Comment

Julia Gillard
How to combat rising autocracy

To be invited to speak in honour of my dear friend, mentor and predecessor as the member for Lalor, the great Barry Jones, is a privilege.

An Australian quiz champion, a teacher, lawyer, talkback radio host, writer, state and federal politician and minister of the Crown, there’s not many things Barry hasn’t achieved in his 92 years.

I know it’s a term thrown around a lot these days but, put simply, Barry is an icon. It seems the National Trust agrees, declaring Barry an Australian Living Treasure.

Barry’s genius commands respect, but his nature does not drive him to issue commands. He is gentle, generous and thoughtful in his interactions with everyone.

In politics, he was ahead of his time, becoming the first Australian parliamentarian to argue that climate change was an existential threat to civilisation and shaping much of our nation’s thinking about the future as science minister.

Post-politics, he’s exactly where he wants to be, supporting the causes he’s deeply passionate about.

Barry is the epitome of what a retired parliamentarian should do and be, and our nation is all the richer for his enduring service.

He is and continues to be someone who has always stood up for the importance of facts, reason and civilised discourse.

Recently, I was reading David Brooks in The New York Times. It was a sobering piece, entitled “Producing Something This Stupid Is the Achievement of a Lifetime”. Brooks lamented that tests show adult numeracy and literacy skills across the globe have been declining since 2017; for children in the United States that decline started about 2012.

Brooks noted that, according to the National Center for Education Statistics, in 1984 35 per cent of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day. By 2023, that number was down to 14 per cent. As the main driver of all these changes, he cited passive screen time just spent scrolling.

He went on to say: “My biggest worry is that behavioral change is leading to cultural change. As we spend time on our screens, we’re abandoning a value that used to be pretty central to our culture – the idea that you should work hard to improve your capacity for wisdom and judgment all the days of your life …

“Reading a book puts you inside another person’s mind in a way that a Facebook post just doesn’t. Writing is the discipline that teaches you to take a jumble of thoughts and cohere them into a compelling point of view...

“Back in Homer’s day, people lived within an oral culture, then humans slowly developed a literate culture. Now we seem to be moving to a screen culture. Civilization was fun while it lasted.”

Brooks was urging us to recognise that we are at an inflection point where the degradation of our attention spans and shared cultural capital has led to a degradation of our civic lives and political systems.

Of course, he’s just one of the many doing so. Take the book Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams, a Facebook whistleblower originally from New Zealand.

She details the amorality of Facebook’s approach to the world and its sole focus on profits, which she saw from her vantage point as part of Facebook’s leadership team. The title of the book is a nod to the famous quote from The Great Gatsby:

“They were careless people, Tom and Daisy – they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made.”

These words so aptly describe the ethos of the tech bros who sat behind Donald Trump at his inauguration.

While I writhe with anger about their self-absorption and cavalier attitudes to the future of our shared world, it’s not the only thing that causes me to grimace.

We live in an era in which autocracy is prospering. If you are in any doubt about that proposition, read Anne Applebaum’s carefully reasoned work Autocracy Inc. and then follow that up by reading the news.

We are in an era in which profound global challenges such as climate change and the downside impacts of artificial intelligence go unaddressed. An era of trade wars, wealth inequality and hard power conflict.

It is also an era of the celebration of cruelty. Witness the social media output of the Trump government agencies involved in deportations or Elon Musk’s glorying in the large-scale destruction of the US Agency for International Development (USAID).

The list goes on.

There is, however, a “but”. In meeting the challenges of this age we have three strong advantages.

First, we won’t be fooled again. As a global community, we stumbled into this era with wide-eyed naivety allowing ourselves to believe that liberal democracy had established itself as the desired norm.

We believed open trading economies and markets would lift all boats and that the world could address shared challenges and be driven by global goals, like the Millennium Development Goals and those on sustainable development.

We believed Vladimir Putin was a man with whom we could do business and that China’s economic rise would fuel internal demands for democracy.

We believed the success in many parts of the world of movements such as that of marriage equality meant there was a community openness to more change.

The list goes on.

You may be shaking your head as you read this list, noting that you never shared some of these beliefs. I, too, can do the same.

Yet there can be no doubt there was a growing sense of orthodoxy around these kinds of conclusions in many foreign policy establishments, political parties and progressive organisations.

There was certainly a great deal of enthusiasm, even excitement, around the proposition that new technology, the so-called information age, with powerful computers at our fingertips and the ability to be connected instantly with everyone everywhere on the planet, would foster a deep sense of shared understanding.

It is now so blindingly obvious that we confused information with wisdom, immediacy with knowledge.

None of us are wiser because we google what we then accept as facts. None of us are truly more attached to strangers because we can use social media to snap ill-thought-through views back and forth. Instead, we are all at risk of just being more distracted and agitated. We are potentially more arrogant because instead of confessing ignorance any longer, we quickly type a question into our phone, scan the results and then think we know.

Yet having lived through these head spins, we face our circumstances today more clear-eyed about the dimensions of the challenges and the profound need to rethink how our world should work.

Second, as Australians we enter this phase with many national economic and societal advantages, including our functioning democracy, with the boundaries of seats fairly drawn, public funding for elections, compulsory voting and the routine peaceful transfer of power, with non-politicised courts able to adjudicate any disputes. Think where the US could be if it shared these advantages.

I would also stress that one of our current advantages is good national political leadership.

I am well aware that in many progressive circles it is routine to decry the merits of contemporary political leadership and to contrast the current crop disapprovingly with leaders of the past.

In many ways, I’m the last person who should be standing out against this trend. After all, I personally get to benefit from it.

It is, however, an unfair trend. Who knows how the political legends who dominated early eras would actually fare in today’s world, where social media fuels fever and fragmentation, while at the same time enormous policy conundrums flow from the breaking down of the architecture of the post-World War II world.

In this environment, the Albanese government is to be applauded for keeping on course and delivering significant policies that have strengthened our nation. Close to my heart is the full delivery of the school reforms I initiated, which will ensure a needs-based funding model is used to drive better learning outcomes for all, with a particular focus on those children who are most disadvantaged. I also warmly welcome and admire the courage it takes to stand up to the tech giants and protect our kids from social media. For these and so many other reasons, I was glad to celebrate a Labor victory on May 3.

Third, we rise to meet the challenges of this world enriched by our storytellers, by the people who enable us to visit the realm of their imagination and come back with insights about our own.

I have learnt more about the trauma of our colonial history and the way it drives contemporary alienation and dispossession from reading Fiona McFarlane’s The Sun Walks Down and Alexis Wright’s Praiseworthy.

I more clearly see and feel the impacts of climate change because of Charlotte McConaghy’s Wild Dark Shore.

I am wiser about what it means to live through an era that is an inflection point in human history as a result of re-reading George Eliot’s Middlemarch.

You will have your own contemporary list, your own lifetime list, of the books that shaped you and sharpened your insight and deepened your empathy.

Let me conclude by saying, even in today’s troubled times, there is hope – hope because of our hard-won wisdom, our nation’s strengths, and our ability to learn, grow and connect through books.

These are the blessings and benefits that will aid us as we strive to shape a better future for our communities, nation and world.

Now is a time for action, which simply means each of us doing what we can, where we are. We have the tools for change in our hands.

This is an edited extract of the Barry Jones Oration, delivered by Julia Gillard at the 2025 Sorrento Writers Festival.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on May 24, 2025 as "Among the autocrats".

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