Labor’s day: Australia’s election

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Hello and welcome to the Intelligence from the Economist. In London, I'm Jason Palmer.

And in New York, I'm John Fassman. Every weekday we provide a fresh perspective on the events shaping your world.

How often during the workday do you check your personal email, browse sports scores or just go for a walk? We don't mean to scare you, but thanks to increasingly popular surveillance software, your boss might soon know every slackerly detail.

And prediction is difficult. Mark Twain once wrote, particularly when it involves the future. But that has not stopped people from trying using crystal balls, tarot cards and in Brazil, cowrie shells, an ancient Yoruba practice that has grown increasingly popular.

First up, though, After a weekend vote, Australia has a new Prime Minister, Anthony Albanese.

Tonight, the Australian people have voted for change. I am humbled by this victory and I'm honoured to be given the opportunity to serve as the 31st Prime Minister of Australia.

The outgoing leader, Scott Morrison, who for four years led a coalition government comprising his Liberal Party and the National Party, was also humbled.

It's a difficult night for Liberals and Nationals around the country, as nights like this always are. They are humbling, but so is victory. Victory is also humbling and always should be.

For Mr. Albanese, or Albo, as his countrymen like to call him, it was no landslide. His Labour Party only got about a third of the votes, and it's still not certain he'll end up with a parliamentary majority. What's clear is that the Australian people wanted to move away from the Liberal National Coalition's flippant attitude to climate change, from Mr. Morrison's masculine brand of politics. But what they want instead represents more than just a bounce of power between the traditional, largely centrist parties.

So Australia has now, in Anthony Albanese, its first Labour Prime Minister in nearly a decade. And it looks like Labour is just about going to be able to scrape A majority in the lower house, the House of Representatives here, and that'll be the first time that it's done that since 2007. So Labour doesn't often and win from opposition.

Eleanor Whitehead is the Economist's Australia and New Zealand correspondent.

That wasn't all that happened in this election. I mean, it was a crushing defeat for the previous coalition government and its larger partner, the Liberal Party. And votes flowed away from both of the major parties and towards independent candidates and minor parties to a degree that they've never done before. So about a third of Australians voted for independence and minor parties at the expense of both the major parties here this time around.

And so about the eventual winner, Anthony Albanese, who's he? Tell us about him.

So he is quite a good kind of Australian. Pull yourself up by the bootstraps story. He came from very humble beginnings. He grew up in public housing and council housing and Sydney to a single mother who was on disability allowance, and he's made quite a lot of that in the campaign. It says a lot about our great country that the son of a single mum who was a disability pensioner, who grew, grew up in public housing down the road in Camperdown, can stand before you tonight as Australia's Prime Minister. But on the professional side, he's actually kind of a pretty conventional politician. He's a career politician. He came up through the New South Wales Labour party in the 1990s and he's been in federal Parliament in Canberra since the 90s. He had various ministerial positions under the last Labour governments. He was deputy leader for a brief while under Kevin Rudd. And I think the kind of most interesting aspect of his experience under the last governments, because he was a relatively experienced politician, was he had a sort of leadership role in the lower house, managing government business. And it was during a period of minority government for Labour, so he had to do a lot of negotiating with crossbenchers to pass legislation. And that is going to be, I think, quite important for him because even if he scrapes a majority in this election, there's going to be a big cohort of independent politicians and minor parties and Labour's not going to have control of the Senate here. So that's going to be that kind of collaborative consensus building politics is going to be very important now.

And so you said it's unusual for Labour to win in opposition against the sitting coalition. What do you suppose happened there?

I think it was as much a case this time around of the coalition government losing the election. Votes for both the major parties were down There was a swing against the coalition of almost 6 percentage points. Labour's won less votes than it did last time around in 2019, when it was defeated by the Coalition. Less than one in three Australians have voted for Labour, so it's the lowest vote for any incoming government since the country became a Federation more than 100 years ago. So it's not a resounding endorsement of the Labour Party. So it was really a case, I think, of votes flowing away from the coalition. I mean, its prime minister, the former Prime Minister now, Scott Morrison, I think his style of leadership, he had a kind of quite bullish, quite hairy chested, almost laddie style of leadership that disagreed with a lot of Australians, particularly in kind of more metropolitan, educated areas. And the party just hemorrhaged seats in inner cities, in Melbourn, in Sydney, in Perth and in Brisbane, partly to a new group of independent candidates, most of whom were campaigning for more action against climate change and stronger cuts to emissions, but also, astoundingly to the Greens in Brisbane, which is the capital of Queensland, which is a mining state. So, you know, a lot of votes going towards minor parties and independents, about a third of Australians voting for them, which is just way more than ever before.

And one thing that's interesting about Australian elections is that people have to participate. What effect do you think the compulsory voting in Australia has had on this election?

