Democracy is under sustained pressure everywhere. Australia is one of the world’s leading democracies, but we cannot – and should not – take ours for granted.
That’s the backdrop to our new Grattan Institute Report For the people: Future-proofing Australia’s democracy — and it’s what Grattan democracy experts Kate Griffiths and Matthew Bowes unpack in our latest podcast episode, along with five priority areas for making Australia’s democracy stronger.
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Transcript
Matthew Bowes: Around the world, democracy as a system of government is backsliding. According to one measure in 2025, out of the 179 countries assessed, only 31 were classified as liberal democracies. Australia is one of the few remaining liberal democracies, and we’re a leading one at that, but we are by no means immune to the turbulent times that democracies around the world are facing.
So what challenges does Australian democracy face? And what do we need to do to face up to them? That’s the subject of our new Grattan Institute Report For the people: Future-proofing Australia’s democracy.
Hello and welcome to the Grattan Podcast. I’m Matthew Bowes, Senior Associate at the Grattan Institute, and today I am joined by one of my co-authors on the report, Kate Griffiths, Deputy Director of Grattan’s Democracy Program.
Hello, Kate.
Kate Griffiths: Hi, Matt. Good to be with you.
Matthew Bowes: It’s great to be here. It’s been a while since we’ve been behind the microphone for this podcast, but now we’re back. I think it’s for a pretty important reason. Today we’re talking all about Australia’s democracy.
So to start, I wanted to ask about our reports title For the people: Future-proofing Australia’s democracy. Why do we think that Australia’s democracy needs future proofing?
Kate Griffiths: First and foremost, this report is about recognising the times we’re living in. These are fairly exceptional times and we’re facing a lot more uncertainty — uncertainty in our economy, uncertainty for our living standards, and for liberal democracy itself, which is our focus here today. For most of the last century, liberal democracies around the world were in ascendancy, and it was around the turn of the century that we started to see that plateau.
Then in the last couple of years, it’s turned a corner. Liberal democracies are now backsliding, and in the most recent Global Democracy Report, America — the poster child for democracy — was downgraded from a liberal democracy to an electoral democracy. What that means is it still has free and fair elections, but it’s missing some of the extra features of a liberal democracy. It’s seen declines in its checks and balances on executive power, for example, and that’s one of the areas that really distinguishes a liberal democracy from just an electoral democracy.
What does this all mean for Australia? We are still a leading democracy. We are still a liberal democracy. We are rated highly on international measures of democratic health and on international measures of social and economic wellbeing. Australians overwhelmingly value democracy as a system, and I think that’s perhaps the most important point — that we recognise the importance of democracy for Australian prosperity. So given that we are well positioned in these turbulent times, we just can’t be complacent about that. Our report looks at where Australia’s vulnerabilities lie and what we can do to better future-proof our democracy.
Matthew Bowes: Something that surprised me coming into this work is that there’s been a lot of concern about support for democracy in Australia. When we look at a range of different indicators, the story is perhaps a little bit more nuanced than I think that public conversation anticipates. For instance, when we look at the survey evidence on support for democracy — as you’ve referenced — we see that support for democracy in Australia is generally pretty strong, and if anything, it’s risen over the past couple of decades.
One of the areas where people are concerned is around younger Australians, and the story there is a bit complex. Younger Australians generally don’t support democracy at the same rates as older Australians, but that trend has been pretty constant over time. Generally, as people age, they become more supportive — or more likely to say they’re supportive — of democracy in a survey context.
When we look at some of those other indicators, say around voting for minor parties — voting for parties other than Labor and the Coalition, who’ve generally dominated Australian politics — that has increased over time from around one in five Australians in the 1990s to around one in three Australians today. That’s received a lot of attention, but trying to piece apart what that means for people’s support for our system is a bit complex.
Kate Griffiths: Absolutely. The minor party voting is like a pretty clear signal of dissatisfaction with the major parties, but not clear that it’s a signal of dissatisfaction with democracy itself, for example.
Kate Griffiths: Absolutely. Minor party voting is a pretty clear signal of dissatisfaction with the major parties, but not necessarily a signal of dissatisfaction with democracy itself.
Matthew Bowes: Exactly.
Kate Griffiths: But a lot of the dissatisfaction data gets at the idea of the social compact. In a democracy, the people grant power to governments with the expectation that those they elect will represent them and make decisions in the public interest. Those expectations help hold governments to account, but of course they’re not always going to be aligned with what governments can actually feasibly deliver. To some degree, dissatisfaction with how things are working is normal — even healthy — in a democracy. We wouldn’t want everyone to always be in agreement. That is not a sign of a true clash of ideas or a healthy democratic system.
