18 Spotlight 1/2020 SOCIETY
to confront employers who do not pay
workers enough to live on and afterwards
to make allies of those who have imple-
mented reforms.
There was also something more fun-
damental about the campaign, however.
“There was a simplicity and a moral clari-
ty to the demand,” Baskerville says. “How
can it be right that you sit at the top of an
organization, and the person who cleans
the carpet under your feet doesn’t have
enough to live on?”NGOs are not the messiah
The shape of modern-day activism and
community organization is, however, not
necessarily flat and leader-
less. Some kind of institu-
tion and distributed leader-
ship is necessary to sustain
effort and develop strategy,
argue those at the meeting
of the Sydney Policy Lab.
“You do see these vast
protests which evolve into
nothing because there’s no
organization behind them,
and everyone thinks they’ve
done their bit,” Stears says.
“What you really need are
people who can sustain
months and months of action. Unless you
do that, you’re not going to make concrete
changes.”
In order to work in a constructive way
against the anger caused by voicelessness
and powerlessness, those at the lab agree
that these movements and organizations
must act as springboards for people, and
not as their saviours.
“It is not meant for NGOs to be the
messiahs of their communities,” Swart-
booi says. “It’s building people’s power
through educating them to know their
rights and making sure the skills and
knowledge we have are transferred to
communities.” What’s more, in a society
increasingly marked by division and dis-
trust, listening is critical.
“If you want to have a campaign about
coal in Australia, you must have people
from coal communities as part of the rela-
tionship,” Stears says. “You have to know
what they’ll think, what they’re worried
about. We’ve got into a habit of not do-
ing that. We get outraged by an issue, so
shout about it, but we haven’t built the
relationships with people that are neededin the coalition. So you’ve got to slow it
down, even though it’s urgent.”“Don’t wait for your Brexit moment”
Stefan Baskerville, the grandson of Jewish
refugees who fled Nazi Germany, is very
much aware of what can happen when
economic systems no longer work for
people.
“The dark thing about what is happen-
ing now politically is that it is polarizing,”
he says. “You’re seeing the rise of authori-
tarianism in places which are supposed to
be the strongholds of democracy. There is
a critical mission before us to sustain de-
mocracy, and it rests not just on voting.
It rests on people having
agency and power, having
the habits of relating to each
other across difference.”
Stears says it is difficult
to know whether we are at
a tipping point, or if a tip-
ping point is about to come.
“There’s just no doubt that
people are beside themselves
— not just with anger, but
with fear. There’s a sense
that awful things are already
happening, and worse things
might happen, unless we
make some change.” But both that sense
of overwhelming powerlessness, and
the anger felt about things like the state
of jobs, housing, climate and so on, can be
overcome, he says, if people can organize
and think these problems through im-
aginatively. Stears, himself a Brit, warns
Australia: “Don’t wait for your Brexit
moment.”
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