So the general feeling is that compulsory voting keeps things relatively kind of sensible and centrist, and that's because political leaders don't have to rally people out to the ballot box, so they don't have to resort to dog whistles or more extremes to rally a base who might not otherwise turn up. By and large, the effect is to keep politics on both sides more centrist. And it is very centrist, by and large, in Australia. So it's a system, I think, that served Australia very well. I don't think that means it's one that would work necessarily in other countries. You know, Australians obviously don't know any different. The general feeling among political scientists is it would not be applied in countries like Britain or America, which have less utilitarian and more kind of libertarian cultures. You know, if people feel like they're being coerced into it, then I don't think the system works.

And in terms of what mattered to voters this time around, it sounds as if climate change was a prominent issue.

Yeah. So I think for a long time people have been saying that Australian elections are going to be determined by climate change, and they haven't been. And this is the time that it's really happened. And the background to understand that is that the coalition government, the Conservative government that is now in opposition, has very, very poor record of making cuts to emissions because it staunchly defends Australia's very big coal mining industry. And that has been an increasing frustration to voters, especially in inner cities, who can kind of afford to be concerned about things like climate change. And I think that was a kind of repudiation from those inner city areas of the long history of inaction on climate change here.

And aside from some action then on climate change, what can we expect from the Albanese government?

The campaigning was very thin on policy, so it's quite hard to kind of say what is going to define the next government because it hasn't really promised Australians very much. So Albanese had made promises kind of around the economy, raising wages, boosting productivity, not all of which is going to be easy to do when inflation is rising and debt and structural deficits are as well. And then abroad, he's going to have to get a grip on foreign policy at a time of acute concern in Australia about China's expansionism and rising influence through the Pacific. And the first job for Albanese is to represent Australia at the Quad, which is this loose coalition of Japan, India, America and Australia, which sets out to kind of offset Chinese influence throughout the Indo Pacific. And I think that partners there are going to be looking for reassurance from Albanese that Australia is going to stay kind of firm and active in collective resistance to China's rise through the region.

Eleanor, thank you very much for joining us.

Thanks, Jason.

If you're slacking on the job right now, say, by listening to this podcast when you should be working, I have a warning for you. Your boss may be watching. Working from home has made it much easier for workers to not work away from the prying eyes of their superiors. But to regain their advantage, some managers are using increasingly invasive technology to keep tabs on their underlings.

People working from home has made it harder for bosses to track exactly what their employees are doing.

Vinjeru Makandawiray writes about offices and the future of work for the Economist.

And so as Covid spread, more and more employers started to use monitoring technology just to keep tabs on their remote workforce force.

What software do companies have at their disposal to track workers?

In general terms, a lot of companies track things like emails, voice and chat records. Managers can tell you how much or how hard you're working using your digital footprint. And even in the office, badges that are Fitted with motion sensors and microphones help bosses track your every move. They know if you're spending, say, long hours alone at your desk or wasting time on too many meetings. But what's really changed is that artificial intelligence can take this a step further. So AI tracks everything from facial expressions, your tone of voice, and even your mood to provide deeper insights. It can look for signs of aggression or even tiredness.

This sounds deeply creepy to me. Why would businesses want to track things like facial expressions or tiredness?

There are plenty of reasons companies might want a lot of this information. So the biggest driver, I'd say, for, say, Finance confirms is compliance. To ensure that their employees aren't sharing sensitive information, banks such as JP Morgan will trawl through calls, chat records, and emails. But they also track how long staff are in the building, how many hours they've worked. Some AI tools will look at whether you have a camera nearby or if you're eating or drinking while working. I spoke to one company called Deep Score, that claims that its face and voice screening tools can establish how trustworthy an employee is. Others, such as Variado, give workers a risk score to determine a worker's security threat to an employer. And Fujitsu, which is a Japanese tech conglomerate, unveiled an AI model in 2020, which measures concentration in employees based on their facial expression. And so the reasons that companies use this will vary from compliance to measuring productivity or employee engagement. Some people use it for health and safety reasons. If you're able to track where your employee is in a building, for example, that could be helpful during an emergency. But critics of surveillance fear that firms can't be trusted with all this data.

How do workers react when they find out that their employer is tracking their facial expressions to determine how trustworthy they are? I can't imagine they'd be too happy about it.

In 2020, a staff backlash at Barclays forced them to scrap software that tracked how employees spent their time at desks. And it also nudged those who spent too long on breaks. There are survey results that showed that only one in four workers think monitoring offers more benefits than downsides. And three in four people viewed facial recognition software as being inappropriate.

And how are lawmakers responding to these concerns?

