Accomplishments

THE TEALS HAVE AN accomplishment-based ideology, and each one of them prizes their achievements, of which, to be fair, they have a large number. Monique Ryan was a doctor and hospital administrator. Zoe Daniel was a prominent journalist. Zali Steggall was a barrister and led NGOs, and oh yes, won an Olympic gold medal. That accomplishment-mentality leads them to meritocratic thinking; they work hard, they achieve, they win, and not unexpectedly, they make the logical leap that they win because of their accomplishments and all that hard work; the just reward of effort and aptitude. They contrast themselves against the major Parties (and Greens), who, by contrast, stress collective effort and solidarity, and have a fundamentally different sense of power. The essential truth of meritocratic thinking is that you can't share wins.¹

I prefer to contrast them instead to one of the more remarkable episodes in recent Australian politics, the strange election of Ricky Muir to the Senate. He stood for a Motoring Enthusiasts party, won a tiny number of primary votes, and a cosmic accident of electoral law propelled him to Canberra, where he, equally unexpectedly, turned out to be actually quite a worthy Senator. He was an ordinary man from regional Victoria, who'd got an ordinary education, worked in unremarkable, unglamorous, honest ordinary jobs, and when he became for a brief period important, he took that attitude to Parliament. He approached it as just another honest job and was totally fine at it, and then the next election came and he wasn't a Senator anymore.

I know whose approach to human organisations and the ordering and limiting of power---in other words, politics---I prefer. There's the former which is exclusive to the best, the most brilliant, the cleverest, the most successful, where worthiness rests on a base of achievement. (That achievement also rests on a base of money is usually pronounced silently). Then there's the latter, of approaching politics as simply an ordinary duty that everyone has in a free society, that isn't about choosing the most special people, but that's approached by trying to be wise, which is a virtue open to anybody.