A message to the major parties: Embrace reform or end up like the Romans

With both parties having announced their flagship policies, it appears that Australia today is following the path of the late Roman Empire: tired, overextended and ruled by an elite political class more interested in voter appeasement than real reform.

The ancient Roman poet Juvenal called it panem et circenses, or “bread and circuses” – a strategy of appeasing the public with necessities and entertainment to distract them from the real issues and maintain social order while selling future generations up the river.

The fall of the Roman Empire could have been avoided if they embraced real reform, a message that rings true in our current timid political climate.Credit: iStock

My home state of Victoria now resembles the Roman province of Britannia in its final years—overburdened with debt, mismanaged by its rulers. But the parallels with ancient Rome are not just rhetorical.

As Professor Frederik Vervaet of the University of Melbourne explains, “the fall of the Roman Republic could easily have been avoided if the senatorial aristocracy had supported moderate reformers instead of brutally repressing them”.

Vervaet calls it “reform aversion”, the conscious refusal on the part of powerful segments of the senate to embrace undesirable reforms, however pressing the need or justified the cause.

“The aristocracy’s reform aversion put the Roman republic on the road to authoritarianism,” he writes in his recent essay How Republics Die.

If our politicians think tinkering around the edges instead of engaging in meaningful reform is enough, well – et tu, delulu.

“Roman politics became marked by escalating polarisation and a rise in factionalism, with the ensuing political deadlocks causing interest groups to divide and lose faith in the traditional political process.”

We see this occurring today, with voters abandoning major parties in favour of more extreme minor parties.

Young Australians like me don’t want a Trump, but we are angry with a political aristocracy they associate with a rigged economic system, and as economic insecurity and inequality grow, we will take a chance on anyone who promises to smash the system.

Australia is no longer the land of the fair go, but a country where birthright is the biggest predictor of success.

We have reached a point where we cannot bear either our vices or the remedies needed to cure them. We are a society drowning in uber-inequality, where full-time workers take second jobs just to keep up.

Every housing policy in this country boils down to the same idea: to help people into more debt – to shovel us like lemmings into mortgage servitude in service of the Great Australian Dream.

My peers have started openly discussing if it’s time to move to Mexico or Thailand, where they believe they can have a better standard of living – a reflection of how little hope they have left for a good life in Australia.

What we really need is to cut income taxes on young workers, fix bracket creep, limit negative gearing, increase GST and switch to a broad-based land tax system. But no major parties will go near these reforms.

“Had the Roman elites been willing to embrace reforms granting moderate, if tangible, concessions to key interest groups (…) they might very well have avoided the cataclysmic strife that paved the way for autocracy,” concludes Vervaet.

“If the example of the violent death of the Roman republic tells us anything, it is the paramount importance of responsible leadership.”

If our politicians think tinkering around the edges instead of engaging in meaningful reform is enough, well – et tu, delulu.

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