A Different Country: Finding the Models That Already Work (Series part 2 )
What If We Were All On The Same Team?
What if we all decided that we were on the same football team — and that politics itself, not the party, not the brand, not the personality — was the opposition? Not fighting each other. Fighting ignorance. Fighting the systems that keep us divided, passive, and easier to control.
That sounds idealistic. It is not. It is, in fact, how some of the most effective political change in this country has actually happened. And the evidence for it is sitting in our recent history, waiting to be taken seriously.
In the early nineties, the community of Gippsland West in Victoria had had enough. They had a sitting member who wasn’t serving them. So they did something deceptively simple: they talked to each other. They worked out what they actually needed, who among them understood those needs, and who might be willing to fight for them. Then they asked her. Susan Davies stepped forward as an independent, won by a significant margin, and — crucially — brought her community with her. Constituents became part of her team. They worked as advisers, secretaries, schedulers. They saw how the machinery of parliament actually functioned from the inside. They stopped being spectators and became participants. They knew things after that they couldn’t unknow.
That is not just a feel-good story. It is a working model of what participatory democracy looks like when it is actually practised, rather than theorised. When you demystify politics by letting people genuinely participate in it — not just vote, but work it from the inside — everything changes. The knowledge that was held inside institutions becomes distributed. And distributed knowledge is much harder to manipulate.
We saw a version of this replicated at scale in the 2022 federal election. The so-called teal wave delivered a cohort of community independents to seats that had been held safely for decades — seats the major parties had assumed were locked in. These candidates were not parachuted in from head office. They emerged from their own communities, nominated by people who knew them, funded largely by small donations from local supporters, and accountable in ways that career politicians, with their factional obligations and donor relationships, rarely have to be. Research conducted during that period found that voters in these seats were not primarily motivated by disillusionment with the major parties. They were motivated by a positive desire for genuine representation — for candidates who matched their actual values and would say so plainly. That is a different kind of political energy than cynicism. It is people deciding to play rather than watch.
David Pocock’s election to the Senate from the ACT in 2022 is worth holding alongside this. Pocock did not win by being vague or by playing the identity game. He won by being specific. By talking clearly and consistently about outcomes: a federal integrity commission with genuine teeth, climate targets grounded in the science, honest action on housing affordability. He put the minerals resource rent tax — a policy with broad public support that had been politically buried for over a decade — back on the table in the Senate. The national conversation shifted. Not because he held enormous institutional power. Because naming things plainly and refusing to move turns out to be one of the most powerful things a politician can do in a system where deliberate vagueness is the norm.
Beyond our own history, there is a substantial body of research on what happens when ordinary citizens are given real information and genuine space to deliberate together. Deliberative democracy — the practice of bringing representative groups of citizens together to work through complex policy questions — consistently produces outcomes that are more nuanced, more broadly supported, and more reflective of the public interest than what partisan politics typically delivers. Ireland’s citizens’ assemblies are among the best-documented examples. On abortion law and on marriage equality, the assemblies brought together citizens who arrived with genuinely divergent views, gave them access to expert evidence and time to talk to each other, and let them work toward conclusions. The results went to referendums. Both passed with strong majorities. Not because people were forced to agree, but because genuine deliberation — as opposed to tribal argument — produces genuine consensus far more often than we expect.
Australia has its own tentative versions of this. The ACT has run deliberative processes on climate and planning. Victoria used a citizens’ jury process in developing its voluntary assisted dying legislation. These are not perfect models, and they are nowhere near standard practice. But they demonstrate, consistently, that the football model of politics — pick a team, defend it to the death, never revise — is not the only structure available to us. It is just the one we have inherited and not yet seriously questioned.
The shift that makes all of this possible is not a grand one. It does not require everyone to become an activist or a political scholar. It requires something more modest and more difficult: the willingness to sit with the discomfort of not having a team, long enough to ask what we actually think. What do I want for my community? What do I want for the people who come after me? Who is actually working toward that, as opposed to performing it? And who are the people around me who share those questions, even if they would phrase them differently?
Political change does not begin in parliament. It begins at the dinner table — the one we stopped using for this decades ago.
The table is still there. We are just waiting for someone to bring the conversation back to it.
