even vote.

Apparently we can also kiss goodbye to renting a home, owning a car, using social media, shopping online, accessing the internet, having a phone number and buying groceries.

It then moves on to “digital tyranny”, a “surveillance state” and “China-style social credit”.

My eyes glaze over.

Not because I have no concerns about Digital ID. I do.

They glaze over because the moment an argument moves from scrutinising what legislation actually says to presenting speculation about some dystopian future as established fact, I switch off.

And I doubt I’m alone.

Yet these posts attract thousands of likes and retweets because outrage travels further and faster than nuance.

But here’s the problem:

Virality among the already convinced is not persuasion.

Taking legitimate concerns, layering them with a lack of understanding of the legislation, adding a very thick slab of hyperbole and then presenting predictions about the future as established fact achieves precisely the opposite of what was intended.

It makes it easier for governments to dismiss perfectly reasonable concerns about Digital ID as conspiracy theory.

And that plays directly into their hands.

We complain — often with justification — about governments labelling inconvenient arguments MISINFORMATION. DISINFORMATION.

So why hand them the ammunition?

Why make it easier to lump legitimate criticism in with claims that simply cannot be substantiated?

Worse, it risks losing the very people who might otherwise be persuaded to examine those concerns.

People who don’t buy into OTT alarmism simply switch off. The legitimate argument gets lost along with the ridiculous one.

And once you lose credibility on claims that can easily be disproved, people are understandably less inclined to listen when you raise concerns that genuinely deserve scrutiny.

There is an important distinction here.

Something can be voluntary in law while still raising legitimate questions about whether it will remain voluntary in practice.

That is where scrutiny should be directed.

Will Australians who choose not to use Digital ID continue to have genuinely practical alternatives? Will those alternatives gradually become more cumbersome? Will businesses increasingly encourage its use? Will future governments expand its application? Are the privacy protections adequate? How secure will the system be? What safeguards exist against function creep?

Those are serious questions.

They don’t require claims that tomorrow morning you’ll need to produce your government Digital ID before Woolies will sell you a loaf of bread.

And this is where political tactics matter.

If we want to keep the bastards honest, we have to hold ourselves to the same standard.

If your objective is to persuade, inform and encourage people to scrutinise government, exaggeration that appeals primarily to those who already agree with you is self-defeating.

There is more than enough in government policy worth questioning without inventing things that aren’t there.

So scrutinise the legislation.

Highlight its weaknesses.

Question the safeguards.

Watch what governments do next.

Challenge function creep when it occurs.

Demand that “voluntary” remains genuinely voluntary.

And keep the bastards honest.

But for heaven’s sake, be tactically smarter.

Don’t make their job easier by giving them an excuse not to take legitimate criticism seriously — or ammunition to justify restricting the debate we should be having.

Stick to the facts.

They’re usually powerful enough.

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐄𝐧𝐬𝐡𝐢𝐭𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐚𝐭𝐢𝐨𝐧 𝐨𝐟 𝐆𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫𝐧𝐚𝐧𝐜𝐞

Applying Platform Decay Theory to the Australian Labor Government

There is a wonderfully ugly word for something most of us have experienced online: enshittification.

The term, coined by technology writer Cory Doctorow, describes the process by which digital platforms progressively deteriorate.

They begin by offering something genuinely useful. Once users are captured, priorities change. The platform increasingly serves the interests of those from whom it extracts value. Eventually, in the relentless pursuit of its own interests, the product becomes more expensive, more cumbersome and considerably less useful to the very people it was originally supposed to serve.

Sound familiar?

Because perhaps enshittification isn’t confined to technology.

Perhaps governments can do it too.

I would describe political enshittification as the gradual process by which public institutions, essential services and national policy decline in quality because government shifts its focus away from solving real-world problems and towards managing political perception, satisfying influential stakeholders and protecting its own political survival.

Increasingly, under Labor, the response seems not to be to solve the underlying problem, but to tax, subsidise or regulate around it.

And viewed through that lens, Australia’s experience under the Albanese Labor government begins to look remarkably familiar.

Stage One: The Promise

Every platform needs users before it can exploit them. Every government needs voters before it can govern them.

So first comes the attractive product.

Rewind to 2022.

Australians were promised cheaper electricity. Higher real wages. More affordable housing. Greater transparency and integrity in government. Better services. A government supposedly interested in making life easier for ordinary Australians.

It was the political equivalent of the free introductory subscription.

Come aboard. Trust us. This will make your life better.

Labor won government.

And then the product began to change.

Stage Two: The Pivot

Once political power is secured, priorities begin shifting.

The language of public benefit remains, naturally. Governments rarely announce that the interests of ordinary citizens have slipped down the priority list.

Instead, complexity grows quietly around them.

More regulation. More agencies. More public servants. More consultants. More subsidies. More programs. More compliance. More influence for unions. More agreements with favoured stakeholders. More taxpayer money required to keep the increasingly complicated machinery functioning.

Each individual intervention can be defended.

That is precisely what makes the process so difficult to recognise.

It is only when you stand back and look at the accumulated system that you begin to see what has happened.

The government that promised to make things better has constructed something substantially larger, substantially more expensive and frequently less effective.

