The narrative emerging from mainstream Australia about the recent election result feels surreal. Headlines celebrating how we’ve “rejected division” and “chosen unity and kindness” sit alongside analysis that ignores some uncomfortable truths about what this result actually represents – and who gets to feel relief about it.
Reading these takes alongside voices like Professor Chelsea Watego and Uncle Robbie Thorpe reveals a stark difference between how mainstream Australia and many First Nations people, Palestinians, and other communities experiencing racism view this outcome. This difference matters, and it tells us something important about the work still ahead.
Whose Unity? Whose Relief?
Professor Watego’s reflection cuts through the celebration: “This election result was a win for whiteness…so-called Australia could redeem its virtue and innocence post the voice referendum. They’re not really racist after all.”
The question she raises is crucial: if we’re united, what are we united around? When the celebration centers on rejecting “divisive politics” while ignoring Labor’s complicity in genocide in Palestine, or when acknowledgment of country becomes a political jab rather than genuine recognition, we have to ask whether this unity is built on centering whiteness.
Uncle Robbie Thorpe’s observation that for First Nations people, the choice between major parties is “a choice between overt racism and covert racism” highlights who gets to feel relief about election results. It’s easier for mainstream Australia to feel comfortable with covert racism – it’s less obvious, more palatable. But if you’re experiencing the impacts of that covert racism, there’s less cause for celebration.
The Comfort of the Middle Centre
Jan Fran’s analysis about comfort and disruption resonates here. Australia’s rejection of Trump-style politics might not reflect a genuine rejection of division and hatred, but rather our aversion to disruption and chaos. We’re comfortable, and we want to stay that way.
Labor’s majority was built on appealing to the “middle centre” – and as Professor Watego points out, what we’ve learned about the middle centre is that “they don’t give a shit about genocide, Indigenous peoples here or elsewhere.” This brings to mind Martin Luther King Jr.’s observation that “the white moderate” is often the biggest obstacle to liberation – more devoted to order than to justice, preferring negative peace to positive change.
Beyond Negative Peace
The media’s current vibe feels like what some call “negative peace” – the absence of conflict around things that aren’t working for everyone. It’s the idea that we should all be quiet and not talk about the things affecting people, that pointing out problems is itself the problem.
This resembles what many of us know as “dishonest harmony” – the kind of fake unity that prioritizes comfort over truth-telling. When kindness gets weaponized to mean conflict avoidance, when unity means everyone has to be quiet about oppression, we’re not building the kind of society we actually want.
Redefining Kindness and Unity
How do we work toward values like unity and kindness without them being co-opted by white supremacy culture? This question sits at the heart of how we organize and what kind of movement we’re building.
Real kindness isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes kindness looks like being direct or blunt when the situation calls for it. Under white supremacy culture, kindness has come to mean conflict avoidance, but kindness also looks different across different cultures. Sometimes kindness is dissent. Sometimes kindness is refusing to let people stay comfortable with systems that harm others.
The same goes for unity. The unity we want isn’t uniformity – it’s not everyone thinking the same way or staying quiet about differences. Healthy unity means being unified enough for common purpose while knowing what we don’t compromise on. It means being comfortable with difference rather than demanding everyone pretend we’re all the same.
The Limits of “A Movement for All”
This election result highlights something we’ve been grappling with in our own organising: the attempt to appeal to everyone can be inherently problematic. When we try to build “a movement for all,” we risk building a movement that can’t actually be for all – because some people need to do work before they can be part of transformation.
We need to be pushing the Overton window, not just finding the middle ground. This means that the people who show up to our movement need to do the work to confront their own complicity in systems of harm. And we have an important role to play in supporting folks to take this learning journey, so that our movements can be transformational spaces.
What This Means for Our Organising
These reflections challenge us to think differently about how we organise and what kind of unity we’re building. It means:
Being honest about contradictions: We can hold relief that we avoided the worst outcome while also recognizing that this result shows racism is still very real – it’s just shifted from overt to covert.
Questioning who gets to feel comfortable: When our strategies centre making people comfortable, we need to ask whose comfort we’re prioritising and whose experiences we’re ignoring.
Redefining our values: Unity and kindness are values many of us hold, but we need to be clear about what we mean by them. Are we talking about the kind of unity that maintains the status quo, or the kind that requires everyone to grapple with hard truths?
Building for transformation, not just comfort: If we’re serious about challenging systems of oppression, we need to be willing to disrupt comfort – including our own.
The Work Ahead
The celebration of this election result as a rejection of division reveals how much work we still have to do. It shows how easily narratives of unity and kindness can be used to avoid confronting ongoing systems of harm.
For those of us building movements for justice, this moment is a reminder that we can’t mistake the absence of overt conflict for the presence of justice. We can’t let the relief of avoiding the worst outcome distract us from the work of building something better.
The question isn’t whether we can build unity – it’s what kind of unity we’re building and whether it’s the kind that can actually create the changes we need. That work requires honesty about where we are, courage to have difficult conversations, and commitment to the long-term relationship-building that real transformation requires.
It means recognizing that kindness sometimes looks like disruption, that unity sometimes requires conflict, and that the work of justice is never finished – especially when election results make it easy to think we’ve already won.