Nick Xenophon and longtime parliamentary staffer Connie Bonaros have years of political experience - but most of their fellow SA Best candidates do not. Photo: David Mariuz / AAP

A couple of years back a wall certificate emblazoned with a slogan became the trendy gift doing the Christmas rounds among the medical fraternity.

If you’ve got a particularly waggish GP you might even have spotted said slogan adorning their waiting room wall. It reads: “Please Do Not Confuse Your Google Search With My Medical Degree.”

The point, drolly-made, is that doctors are the experts, and that self-diagnosis predicated on the dubious expertise of “Dr Google” is not only wildly unreliable but potentially quite dangerous to boot.


But the slogan itself is a symptom of the online age, wherein the Great Unwashed (and, more pertinently, the Great Untrained) feel empowered by the sheer magnitude of information – or purported information – at their fingertips.

Knowledge, after all, is power, and there is now more knowledge than ever before available to more people than ever before. But if knowledge is power, wisdom is attaining the expertise to use that knowledge judiciously – not merely to cherry-pick solutions and syllogisms from the mass of information churning in the internet ocean.

If even doctors are finding themselves increasingly told how to do their jobs by armchair experts these days, it is but a minor exponent of a modern malaise – the anti-expert revolt.

The zeitgeist was captured beautifully by a cartoon in the New Yorker just over a year ago, in which a disgruntled airline passenger riles up his fellow travellers with an eerily familiar call to arms: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?”

It’s a brilliant evocation, because of the inherent silliness of the notion that a majority of passengers would prefer to entrust their lives to an opinionated novice than a trained professional. But, of course, that’s increasingly the story of our political life.

Trump’s ‘Drain The Swamp’ refrain captured the essence of the movement – a broad dissatisfaction, even anger, with the ruling elite.

Empowered by a mass of information, people increasingly resent being told what to do, and even what to think, by career politicians who have increasingly lost touch with the lives of their constituents.

The sentiment is so palpable that even a billionaire property developer was able to harness it to somehow portray himself as the voice of America’s disaffected lower middle class.

His enduring shtick is to berate the pillars of the liberal establishment. It is, in effect, the very thing proponents of the new Right despise the most – virtue signalling. His public attacks on ethnic minorities, on women, on Democrats and – of course – on the media is a thinly-coded dog whistle to those who feel diminished, or ostracised, or aggrieved, by the liberal elite and its attendant political correctness.


And it’s catching.

The president’s constant media pejorative – Fake News – is so prevalent it was Macquarie Dictionary’s Word of the Year last year, and a more deserving choice than this year’s hipper yet more obscure Milkshake Duck. It is, after all, a phrase that has entered the lexicon (one fears, permanently) and moreover crossed the political divide, with members of the Left enthusiastically embracing the Trump lingo. It’s become a catch-all for any news story, even those that are sourced, verified and attributed, with which the reader disagrees.

Because readers are sick of being dictated to by these smug “expert” journalists.

Nick Xenophon hates being compared to Donald Trump.

Before the last federal election, he took grave offence to then-Liberal MP Jamie Briggs arguing there were “uncanny” similarities between the two “anti-politicians”.

“Both are populists who play on fear claiming to be ‘anti-politicians’, whereas the truth is that both have been involved in politics nearly all their adult lives,” Briggs told The Australian.

Xenophon has described the comparison variously as “hysterical”, “really rough” and “quite reckless”.

“It would be funny if what was behind it wasn’t so offensive,” he told News Corp in 2016.

“I find Trump’s views on migration, on Muslims, on war veterans, quite repugnant.”

He got the last laugh in that particular exchange when Briggs lost his previously safe seat to NXT’s Rebekha Sharkie.

But the former member for Mayo was onto something.

For the Xenophon phenomenon – while politically centrist and thus boasting local mainstream appeal – is predicated on the same social groundswell that saw Trump elected and, despite his daily ability to outrage the mainstream, may yet see him re-elected: a disdain for the status quo; a rejection of expertise.

In coming weeks, SA Best will unveil a full suite of candidates, which is likely to number 24 or more – enough, mathematically, to govern the state.

Most will have little or no political experience. All but a couple – including likely off-sider Kris Hanna and Xenophon himself – will have no parliamentary experience.

And yet this inexperience appears to be part of their charm, given Xenophon has thus far eschewed hardened political operatives in favour of community everymen and women, plucked from local businesses and the ranks of local government. Those that have left parties have rarely risen high through their party’s ranks. It seems that it will be the very definition of a rag-tag bunch.

And yet, Xenophon could rightly claim that the status quo has hardly gifted us the highest quality of representation. The major party machine has, over the years, given us a motley collection of hacks, seat-warmers and even one MP convicted of attempting to obtain child pornography.

There is a difference though: the major party proving ground may let through its share of duds and opportunists, but they must still spend years working their way through the ranks. Their colleagues may not know all their secrets, but they are, by and large, known quantities.

The team SA Best will put up for election is, by contrast, a cast of unknowns.

Many of them have only been interviewed for preselection in recent days – and will be endorsed to fight an election in just two months’ time.

Not even Xenophon could claim to know them all well – and yet they will be running under his auspices, and benefiting from his aura.

On the face of it, I’m not one of those who automatically assumes a big vote for SA Best will automatically spell the Worst for SA. If Xenophon holds the balance of power, a range of measures will be passed in the next four years to bring much-needed reform to the processes of parliament and the state’s bureaucracy. Which, given the follies on which we’ve needlessly wasted breath and money in the last four years – chasing nuclear dollars down the proverbial rabbit-hole and taking soundings on shifting time-zones, only to abandon the whole enterprise at the first sign that it will require some political conviction – would at least be a tangible policy outcome.

And yet there are plenty of things about SA Best that ring alarm bells. While projecting its anti-establishment aura, the fact every candidate must cough up $20k even to run under the Xenophon banner suggests it’s actually a reasonably exclusive enterprise. And the pontificating about transparency seems wildly at odds with the party’s own internal governance, with candidates required to gain written permission before making public utterances on a given issue.

Moreover, despite his pretensions as an outsider, Xenophon is in many ways a textbook politician. He makes almost all his candidate and policy announcements via his preferred media outlet, the Murdoch-owned Advertiser, guaranteeing a good run, and a smooth one – albeit likely hidden away from many of the battlers he purports to represent behind an online paywall.

It’s hardly the mark of a champion of the disaffected. But then, Trump’s MO doesn’t exactly scream everyman charm either.

Xenophon of late seems constantly frazzled, overwhelmed by the onerous duties of overseeing an entire party machine by himself.

It may be taxing, but it’s just the image of him that will likely see SA Best hold the balance of power after March 17 – just a poor guy struggling by without an army of advisers, departments… and experts.

And thus runs SA Best’s narrative, a paean to the age of Trump and Dr Google.

‘Those smug major party pollies have lost touch with regular voters like us,’ it screams.

‘Who thinks we should run the state?’

The inexperts are clamouring to storm the cockpit and usurp the controls. The question is: will it be a soft landing?

Tom Richardson is a senior reporter at InDaily.

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