The myth of ‘social cohesion’ – do as they say, not as they do

RonniSalt

 There’s an established principle in law: he who comes looking for equity must come with clean hands. The clean hands doctrine simply means that if you want equitable treatment on an issue, you must have acted ethically and in good faith yourself on the same issue. In other words, don’t come at me with lectures and proselytising about my behaviour when you haven’t acted the same way yourself, which may be a far broader interpretation than our learned friends are comfortable with, but it’s still largely accurate. 

Which leads us naturally to this year’s buzz phrase being utilised heavily by our most prominent leaders, not just in Australia but around the globe – Social Cohesion ™️

If there’s a phrase that deserves to be flushed into the sewer pipes of political history, then in 2025 social cohesion would have to be first into the bowl. It’s an insufferable, hectoring, holier-than-thou pair of words that appear to have infiltrated the speeches of many of our major leaders. Prime Minister Albanese is especially fond of the term, having used it in his speeches and interviews more than seventy-five times since March 2023, and probably more many times in speeches and conversations not recorded.

But what is social cohesion? What is this thing Australians are having rammed down their throats by both federal and state leaders, (yes, we’re looking at you Chris Minns) almost weekly now? Its first recorded usage by an Australian leader was in 1972, when Gough Whitlam used the phrase in his famous It’s Time speech. Back then, Whitlam’s use of the phrase was in the context of strengthening community life and community identity. More broadly, social cohesion is described as the connections within a society, characterized by a shared sense of trust, positive social relationships, and shared values among its members. Well, that’s nice.

However more recently, social cohesion has become a term used by Australia’s leaders to get certain sections of our society to shut-the-fuck-up when it suits them. While the world faces a climate emergency, if you choose to protest about the appalling judgement of the Albanese government in extending approval for Australia’s second most polluting fossil fuel extraction project, the Woodside’s North West Shelf gas project, then you dear reader are interfering with our social cohesion. Not Woodside the planet polluters, not the politicians who approved the planet pollution. Not the parasitic fossil fuel executives killing the planet. No, you are. You are not socially cohering.

Even worse, if you’re stopping traffic for the cause of saving our planet, then you’re definitely not socially cohering. Sure, you can stop traffic for a fun-run, or a movie scene, or a visit from the US President or any number of other issues deemed traffic-stopping worthy by the government of the day – it’s their privilege to twist the term social cohesion to suit them – but if you’re doing it for any other more worthy cause, suddenly you’re not being socially cohesive. 

The term social cohesion is abused and used to hector and badger Australians into compliance while our political and business leaders do as they please, every minute of every day. It’s a term used now to get us to obey a set of rules that our leaders themselves never follow.

Take the National Anti-Corruption Commission for example. The NACC is led, for want of a better word, by Commissioner Paul Brereton, who just this week was found to have been telling more conveniently manipulated untruths when he claimed he’d resigned from paid roles in the Australian Defence Forces. 

It turns out, Mr Brereton has been happily receiving his $800,000 per year tax-payer funded remuneration package from the NACC while also “occasionally consulting in a critical capacity” for the taxpayer funded Department of Defence. Mr Brereton, you will recall, also told Australia that he had not in fact been involved in any of the NACC’s Robodebt decision making process, and then was found to have sat in on, and been communicated with, on almost all the Robodebt senior decision meetings. If he wasn’t there to covertly exert his authority as the Commissioner who was also a very close friend of one of the key Robodebt accused, then one can only assume he was there to make the coffee.

The NACC now operates on more than $70 million a year and has so far had $270 million allocated in the federal budget. In its over two years of operation, with more than $6 million a year of that going out the door in commissioner’s, deputy commissioner’s and senior executive’s salaries (page 64 of this), the NACC has only managed to individually succeed in one criminal prosecution.

Yes, that’s correct – one. 

The NACC’s own web pages will glowingly spruik they’ve enjoyed eleven successful prosecutions. However, what they don’t extrapolate is that ten of those eleven were investigations that were initiated and investigated by the former Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity before the NACC took over. In other words, they were investigations they joined in on with the help of other or previous government agencies. Yes, at a cost of over $120 million and counting so far, the NACC has managed to catch one dodgy airport worker in Western Sydney in an operation that could have frankly been conducted by the AFP with one hand tied behind their back.

Are you socially cohesive yet?

Then of course there’s Australia’s illustrious antisemitism envoy, Jillian Segal. Australians didn’t ask for an antisemitism envoy; we had one thrust upon us in yet another federally funded office that has cost us millions of dollars a year to produce nothing that benefits Australians in any way. Ms Segal’s position was sold to Australians as something that would promote social cohesion, and yet no tangible outcomes have been achieved other than an unsourced, unverified, report that appears to have been placed in the federal government dustbin while taxpayers continue to pay for two offices, a staff of four and overseas trips for the envoy, with little to show for our money.

We Australians like to tell ourselves we live in a democratic society. We do not. We have all the structures of democracy, but we have no practice of democracy. It is Potemkin politics at its finest.

We have the fake shopfronts of a National Anti-Corruption Commission, or Freedom Of Information laws, or government tender and procurement guidelines, or fluffy rules about who can close down the Sydney Harbour Bridge and who cannot. We have all the shiny, fancy facades of something called democracy which in practice are simply expensively window-dressed theatre stages, where those in power and those with wealth can rort the system, ignore the law, ignore the guidelines and do as they please. But not you, dear reader, not you. You have to be socially cohesive.

The largest contributors to the breakdown of social cohesion in Australia are the governments of Australia, practising a privileged fuck-you version of democracy that makes its own rules and caters for those within the club. 

This is the stench at the core of the decay of social cohesion. If governments want people to trust one another, they can start with themselves first. They can stop lecturing Australians on social cohesion and start behaving in a way that deserves our respect and trust, because at the moment with everything we see laid before us – this ain’t it.

The breakdown in trust in society is due to the people in power who abuse that trust, not Norm and Jenny on the corner, not the people wanting to stop children being burned alive in Palestine, not the people wanting to stop the death of the planet. 

It is governments that are breaking the social contract. It is governments that are breaking the bonds of trust, doing as they please, with no accountability or consequences. They carry all the burden of its failure. Look at the Robodebt fiasco that continues to this day. No justice was ever served, nobody was ever sacked, nobody was ever prosecuted. Is it any wonder Australians are increasingly refusing to cooperate with what they’re told. There can be no social cohesion while those above us come to the table with unclean hands.

We are all shareholders in the organisations called the federal and state governments. We have a right to know and say what is done with our money and how it is squandered by the power we invest in them. It is our leaders who are failing to practice social cohesion, not us. Instead, they practice democratic delinquency. The next time you’re lectured on observing social cohesion by someone in power – ask them if they’ve bothered washing their own hands.

https://theshot.net.au/uncategorized/the-myth-of-social-cohesion-do-as-they-say-not-as-they-do/