(D. Woodard and W. S. Burroughs with Dreamachine, 1997, John Aes-Nihil via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0)
After nine years of hard pushback on social change in Australia, it is pleasing to see that our federal election result holds hope for the near future. For many its like waking from a long, slow, nightmare that it looked like might never end because of the spell of complacency that had been cast so effectively over us.
The community independents have changed things, hopefully forever, finding a way to thread local people wth capital P politics. What is only just starting to be said out loud is that this is the value of massive scale door knocking campaigns, and the value of actual organising. Perhaps this was made more possible by the hyperlocal focus in our cities under two years of lockdowns, and also more middle class people working-from-home. The new members elected are almost all women, and slowly but surely there are more Asian-Australian and now six First Nations members of parliament.