Introduction

In 2017, the Australian government surveyed the Australian people on whether they supported a change to the law to allow same-sex marriage. Despite the non-binding nature of the survey, there was a widespread expectation that the government would implement the result. In the end, more than 60 per cent of survey participants voted ‘Yes’. On the day that the result was announced, Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull declared: ‘The people have voted “Yes” for marriage equality, now it's our job to deliver it’ (Turnbull 2017). A few weeks later, the Commonwealth Parliament amended the Marriage Act 1961 (Cth) to make same-sex marriage lawful.

The marriage survey illustrates one of the curious features of the advisory referendum, or ‘plebiscite’ as the device is often called in Australia.2 The result is not binding on the parliament but may nonetheless be treated as if it is. Lawmakers remain free to respond as they wish, but there is a strong political incentive for the parliament to act in line with the result, as disregarding it could risk a severe backlash from voters. For this reason, some view the plebiscite as ‘effectively binding’ (Gallagher 1996, 246). Viewed in this way, the plebiscite can be seen as a device that empowers citizens and, potentially, weakens parliaments (Suksi 1996; Psycharis 2022, 233).

However, others challenge the idea that plebiscites are politically binding and question their value as a mechanism for citizen participation in the making of policy decisions. They point to examples where advisory votes have been ignored by political actors (Cheneval and El-Wakil 2018). Some view plebiscites as nothing more than official opinion polls given that they provide a mechanism for people to express a view on a policy proposal but deny them the final say (noted by Setälä 1999, 87). And it is said that advisory votes, if anything, empower politicians at the expense of citizens, as political actors remain free to manipulate the results to their own advantage (Cheneval and El-Wakil 2018). On this account, the plebiscite offers an illusion of popular control but preserves the power of political elites.

This chapter investigates which of these two accounts of the plebiscite is most applicable to Australia. It does this by examining the immediate aftermath of the 44 plebiscites that have been held by federal, state and territory governments since federation in 1901.

Back to Contingency

For Plato, human reason “sees” abstract ideas and concepts that are necessary, whereas concrete objects and appearances of objects, as long as their existence is not explained through reason, are contingent. Real is only what can be rationally explained. Laplace's determinism continued to build upon these convictions. But despite the popularity of this powerful paradigm, science and philosophy never entirely neglected the idea of contingency. On the contrary, it remained a relevant philosophical topic during a time span ranging from Aristotle to Descartes. As mentioned, Aristotle was opposed to any deterministic denial of contingency: coincidences were not just subjective perceptions but real. Aristotle even created an ontology of contingency in which an aggregative totality called “the world” was composed of both necessary essences and contingent beings. For centuries, contingency would be discussed along these lines, and most of the time, this happened in theological contexts. It is only after Descartes that contingency would disappear from major philosophical debates—though not because it had been scientifically solved, but, paradoxically, because science and philosophy had abolished divine determinism. Contingency was worth targeting only as long as it represented the opposite of providentialism. Once philosophy was de-theologized, the modern world was freed from contingency much as it would later be freed from God. For the historians of philosophy Graevenitz and Marquard (1998), the intellectual history of contingency is therefore a major philosophical episode that ends with Descartes. In the aftermath of this long episode, contingency could still be seen as an antidote against scientific determinism. However, compared to earlier theological projects, these new discussions remained relatively marginal. It would only be with the rise of Darwinism and other important scientific theories such as atomic theory in the nineteenth century (which put forward the coincidence) that discussions of contingency once again became more prominent. In the twentieth century, relativity theory and chaos theory theorized contingency in their own ways. None of these sciences ever claimed to have solved the problem of contingency; they merely reformulated it in different fashions.

The Greeks did not accept cosmological contingency and believed that the universe had always existed as an eternal and unchangeable being. As has been shown above, in the Middle Ages, the theory of contingentia held that, though the world was created out of nothing, it was still sustained by a divine will.

Introduction

In a ‘constitutional legitimacy crisis’ (Appleby, Levy and Whalan 2023), two or more parties view the values underlying a constitution markedly differently, such that there is no single, practically authoritative view of how a constitutional disagreement between them should be resolved. The parties disagree not only about a constitution's essential normative foundations but also about who is authorised to resolve the disagreement. There are many kinds of constitutional legitimacy crises. But our interest in this chapter is in competing claims to constitutional sovereignty of Indigenous groups and the settler state – in particular, the Australian Commonwealth and its federal subunits.

