Q&A: The Basics’ Kris Schroeder on entering the Victorian election

The newly-registered Basics Rock'N'Roll Party, created by Kris Schroeder and his band mates Wally De Backer (Gotye) and Tim Heath, launched their campaign as part of Melbourne Music Week on November 13 and this Saturday will be included in the Victorian State Election.

The Basics' lead upper-house candidate, bassist Kris Schroeder, chats to TMN about his views on Australia’s political system and the missteps BRRP made along the way, the band’s latest single, and why he’s encouraging voters to vote below the line.

Do you feel ready for the State election this weekend?

No (laughs). I don’t know what to expect. I don’t know what’s going to happen so I’m just going to treat it as a normal day.

Have you called upon anyone in politics to help you along?

We’ve definitely been offered and given a fair bit of advice from speaking to people along the way, but most of it is just opinion. There’s no ‘how-to’ guide for making friends and influencing people. It wasn’t meant to be that way anyway; we’re trying to highlight some issues and instead you get caught up in this circus.

Are you happy with how it’s going given the fact your idea of the system has changed?

I’d definitely like I to be more issues-based. I really abhorred the way that in the democracy we work in – particularly at the moment – it really comes down to preferences. It sullies your message, it sullies your vision, it makes whatever you stand for completely irrelevant, it makes the system very easy to manipulate. The very fact that you can google ‘election Victoria’ and there are plenty of articles from experts – they know the numbers already, they know just from preferences how it’s going to flow. It will end up being another swapping of sides again. Some people might have to be courted as far as making a coalition again. But nothing about it is surprising at all. It just becomes a replica of the time before, and the time before that. It’s just a shame that vision doesn’t count for much when it actually comes down to it.

Is that why BRRP struck a deal with The Sex Party, to skew things in your favour?

So, in the Upper house, there’s eight regions and in each region there’s five seats. Four of them with definitely go Liberal, Labor, Green, and in the last one it was marginally won by the Liberals. In that, there was an opportunity to win that for a progressive party such as The Sex Party so we are using what methods we can to get up, so to speak.

They’re also being preferenced by The Greens, by Labor, there’s a 50/50 chance they’ll get in. If they don’t get in it will probably be People Power Victoria – No Smart Meters or Family First. I mean, it’s a Liberal seat already so it’s not going to change anything hugely, it’ll just be great if we can get a progressive in there to get a fresh thought across.

Why did you choose them over The Greens?
We actually approached The Greens and they said they’d already done the deal with The Sex Party so their advice was to put them third and Sex Party first.

Sex Party had gotten in contact so I met up with them and a good part of what they stood for sort of aligned. I wish that maybe they’d rebranded before the election. They’ve got some good policies and I think that people will just judge them on the name – in a way Basics Rock'N'Roll Party doesn’t really [help either].

In the time between the discussion on your Facebook page that sparked the party’s formation, to now, what have you learned about Australia’s political system?

That people play really dirty. That people’s decisions are mostly driven by fear, and the reason that progress never gets made is because there’s this rhetoric out there that if you vote for a party that isn’t Liberal or Labor then it’s a wasted vote. They’ve managed, over the last century, to manage this falsified left and right ideology whereby people immediately associate Labor with Liberals with the right. Left and right, aside from not really existing in practise, it definitely doesn’t when it comes to these two parties, they definitely are two sides of the same coin. They’ll pull out the same argument: don’t vote for the Greens, it’s a wasted vote and they’re not ready to govern. Yes they are, how would you even know that if they’ve never been given a chance?

Last night I was having a discussion with a group of friends, Wally (De Backer/Gotye) was one of them. It’s a little bit like making a film. Just because you change the director doesn’t mean the director of photography is going to be able to do his job. They’ve got a public service there that’s going to be able to do the books and give advice; the people with the vision at the top that’s what we’re trying to decide. Why not give a progressive party like The Greens, like The Sex Party an opportunity to demonstrate their vision and demonstrate that we don’t have to live in this Liberal-Labor paradigm.

Why has no one else advocated the things in your platform (more funding for Public Transport, the Arts, Education, Renewable Energies & Health) in a way that’s satisfied you?

I don’t think it’s that people haven’t advocated things in a way that hasn’t satisfied us; but you take for instance say the burden of having the name The Greens and advocating for those things under that name and how quickly, as with The Sex Party, people jump to conclusions about how legitimate they are.

We’re essentially advocating for the same thing, so we’re coming from a different angle that reaches out to some people that would otherwise be closed off to that message because of their preconceptions.

You’ve mentioned previously that you’d made a few missteps along the way, what were they exactly?
Being a party for what it is now here, you’re having to be the minster for everything. When you’re interacting with other politicians whose specific portfolio id X, Y and Z, you’re portfolio is A, B, C, D, E, F, G… and they’ve got a team of advisors. Trying to take people on when your knowledge is based around what you know and theirs is based around what they know and their advisors know – you’re judged on the same platform even if you don’t have all those legs up. As far as missteps go it was being able to see what an agenda is and being able top prepare appropriately for it.

Naturally, The Lucky Country is already being called a politically-charged record, is it very indicative of BRRP’s views?

It’s not really so much about politics, it’s about people. It was written 18 months ago even before the federal election. It’s about fear, it’s about how much more self-interested we are as a society these days as opposed to where I was living at the time in Kenya. I guess it’s a bit of a comparative piece and also reflecting on the media that was coming out at that time when Murdoch began churning the propaganda machine. It’s about our expectations as a society, taking things for granted, apathy – basically it’s about that quote. The words of Donald Hornering just as true as they did 50 years ago.

Do you think the BRRP has a fighting chance this weekend?

We’ve been told we don’t but hell, I don’t know, it could come out as a surprise. With the Lower House stuff, apparently – and the Lower House there’s no preference with any deals that they’ve done, it’s just ‘how to vote’ card essentially – I was told yesterday that Labor, Liberals and The Greens are all preferencing us second in Northcote. There might be some freak perfect storm that somehow results in us coming in, I don’t think so though.