It seems the former Australian minister has stumbled upon the only form of political influence the 21st century has left for its has-beens: beggary. Yes, a crowd-funded inquiry into the AUKUS compact. One can almost hear the ghosts of Burke and Mill weeping into their claret.
This is not merely a quaint exercise in democratic nostalgia. It is a symptom of a deeper rot. AUKUS, that trilateral naval pact between Anglosphere powers, represents the last vestiges of a strategic reality that the modern politician cannot comprehend without a pocket calculator and a wifi hotspot. So what does our intrepid ex-minister do? He goes to GoFundMe. How perfectly Victorian. Or rather, how perfectly late-Imperial. When the machinery of state no longer listens, one must resort to the penny subscription, the public appeal, the epistolary whinge broadcast across the digital ether.
Let us recall that AUKUS is not some esoteric treaty about whale quotas. It is about nuclear submarines. It is about the Pacific's balance of power. It is about whether Australia remains a sovereign entity or a vassal state in a new Cold War. And to adjudicate this, we now rely on whatever pocket change the aggrieved can muster. This is not democracy. This is intellectual decadence dressed as participation.
The former minister's campaign raises a fundamental question: has parliamentary inquiry become so neutered, so timorous, that it must be rescued by a whip-round? The answer is yes. Our elected bodies, once forums of gravitas and decision, have devolved into reality TV sets where the only drama is the next soundbite. To challenge a trillion-dollar defence pact, one must now create a YouTube series. Such is the progress of the West.
But there is a more troubling parallel. The crowd-funded model echoes the decline of the Roman Republic, when the state could no longer fund its own functions and turned to private patrons. Today, we have a former minister essentially becoming a client politician, dependent on digital handouts. The difference is that the Romans knew they were in decline. We call this 'innovation'.
What does this inquiry hope to achieve? Transparent debate? The AUKUS agreement was signed in a blur of press releases and closed-door talks. Australia's sovereignty was traded for a few dozen submarines that will be obsolete before they are built. And now, to discuss this Faustian bargain, we need a Kickstarter campaign. This is not just pathetic. It is a cultural statement: we have forgotten how to govern.
Perhaps the former minister's gambit will succeed. Perhaps it will reveal uncomfortable truths. But the method itself is the death knell of Westminster traditions. When the opposition benches become crowdfunding platforms, the game is up. We are no longer a nation of parliamentary democracy. We are a nation of political go-funders, where every cause is a campaign and every campaign is a begging bowl.
In the end, this will pass. The AUKUS submarines will arrive, the strategic landscape will shift, and the former minister will be forgotten. But the precedent remains: inquiry by subscription. It is a perfect emblem of our age, where even power must beg. The Romans called it ‘decadence’. We call it Tuesday.