Sovereignty claims are claims to legitimate ownership and authority over the land, law and political life within a given territory or in relation to a set of people (Cobb 2005, 118). Sovereignty conflicts raise a particularly caustic form of constitutional legitimacy crisis, due partly to divergent ideas about the foundations and implications of sovereignty. As Davis and Williams write, the ‘term “sovereignty” is a widely used but contested term that can mean different things to different people’ (2023, 165). Indeed, competing visions of sovereignty were mainstays of the rhetoric leading up to the 2023 referendum on the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice. All sides made claims based on distinct perspectives of sovereignty. In this chapter, we focus on this competition of ideas in the Voice debate.

Claims of the state's exclusive sovereignty commonly arose. However, a close look reveals these claims’ normatively problematic foundations. Some varieties of exclusive claims understood exclusivity as self-evident. Others relied for support on the authoritative statements of state institutions, notably courts. Neither type of argument could escape the problem of self-reference – or ‘normative bootstrapping’ (Levy 2025). Claims to the state's exclusive sovereignty relied on state perspectives, or on state institutions themselves, to justify the state's normative primacy.

The consequence of such bootstrapping rhetoric first may have been to contribute to the Voice reform's rejection by generating fears about creating (Albrechtsen 2023b) or amplifying Indigenous sovereignty. This rhetoric misunderstands the status of Indigenous sovereignty, which – as a normative and political matter, rather than positive law – is already widely understood by Indigenous people and their supporters as existing. The bootstrapping perspective overlooks this normative and political reality.

This final chapter explores the ways in which Eastern philosophies avoid the obsessions with necessity that are so common in Western philosophy and culture, and which have led to a conspiratorial mindset, among other things. More consistently than Western philosophies, Eastern philosophies have tried to see the world in terms of contingency, or rather, as a realm in which the contingency/necessity dichotomy has been overcome. These views contrast most clearly with conspiracist ways of thinking, as the conspiratorial mindset's main occupation is to construct permanent and rigid identities, beliefs, foundations, and opinions. The purpose of these constructions is to create security. Eastern philosophies acknowledge that contingency can be difficult to bear, but the contingency-coping devices they offer are usually different from Western ones. Instead of replacing contingency with necessity, they recommend seeing necessities as non-essential. The conspiratorial mindset would certainly be the textbook example of a person in whom Buddhist teachers would try to instill an awareness of impermanence.

Strangely, the conspiratorial mindset can at times sound vaguely “Buddhist” as it tries to bring relief from the so-called real world or asks us to “awaken” to a reality that remains hidden from ordinary people. Such a Buddhist air seems to permeate the conspiratorial mindset because, on top of it, it preaches that the conspiracy must be borne like karma. But it is precisely non-Buddhist, because it is a non-dynamic perception of destiny or karma, or a view that refuses to see the contingency of time and history. The conspiratorial mindset cannot overcome its destiny and declare its shaping forces to be non-essential, but rather reifies destiny through ressentiment, and perhaps even to the point of seeking revenge.

Buddhism

Buddhism is traditionally rooted in doctrines of impermanence (anitya), emptiness (sunyata), no-self (anatta), as well as in conditioned or dependent arising (pratitya-samutpada). It teaches us to let go of such supposed necessities, as we tend to cling to them in the form of rigid images of our selves, or of fixed conceptions of how we think the world should be. The Buddhist philosophical view is that everything is impermanent, conditional, and thus contingent. Buddhism does not presuppose the existence of a god who controls the destiny of humans, with the result that, a priori, concepts of possibility and contingency can enter this philosophy more freely than in monotheistic religions and cultures.

Introduction

Australian politicians introduced compulsory voting to address what was unanimously agreed to be a crisis of falling voter turnout. That decision, waved through the federal parliament, shaped the country's party system and the nature of civic engagement for the next 100 years. In 2024, Australia faces a similar downturn in public attitudes towards politics and politicians, but politicians – led by the two major parties – have shown little interest in acting to stem the tide. We should not be surprised that parties are reluctant to act in ways that undermine their electoral interests; electoral reforms can have unexpected consequences, and the risk of, for instance, enfranchising new voters who support other parties is substantial. This chapter proposes policy solutions – mixed-member proportional representation in the House of Representatives, lower fines for abstention at federal elections and more channels for party membership – that will allow disengaged Australians to better engage with their political system without threatening either major party's strategic interests and without dismantling compulsory voting.

Compulsory voting was introduced in 1924 to arrest a rapid decline in Australians voting at federal elections. A century later, Australians’ voting behaviour and responses to political surveys suggest similar signs of democratic disengagement, but the silver bullet of compulsion has already been used. Moreover, disengagement in 2024 takes more subtle forms: voters keep voting (to avoid sanction under compulsory voting laws), the major parties keep winning, and from a distance Australian politics looks to continue pretty much as usual. But a long-term and monotonic decline in the major parties’ vote share, collapse of political party membership and record-low favourability towards democratic institutions all point to serious malaise.