That kind of dissatisfaction, whether it be dissatisfaction with major parties through a minor party vote, dissatisfaction with a particular issue through active participation in protests, or through writing to your local MP — that can be a really important feedback mechanism and an incentive for governments to better meet the needs of the people.
Dissatisfaction can also spur stronger engagement for some people who are relatively disengaged because they’re somewhat content, but when they’re not so content, they engage more with the system. So I wouldn’t say that dissatisfaction per se is a problem, but where we want to be alert is when we see persistent dissatisfaction, because that can harden into the two big problems for a democracy: discontent with the system and disengagement from the system.
We do see a few warning signs in the data on that. I wouldn’t say that either discontent or disengagement look particularly high — in fact they’re relatively small in Australia and they don’t appear to be growing. But the warning signs are around things like growing economic pessimism, worry about future generations, concerns about unfairness, and a declining sense of belonging. Taken together, that gives me a picture of a social compact under pressure.
Matthew Bowes: Picking up on that point around a social compact under pressure, one of the things we discuss in the report is a couple of groups whose satisfaction with democracy might be more challenged. We point to research showing that young people who are renting, people who live in regional areas, and people who say they’re financially stressed are all groups who, in some instances, show higher dissatisfaction with democracy. There are also life events that correlate with dissatisfaction — negative events like becoming unemployed or being socially isolated are all risk factors. These are things that governments need to monitor and have a strong focus on, ensuring that when people are passing through these tricky life events, or when they are struggling as a result of a social compact that’s failing, those sore spots are kept on top of when we consider the health of our democracy.
Kate Griffiths: So a quick recap: there are some signs that Australia’s social compact is under pressure — some potential fuel for discontent building, not necessarily outright discontent.
Matthew Bowes: Exactly.
Kate Griffiths: We know from a lot of different survey data, from global risk reports, that Australians are quite concerned about misinformation. That’s one of the big global issues right now. And Australians are also particularly concerned about economic and climate shocks. So maybe we can dig into some of those global challenges and what they do to put our social compact under further pressure.
Matthew Bowes: One of the things we try to do in this report is look both at the Australian evidence and at some of these broader global trends. One that we pick up on — a challenge to democracies around the world, including Australia — is this trend towards a more fragmented information environment.
When we’re talking about that, we’re really talking about flows of information both from policymakers and the environment around us to voters and citizens, so that they know what’s going on in society and can take political action as necessary, but also flows back from voters and the broader public to policymakers and politicians, so that they know what’s going on and can assess public opinion. Those flows really matter for democracy, and part of the reason they’re challenged is simply because the ways we get information are changing. TV is still, perhaps surprisingly for someone like me, the most used source of news for most Australians, but online sources, social media, podcasts, and even things like AI chatbots are becoming a larger part of the news ecosystem.
That creates a more fragmented information environment, and that has two particular challenges. The first is that it makes it more difficult for the news media to fund itself. The funding model they relied on — which traditionally involved selling advertising both on TV and in newspapers — hasn’t really been replaced by a similar advertising model online. Even though Australians subscribe to news and pay for news at pretty high rates internationally, that hasn’t been enough to fill the funding gap. What we’ve seen is a decline in the number of journalists from around 16,000 in 2011 to only around 13,000 in 2021, and even since then we’ve seen a continued decline, particularly in regional areas, as a result of funding cuts. That creates the risk that we’re just going to get less news, and that the news we receive will be lower quality because there’s less competition in that space — and that is a real threat to the way information flow works in democracy.
This trend towards different ways of consuming information and news also has an impact on the other point you mentioned: misinformation and disinformation. This is false information shared either intentionally, in the case of disinformation, or unintentionally, in the case of misinformation. It’s not something new — we’ve always seen false information circulate in various contexts — but it’s certainly never been more apparent to Australians that this is happening. Social media and online news sources have meant that people are perceiving mis- and disinformation at particularly high rates. Around three in five Australians say they think they saw misinformation in the lead-up to the 2025 election, and more than three quarters of Australians say they think misinformation is a big problem for governments.
