Utopia suggests a place where all bellies are full and all hearts tended.
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The air is crisp, and clean, and carries the sound of laughter and music.
Each decision is made for all, by all, and is undertaken with a shared belief in the potential for a brighter future. No one is forgotten. No one is silenced. No one is abandoned
But if this was the answer you gave at a trivia night, you'd be shorting yourself a drink voucher.
The definition of utopia is, as any brown-card-carrying trivial pursuit fan will tell you, "no place", literally a place that cannot be. And because it cannot be, we know frighteningly little about how a utopia would function.
We can only imagine how a utopian election would run in a territory where constituents want for naught.
A government that promises, if returned, to change nothing, and an opposition that promises if elected to make the free parking even free-er, to push the crime rate below zero, and to make the flying cars fly even higher.
![Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee. Picture by Keegan Carroll Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee. Picture by Keegan Carroll](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/pMXRnDj3SUU44AkPpn97sC/61d25e78-55e2-4f18-b696-fefb35d00b2f.jpg/r0_256_5000_3078_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
Presented logically, the flaw is apparent.
A utopia cannot be because there is no electorate where the constituents want for naught. No government runs on a platform of preserving the status quo.
Culturally, maybe, but economically the promise is always more. This seems to be what the Liberal Party is relying on in the lead-up to the 2024 Canberra election, when already Elizabeth Lee is hoping enough Canberrans feel they deserve more; and that Andrew Barr's failure to deliver more, has left them abandoned by their government.
In a political sense, the question isn't so much "are there abandoned Canberrans?"
We all know there are. In matters of those genuinely abandoned by the government, there's no reason to be flippant.
You need only look at the unhoused and struggling across Canberra's inner suburbs, or those pushed from social housing into the outer suburbs over the last decade to appreciate that for certain people, more can always be done.
Less confronting but still troubling are the families and young people struggling with uncertain interest rates, an inflated property market, gouging at the grocery checkout, and insufficient public health resources, people who as Lee puts it are "doing it incredibly tough, who are making choices they've never had to make before".
The political sleight of hand involves convincing everyone else, the citizens of utopia, that they are comparably abandoned.
You're promised $100 million will be spent fixing up your suburb, and suddenly you're wondering what needs fixing up? You look out the window of your flying car and start noticing every unfilled pothole.
The comparison between utopia and Canberra (a comparison Rob Sitch and the Working Dog Crew have beaten me to by a decade) might feel extreme.
But from across the nation, former non-Canberrans travel here to enjoy a relatively strong local economy boosted by a low jobless rate, the nation's cheapest consumer energy prices, and a healthy budget for retail goods and hospitality.
![Labor has been in power in the ACT, in some form, since 2001. Andrew Barr is the current leader. Picture by Karleen Minney Labor has been in power in the ACT, in some form, since 2001. Andrew Barr is the current leader. Picture by Karleen Minney](/images/transform/v1/crop/frm/pMXRnDj3SUU44AkPpn97sC/e738bb10-849e-4cb5-bfde-e8d011c20f55.jpg/r0_563_5392_3595_w1200_h678_fmax.jpg)
It's a deceptively easy trick to pull off. Most of us have a little voice that whispers "I deserve better than this".
In the lead up to the election, the Liberals have the opportunity to start a dialogue with this voice:
"How can an apparently modern city only have a Northbourne Avenue? Surely, we deserve a Southbourne, Eastbourne, and Westbourne."
"The Kingston Foreshore isn't enough. In four years, my party will deliver a Rearshore as well."
"A Kingsley's Chicken on every corner, a Telsa in every driveway!"
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Oscar Wilde once noted that the mission for more isn't necessarily a bad thing, that "a map of the world that does not include Utopia is not worth even glancing at". That history is progress, and that "progress is the realisation of Utopias".
But the line between decadence and aspiration is a fine one. Lee will win the election if she can convince a voting majority that the incumbent government has abandoned them. Canberra will win if the genuinely abandoned are allowed to share in our utopia.
- Tom Glassey is a Canberra-based writer.