Legal systems are trying to adjust a law kicked in this month in the state of New York that requires firms to tell staff about any electronic monitoring of their phones, emails, and Internet activity. And Connecticut and Delaware have similar disclosure requirements in Europe, and that includes Britain. Businesses have to prove that monitoring has a legitimate business basis. And I think that the state of California is also considering new privacy laws, but you're going to get many rules emerging. That's unlikely to deter more offices from embracing spying software, but they're likely to alert workers that they might be spied on.

So businesses must think that curtailing workers privacy in this way is worth it.

Well, studies have shown that the trade off isn't always worth it. Research associates monitoring with declines in trust and higher levels of stress, neither of which is conducive to high performance. In one study I looked at of call centers which were early adopters of surveillance tech intensive monitoring contributed to emotional exhaustion, depression and high employee turnover. And in a separate survey I looked at over a third of remote and hybrid workers faced pressure to appear more productive or to work longer hours simply because they were being monitored. About a fifth felt dehumanized and as a result, I think about nearly half pretended to be online and almost a third employed anti surveillance software that's designed to dodge online monitoring. So in a lot of cases, these surveillance products actually risk being counterproductive.

Finally, I have to ask, do you have any idea if the Economist is spying on us?

I'm assured that the Economist has no interest in spying on any of us. But that doesn't mean that they don't.

Have the capacity to Vinjaro, thanks so much for joining us today.

Thanks for having me John.

In these uncertain times, a lot of people would welcome some idea of what their future might hold in Brazil. This search for answers has revitalized the centuries old practice.

Shell throwing is ubiquitous in Brazil.

Giorgio Banjo is a foreign correspondent with the Economist.

Walk around any major city and you will see ads for it plastered onto lamp posts. You'll see diviners peering at shells in shopping malls. So I went to Salvador, which is a city in northeastern Brazil, and I met with a lady called Mai Carmen, who is a well known shell thrower. So we chatted for a bit at her home and then we went into quieter side room where she did a reading for me. We were sitting at a table. My Carmen takes out these 16 little cowrie shells. They look a little bit like coffee beans but they are kind of cream colored and they've got these jagged little teeth. She shakes them a bit, she murmurs these low incantations in Yoruba, which is this West African language and then she casts them onto a board in front of her.

And once they're cast, what can the shells tell you?

So like any oracle, the purpose of shell throwing is to answer the seeker's questions. So a lot of people who Go to have a reading, may have something they're wondering about in their lives. But the kind of unique thing about shell throwing is that the way the shells fall not only tell you the answers to your problems, but diagnose what's causing it and also provide a Solution. With the 16 shells together, that makes around 256 possibilities. Each of these possibilities corresponds to a myth which is related to the orishas, or deities, who are thought to command the shell throwing. And so someone like Mai Carmen, she sees the ways that the shells fall, and then she interprets the myth that it relates to, which in turn gives her a magical prescription. So for me, for example, she thought that I was clashing with Eshu, who is the guardian of communication. So her tip for me was to avoid wearing red on Fridays, which is his holy day, and to not drink any alcohol.

And so the practice, which has its roots in West African religious traditions, is pretty pervasive, right?

Yeah. So to give you two examples, there's two big events which are coming up this year. One is the presidential elections in October, and the other is the football World Cup. And so for both of these events, you can guarantee that people like Mike Harmon will be consulted a lot in the media, on TV shows, in newspapers, and they'll also be consulted a lot by the participants, politicians, sports people, celebrities. But the interesting thing in Brazil is that this forms part of a wider magic economy, which also includes tarot readings and increasingly, astrology. And I spoke to a sociologist at the University of Sao Paulo. He told me that the increased interest in these sorts of magical, divination type activities is that we're living in these times of uncertainty right now. And it makes sense, according to this professor, that they'll be looking to magic to ease those uncertainties.

So the pandemic was good overall for shell throwers.

So if you think about what happened in the pandemic, we saw a lot of society shut down. We saw a lot of people look to the intern, and the same has been true for shell throwing. So there was one website I found where the fortune teller was offering shell throwing online. Gypsy card readings and tarot readings, all as part of the same service for around 100 reai. So that's $20 a pop. But for people like Mike Harman, this sort of development is concerning and something that she is really critical of.

Why is that?

So for people like Mike Harman to become a shell thrower in the Kandombeli tradition, which is the African religion she's part of, you have to train for seven years. So she told me that she thinks it's like training to be a doctor for three days and then dishing out advice on the Internet. It's just not how it was meant to be. But that said, even my Carmen is embracing some of these new techniques. So on New Year's Eve, for example, she will give advice to listeners on radio phone ins and make predictions on YouTube. So although the way that she communicates with the Orishas when she does her readings is the same as it's always been, the way that she communicates those answers to others is now very different from the way it was in the past.

All right, Georgia, this was fascinating. Thank you so much for joining us today.

Thanks so much, John.

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