In the report, we dig a little into the research behind misinformation and it is a bit tricky to pull a single theme from. Certainly, one of the challenges is that when democratic systems decay and when there’s really polarised, heated debate, people tend to seek out information that aligns with their identities — and that includes misinformation. So this isn’t just a case of misinformation being something that’s circulating; it’s also a sign that democracies are facing struggles. This is something governments need to be monitoring and keeping aware of, and it relates to that online environment where mis- and disinformation can be shared more easily than in the past.
Kate Griffiths: One of the big risks with misinformation and disinformation is that it polarises the populace. Most indicators do suggest that Australia isn’t particularly polarised — only 10% of Australians say they can’t be friends with someone who holds different political views. I wish that number were even smaller, but it is fairly reassuring. We can still see polarisation, extremism, and other anti-democratic forces gaining momentum internationally, and expert ratings suggest there has been growing political polarisation over the past decade in some of our peer democracies, notably the US but also the UK and New Zealand.
So while this is a global risk, and the evidence would suggest Australia is fairly well buffered, the risk is that these ideologies stoke social divisions at home. We very recently experienced the horrific antisemitic terrorist attack in December, so we know we are not immune from these extremist forces.
Matthew Bowes: Exactly. And I think that goes to this broader risk — we do live in a more unstable world, and there are a number of challenges that governments will have to face up to that threaten social cohesion, but also just threaten their ability to deliver the services and economic outcomes that Australians expect.
Some of the things we point to in the report are risks like the threat of armed conflict in the broader region, the threat of increased disasters as a result of climate change, and the threat of workforce displacement as a result of artificial intelligence. What we’ve seen from the Global Financial Crisis and COVID-19 is that when governments respond well to these threats, trust in government actually increases. So these are opportunities for government to build trust by effectively responding to crises. But the flip side is that there’s lots of evidence internationally that in times of economic crisis — when inflation increases, unemployment increases, and governments have to respond with large policies like fiscal austerity — these things are all threats to trust in government and to the broader satisfaction with democracy that people have.
Kate Griffiths: These are all risks, but it’s worth mentioning that they’re not eventualities, and a lot of what we can do is around how we better prepare for them.
Matthew Bowes: We identify five priority areas in the report. Do you want to talk through what those priorities are for government?
Kate Griffiths: The first is making the most of Australia’s parliament. The Federal Parliament sits at the centre of our democracy, and there are definitely opportunities to make it more representative and better functioning. I think for many people, the parliament is what they see when they think about Australian democracy — elections first, perhaps, and parliament second.
The second priority is nurturing belonging and engagement. This is about ensuring that Australians have a voice and feel a sense of belonging, particularly those who find themselves at the margins of our society.
The third priority is protecting the public sphere, which is about ensuring the sustainability of our news media and investing in the institutions that produce trusted information.
The fourth priority is tackling the known challenges. Effective government matters — outcomes matter. Australians need confidence that the system can actually tackle the challenges we face.
The fifth and final priority is preparing for a more volatile future. There’s a lot more we can do to reduce our vulnerability to the known risks, and even to some extent the unknown ones too.
Within each priority we do have some specific recommendations. Taking the first priority as an example — making the most of Australia’s parliament — we recommend an independent review of parliament. The review would aim to look at some of the big questions of how our parliament is formed and functions: questions around the size of our parliament, because Australia’s population has grown substantially since the Parliament was last expanded in 1984; the functioning of committees; question time; and parliamentary debate.
We also think the review could look at things like standards and codes of conduct for parliamentarians, because there’s a real opportunity to set a higher bar. Another area for the review would be parliamentary training, induction, and the resources available to parliamentarians to do their job. The complexities of governing have got so much greater, but the resources and supports have not kept pace. These are the sorts of questions we would hope an independent review would tackle. They are questions that Parliament itself considers, but an independent review would be better placed to make recommendations that actually build confidence in our parliament, because of the broader suspicion of politicians.
Matthew Bowes: Part of this, as you say, is combining the questions of how we can increase trust in parliament and trust in the politicians who sit in parliament alongside the questions of how we can make parliament better — including questions of resourcing. By putting those together, hopefully we can build a case for reform that makes sense to the Australian public, rather than making it feel like politicians are just looking out for themselves.
Kate Griffiths: Exactly.
Matthew Bowes: The second point you raised was around what we call nurturing belonging. That really goes to the idea that democracy is about institutions and parliament, but also about more than that — it’s about social trust and cohesion more broadly, and the shared values that underpin them.