This chapter examines the context in which compulsory voting was introduced, how it worked to reverse falling voter engagement and helped to solidify the two-party system that has dominated Australian politics, and why the stability of the last 100 years has provided the conditions for current dissatisfaction with the system. Governments and policymakers have a wide range of options to restore engagement with Australian democracy without having to remove the safety net of compulsory voting. The chapter concludes by considering policies that can make engagement easier without incurring electoral disadvantage to either side of politics: introducing (mixed-member) proportional representation to the House of Representatives, lowering the costs of voting (and of abstaining) and expanding the ways in which interested voters can engage with political parties.

Few would deny the importance of an active citizenry in a democracy. In 2014, for instance, the International Social Survey Programme asked around 50,000 citizens in 34 countries to rank on a scale of 1 to 7 how important it is for citizens to ‘always vote in elections’. About 80 per cent gave a ranking of 5 (11.2 per cent), 6 (16.4 per cent) or 7 (51.8 per cent) (ISSP 2016). Many of us, moreover, are deeply impressed by citizens active within the democratic process in other ways. Organising campaigns, attending demonstrations, petitioning government, knocking on doors and so on – such acts seem to exemplify the promise of democracy as ‘rule by the people’.

Presumably, such attitudes stem partly from the fact that democracies are nothing more or less than elaborate systems of norms governing the exercise and distribution of political power. Norms persist only where a sufficient proportion of the citizenry both (a) personally adhere to them and (b) have sufficient confidence that other citizens also do so (Bicchieri 2017). Those who seek to advance their political objectives through the demo-cratic process (rather than by circumventing it) thereby express allegiance to the norms constitutive of that process. This, in turn, plays a vital role in sustaining such norms and, as such, protects and promotes the democratic form of life most of us value highly.

Moreover, virtually every theoretical account of the nature of democracy emphasises the importance of participation.2 Carole Pateman (1970, 2012), for instance, holds that participation is nothing less than the fundamental purpose of democratic government. For her, it is only by positively engaging with matters of public significance that individuals may come to develop the virtues necessary for a desirable form of collective life. Only in a democracy of the right kind – one in which citizens not merely enjoy extensive rights of participation, but wherein such rights are exercised – will this be possible. Pateman’s, of course, is a particularly expansive view of democracy. But even so-called minimalists, who see democracy as merely a process through which elites acquire power ‘by means of a competitive struggle for the people's vote’ (Schumpeter 1950, 269), nevertheless have reason to hold that broad participation is essential if democracies are to deliver desirable outcomes.

Before proceeding to the analysis of contingency-necessity problems in conspiratorial thought, the term “conspiracy theory” needs to be clearly established. Given that the definition of the conspiracy theory has been a hotly debated topic in recent years, it is necessary to carefully present the methodology that I intend to use. I define a conspiracy theory as a framework of analysis that seeks to explain events through a conspiration. Often, conspiracy theories lean toward a belief that a group of people who share a common ethnic, political, national, or religious origin plot to harm another group’s interests. These theories can be warranted or unwarranted, though in common language the assumption that they are unwarranted is most current. It does not mean that the warranted ones are rare. Often, conspiracy theories that are labeled as unfounded have later been substantiated. Very often, attempts to point out illegal acts and atrocities authored by governments and big corporations are too easily discredited by labeling them conspiracy theories. Famous cases are the Watergate affair, the Tuskegee Syphilis experiments, the Iran-Contra affair, or, more recently, the vast surveillance program by the NSA. Multinational companies have a history of plots and counterplots to benefit themselves at the cost of the general population. Another example is Enron’s conspiracy to manipulate the supply of electricity to inflate rates in California (see Orr and Husting 2018). Or a classical case is that of the tobacco industry when, in 1999, a Florida jury declared the seven largest American tobacco companies guilty of misrepresentation and conspiracy to conceal the addictiveness and dangers of cigarette smoking. It is certainly true that the U.S. government regularly lies about its programs and agenda and famously misled other governments into the Iraq War through a conspiracy. These patterns are systemic and theorizing about them means revealing them. Governments and companies lie and dub those who reveal their barbarities “conspiracy theorists” as if that alone were proof enough for the irrelevance of their concerns. “Peaceful, law-abiding people ought to be allowed to freely assemble and pursue their inquiries without infiltration,” writes Hagen (2022: 140).

The meaning of “conspiracy theory” is ambiguous (warranted or unwarranted), and the question arises whether the term should be dropped from academic vocabulary altogether. The ambiguity already concerns the term “conspiracy.”