Photo: My baby niece, during the School Strike March, 2019.

Psychotherapists are not known for getting political. We have enough hair-greying conflict to manage in our day jobs, thank you. At least that gets better for the most part.

But I can’t not get political right now.

Because I just realised that I can’t bear another shouty nothingfest federal election campaign devoid of any courage or vision to wrestle with the real problems behind so many threats to our future.

This gutless sameness is why politics gets called the Art of the Possible. Just a clever way of saying that a lot that should get done never gets done. Between the lines: fairness is a hopeless dream.

But wait…there’s never been a better time to dream, has there?

After all, if the least appropriate person ever to hold the office of POTUS can do it twice AND wish Canada and Greenland and, um, membership of the Commonwealth, and a third term were all his, then surely a humble psychotherapy doctor in Melbourne can wish for a few things too.

Because I have been learning from my patients for three decades about what heals us; I see that our major political challenges are essentially about healing us, and I see that we can not hope to heal as things are.

So here’s my wishlist for political change for a world in need of healing:

1. Prevent the buying of power. End paid lobbying, political donations, cash for access and majority media ownership. Just stop them.
2. Redistribute voting power to the young who have longer to live with the effects of policy. If you’re 20-40 your vote is worth double. If you’re 16-20 it’s worth triple.
3. Tax all fairly and fund all fairly. End the tax avoidance industry. There are lots of other things to do with all that office space. House some people maybe.
4. Determine what’s fair by mandating that all enrolled voters participate in jury-style citizen review of parliamentary bills. All legislation must pass the pub test, except pub is short for public plain-language review.
5. Extend terms to 4 or 5 years to allow time for policy development and implementation that’s not in a blind hurry.
6. End ownership for profit (and shareholders) of services for the needy/vulnerable or for which consumers get no choice: Education, health and aged care, insurance, public transport etc.
7. Finally a biggie: End the birth lottery. Make it possible to live well no matter who you are born to or where. No baby gets to choose to be born; every one deserves a fair chance at life.

Wishful thinking, right? Sure. I don’t know how to do these things, only why: Because these 7 wishes all seek to make our world fairer.

It’s been said that the greatest danger to humankind is unfairness. This fits with my view as a trauma therapist – when things are unfair between us, it’s like a wound. You can treat it properly and heal it by seeking justice of some kind (and this can take many forms in therapy) or you can ignore it and hope it heals itself. It won’t – injustice festers like nothing else – but it will delay the reckoning and leave the mess for someone else.

That kind of dangerous denial is how our 3 year federal political system is designed – leave it to the next lot. The only true solution is to commit over generations to making things fairer. It’s the hardest too, I get that.

But business as usual is making so many of us so unhappy. We are told when young as we learn about the unfair Western world: that’s just how it is. Kids ask why Santa brings expensive toys to rich families and cheap toys (if any) to poor families, regardless of who’s been good, and all we have is: that’s just the way it works. Now enjoy your gifts, be grateful!

But it’s harder for Western kids to be grateful than Nepalese kids living on next to nothing. Because unfairness afflicts the winners as well as the losers. Shakespeare nailed this in MacBeth – win the crown unfairly and you’ll never wear it well. Your mind can convince itself but your gut knows.

Our evolution designed us – brain, heart, gut and all – for smaller, more egalitarian groups. Nature could be ruthless but our nature was kinder than capitalist individualism would now have us believe. Life was better in our tribes when we dealt with injustice meaningfully – that’s part of why spirituality and law are in every tribe.

The bigger the tribe, the more elusive fairness becomes. Western society has more winners by measured standard of living than any other in history, and yet so many feel like we are losing – ‘doing it tough out there’ as every politician everywhere is trained to say.

But if you want to know how tough(ly) people really are doing it, don’t ask a focus group, ask a psychotherapist. My patients are inspirations to me, sane enough to seek help and brave enough to speak truth about what really is tough. The craziest thing about anyone I see in my practice is…yep, the world they have to live in.

I’d vote for them if I could.

But I can’t, and neither can you. So I urge you to ask your local candidates what their policy is on any of these 7 wishes.

I doubt anyone from a major party will be able to respond in any satisfactory way, because…party. So it’ll be a question of which independent has the heart to level with you about this mess and agrees to do their best to change it.

That’ll get my vote.

#psychiatrying