Which brings us to Stage Three.

Stage Three: The Degradation

Eventually the user discovers something rather irritating.

They are paying considerably more for a product that doesn’t seem to work nearly as well as advertised.

Electricity is expensive.

Housing is increasingly unaffordable.

Government spending has ballooned.

Businesses face increasing energy, wage, regulatory and compliance costs.

Taxpayers are funding subsidies and rescue packages to compensate for problems created or exacerbated elsewhere in the system.

Essential services remain under enormous pressure.

And whenever another problem emerges, the answer appears remarkably consistent:

Another program.

Another subsidy.

Another regulator.

Another review.

Another layer of bureaucracy.

Another call upon the taxpayer.

The system becomes more expensive in order to compensate for the deficiencies of the system itself.

That is political enshittification.

Energy: Feature Creep With a Bigger Bill

Consider energy policy.

The original product sounded magnificent: cheap, reliable and increasingly clean electricity.

On the surface, it sounded both economically attractive and environmentally noble. Unsurprisingly, people bought it.

But Australia’s energy transition has become an extraordinarily complicated collection of subsidies, transmission projects, capacity mechanisms, regulatory interventions, renewable targets, taxpayer underwriting and government rescue packages, with an increasing share of generation reliant on the vagaries of the weather.

And when energy-intensive businesses struggle to remain viable, taxpayers increasingly find themselves being asked to subsidise them to the tune of billions of dollars.

Think about the absurdity of that cycle.

Government pursues an energy system supposedly designed to produce cheaper power. Businesses struggle with the cost and reliability of operating within that system. Government then spends taxpayers’ money helping those businesses survive those costs.

The taxpayer effectively pays twice.

Once through the energy system and again through government intervention designed to mitigate its consequences.

That’s not a functioning market.

It’s the governmental equivalent of installing so much bloatware that you need another program just to make the computer operate.

Housing: The Illusion of Reform

Housing provides another example.

Governments announce housing targets, affordability schemes, buyer assistance and construction programs while simultaneously presiding over a system burdened by planning restrictions, infrastructure constraints, taxation, construction costs, regulatory requirements, shortages of skilled labour and extraordinary population-driven demand, fuelled in significant part by record levels of immigration.

Then, when affordability deteriorates, another government program is introduced to help people overcome the affordability problem.

Again, look at the architecture rather than the announcement.

Government intervention helps create or exacerbate complexity.

Complexity increases costs.

Higher costs make housing less affordable.

Government then introduces another intervention to compensate for the higher costs.

And every additional layer becomes another feature the political platform can advertise as evidence that something is being done.

Meanwhile the person trying to buy a first home doesn’t particularly care how many initiatives have been announced.

They care whether they can afford the house.

Government Itself: Bloatware Governance

Perhaps the clearest example is government itself.

The Albanese government has substantially expanded the Commonwealth public service while creating new agencies, programs, taskforces and regulatory responsibilities.

Expansion is not automatically bad. Sometimes governments genuinely need additional capability.

But the relevant question isn’t simply how many people government employs.

It is what Australians receive in return.

If government becomes considerably larger and considerably more expensive while Australians continue struggling with healthcare access, disability services, infrastructure constraints, housing affordability, energy costs and bureaucratic complexity, then taxpayers are entitled to ask a very basic question:

Where is the productivity dividend?

In technology terms, it is the application that requires twice the memory and processing power but somehow takes longer to perform the same task.

More resources should produce better outcomes.

If they don’t, something is wrong with the architecture.

High-Cost, Low-Yield Government

And that, ultimately, is the problem.

The measure of successful government cannot simply be how much money it spends, how many programs it announces, how many people it employs or how many pieces of legislation it passes.

The measure must be what those things actually deliver.

Are Australians more prosperous?

Is housing more attainable?

Is energy cheaper and reliable?

Are essential services improving?

Is government easier to deal with?

Are businesses becoming more competitive?

Are taxpayers receiving greater value for the enormous sums extracted from them?

Government exists to serve citizens. Citizens do not exist to sustain an ever-expanding machinery of government.

Yet increasingly we appear to have inverted that relationship.

Labor is treating Australian governance like a decaying technology platform: increasing the cost of participation, adding layers of bureaucratic bloat and promising that the next upgrade will finally fix the problems created by the previous one. And rather than accepting responsibility for flaws in its own programming, it keeps blaming other software designers: the previous government, the war in the Middle East, global pressures, international uncertainty, anyone or anything except the people currently writing the code.

And taxpayers remain the captive users.

They cannot unsubscribe.

They cannot choose another electricity grid.

They cannot opt out of taxation because they dislike the service.

They cannot uninstall Canberra for another two years.

They simply keep paying.

That is why the technology analogy works so well.

Enshittification doesn’t happen because nothing works.

It happens because just enough continues to work to keep the user trapped inside an increasingly expensive and dysfunctional system.

Australia does not need another patch.

It needs someone prepared to examine the operating system itself.

Because eventually there comes a point when endlessly adding features, regulations, subsidies, bureaucracies and taxes stops looking like government solving problems.

It starts looking like government sustaining the machinery that creates them.

High-cost. Low-yield.

The enshittification of governance.