To touch on two of the ways we think Australian governments can nurture belonging: one is by embedding more deliberative processes in policy making. These are processes that often go beyond what we’d think of as traditional consultation, where you reach out and say people who are interested can have a say on particular policy choices. These go further by bringing groups of people into one space, having them deliberate together as a representative group — representative of the local community or the broader Australian population. It takes a bit more effort and is a bit more involved than traditional consultation, but it’s definitely a space that we think Australian governments should look more at, at all levels of government.
The second point on nurturing belonging is the need to think more about our local government elections and how they work. There’s definitely an opportunity to reform these systems to make them more comparable to state and federal elections, which generally see high turnout and high voter trust. We also think there’s an opportunity to go beyond that and do what New Zealand, the UK, and some other advanced democracies do — allow people who are long-term residents in Australia but who aren’t yet citizens to participate in local government elections. That’s a way of having their voice heard, especially in communities where these people make up a large part of the population. This already occurs in places like the City of Melbourne. We think there’s a strong reason to go beyond that, to make sure that our local government elections are as inclusive and as important a part of our democratic system as our state and federal elections are.
Kate Griffiths: It’s such an important point, because we do see that decline in sense of belonging in Australia more broadly, and there are a lot of different factors in that. But part of belonging is not just inclusion — it’s agency. That’s what these recommendations are trying to address: giving Australians more ways to have a say, more ways to be heard, and the opportunity for those who are currently disenfranchised to come into the fold.
The third priority area is protecting the public sphere. Here we recommend investing in public interest journalism, reviewing the news media business model for all the reasons you’ve outlined, and investing in the institutions that produce credible, trusted information.
We’re pretty lucky in Australia to have many strong public institutions, including specific ones like the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Electoral Commission, universities, and the CSIRO. These are trusted institutions and that trust is critical to grounding the public conversation in a shared knowledge base and understanding. We know that many Australians aren’t following the news regularly — that they’re getting their news from social media or from friends and family — but it remains critical that when they do seek reliable information, it’s available to them from a credible, trusted institution.
Matthew Bowes: It really matters that we create institutions that can share important information beyond just the news media. As we’ve said, that’s an important part of the information flows essential to democracy, but it’s not the only part.
The fourth priority is tackling the known challenges. There’s a range of recommendations here, which draws on a lot of Grattan’s previous work. To pull out one of them: we’ve discussed at a couple of points that one of the tensions with the social compact in Australia today is housing — the fact that home ownership has declined and that housing is generally very unaffordable for many people. We really do think that matters for social cohesion, and we think governments need to see tackling the housing challenge — as well as challenges like climate change and tax reform — as part of a broader agenda that builds support for Australian democracy and shows that we can deliver on the outcomes that matter to people. Tackling the known challenges is an important part of how we defend and build democracy over time.
Taking the vested interests and politicisation out of policy and centring the public interest is what people want, and delivering for the people is a big part of what we need to see from governments.
The fifth priority area is preparing for a more volatile future. Many of the recommendations we’ve already discussed — including nurturing belonging and cultivating a healthier public sphere — are definitely about positioning the nation to better cope with shocks in the future. We do need that kind of broader democratic resilience to cope with rolling or even concurrent shocks, and governments can be better prepared by tackling the known challenges. In a crisis, it just gets harder to do the basics, so we have to be able to tackle these things even when times aren’t that good.
Planning for unknowns is a huge part of this. There are a range of foreseeable risks where you can think about your policy options in advance and communicate those options with the public. In doing so, it can help calibrate public expectations about what governments can and can’t do to cushion the blow.
I’ll call out one in particular: fiscal firepower has been really important to Australia’s response to COVID and to the Global Financial Crisis before it — both of which were world-leading responses that cushioned households and businesses. That level of response may not be possible for every shock, but having the fiscal firepower ready, being seen to be on a fiscally sustainable path, and actually being on that path — the perception and the reality — is so important for governments to be able to ramp up spending or reduce taxes when needed.
This is a really good point to finish on, because it does show that when Australian governments feel they have the fiscal space to react strongly to crises, they’re better able to do what’s required. That has flow-on consequences for people’s trust in government and for their satisfaction with how the system is working. Responding to these overlapping crises is something that governments are going to have to become very used to in the coming years, and fiscal sustainability — ensuring the budget’s in good shape — is a key part of that.
That’s all we have time for today. If today’s conversation sparked something for you, everything we discussed — and much more — is published in the full report For the people: Future-proofing Australia’s democracy. We’d really encourage you to dig in and have a read.
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Thanks again for listening, and we’ll see you next time.