Some free advice for pollies: Take a look into our real lives

Last year, sitting in the audience at the Melbourne International Film Festival, I watched an audience member speak sharply to another who was looking at their phone, telling them to turn it off. I was surprised – but not unsympathetic to the frustrated buff’s sentiment. So I was relieved when, attending this year’s festival, I saw a notice flash up at the beginning of each film. If we looked at devices during the screening, we were warned, we may be asked to leave the cinema.

Some might find this heavy-handed. But to me, this is smart and sensible – saving the blushes of those who would otherwise be chastised by other filmgoers and saving everyone else the distracting glow of someone on their phone in a dark cinema.

And it reminded me, too, that politics often takes place in unexpected locations, practised by people who are not politicians. Because that note, while nominally about etiquette, has a serious – if unintentional – political dimension. I’ve noted before the advice of novelist Zadie Smith to young people. How, she asks, can we fight back against the billionaires who run our world? The idea she offers is simple: “All you guys would need to do is look away.” Put down your phones.

Perhaps naively, I suspect this might actually happen. Most of us feel poisoned by our phones. My hope, then, is that in coming years the culture shifts: that it becomes impolite to look at phones in company or to take them further than the entrance to our homes. This is part of what the Albanese government is encouraging with its social media ban for children under 16: not directly, but by setting a norm around behaviour.

Politics often works like this: as a collaboration between voters’ behaviours and politicians’ laws, each amplifying the other. We think politics is practised in Canberra, but in fact it exists in both these arenas – and in a third space somewhere between. (Commentator Tim Dunlop, who has written about where politics exists, describes politics and values as “existing in overlapping plots of the same garden”.)

This means that looking too closely at Canberra, too constantly, can mean you miss important things.

The rapidity of One Nation’s rise since the election reminds me of an observation made the day after Donald Trump’s first victory: it was not that the country had changed that day but, rather, that it had changed already and most of the political class had missed it.

So: are we now a different country than the one that voted just last year? Or had the country already changed by then but this was not reflected in the results? Or has it not changed at all, the current polls but a mirage?

Because polls, it must always be remembered, are very limited pieces of information. One political correspondent I know believes vox pops are often more useful. Speaking to a person gives you information that a number can’t: whether they are passionate or indifferent or genuinely angry.

Focus groups can provide some of this. Alex Fein from Redbridge polling has written of “fury” coming through in focus groups for years now. And her colleague Kos Samaras recently wrote of one focus group participant’s description of the Victorian government: “They broke us, our kids’ mental health, and went back to their high vis vest.” This, he argues, encapsulated frustration with that government’s failure to address what Victorians had lived through. That voter “was asked about the state, and she answered about the pandemic, because for her, they have never been separate things”.

What else, then, is not separate from the state, at least as far as voters are concerned? Inflation – perhaps not mainly caused by government, but inseparable from how people feel about it. House prices – however overwrought the current national discussion. Broader culture, too: phones and the rest of it, the things that give a hollowness to this age, the isolation, the advertising, the fact that everything is a business and the myriad technological frustrations Waleed Aly recently wrote about.

These are not all directly caused by politicians, but voters are not wrong to partly blame them because so much is tied to things in governments’ control: privatisation, the sale of public spaces and the many concessions made to billionaires.

Samaras was writing specifically about the pandemic’s lingering effect in Victoria, but really, we are all still living in the pandemic’s aftermath. In those years, we saw many problems more clearly – such as poverty. We also saw what governments were capable of, how much they could change in an instant. And then, afterwards, we watched them pretend that wasn’t true, as they returned to the inertia of the pre-pandemic years.

And it was not only inaction that returned. A certain aesthetic had grown up around politics, in which language was used to repel meaning. Much of what mattered – around factions and money – happened out of sight. Ordinary people, it seemed, were not allowed to know what their politicians did. This might have changed after COVID – but it didn’t. And this helped cement the sense that they were not doing much at all.

There has been much discussion this past week about the wisdom of our prime minister appearing on a certain podcast. To me, the most important point to make is that appearing on less traditional forms of media does not come remotely close to what is necessary to break through voters’ disconnection. Doing a podcast with anyone – no matter how famous or unexpected – won’t change the way voters feel about the major parties if the language those politicians deploy, the political tools they use and their understanding of the society around them have not fundamentally shifted. In fact, as Fein has suggested, it might even make them angrier.

Politics is always continuing in multiple locations. Politicians, these past few years, have missed so much. Now, they must do more than simply catch up: they must ensure they do not miss what is changing even now. At a time when ordinary voters are beginning to put down their phones and look around, noticing more and connecting in a different way, politicians would be advised to do the same.

Sean Kelly is an author and regular columnist. He was an adviser to Labor prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.