Writing in Melbourne’s Herald Sun newspaper earlier this month, second-rate shock jock Tom Elliott bemoaned the troublesome process of democracy, arguing that it would be preferable to “appoint a committee of eminent and competent Australians to sort [society] out. A benign dictatorship if you will.”

While he might be out on something of a limb with his unabashed support for the establishment of a technocratic dictatorship in Australia, he is certainly not alone in expressing a certain authoritarian frustration with the democratic process in response to the Abbott government’s woes.

Even the liberal commentariat frequently bemoan the dilemma facing “reforming” governments. On the one hand, they argue, privatisation, austerity and spending cuts are necessary. But on the other, such policies are so unpopular in the electorate that they render any government that tries to impose them terminally unpopular and potentially unelectable.

Nothing illustrates this as dramatically as Campbell Newman’s humiliating demise in Queensland.

For the loony right from which Elliott hails, the problem stems from the supposed pig-headedness of the public and its refusal to approach the economic problems of government in a responsible and adult manner. Their solution: relieve governments of the obligation to be accountable to the people at all, by scrapping even the minimal concessions to democratic control that characterise most liberal democracies.

For those not yet ready to wholly embrace totalitarianism, the problem is posed as one of incompetent governments unnecessarily botching the job of selling austerity to an unreceptive public, as the Abbott government is widely seen to have done with its unpopular budget.

What both these views have in common is seeing democracy not as a means by which the mass of people can have their views heard and acted on by accountable representatives, but instead a veneer to provide legitimacy and a rubber stamp for the policies required by business and other powerful interests.

If people fail to support voluntarily the agenda of the elite, they must either be cajoled into accepting it or have their limited control over society dispensed with. As the poet and playwright Bertolt Brecht put it in his 1953 poem “The Solution”, written shortly after the 1953 uprising in East Germany: “Wouldn’t it/ Be simpler for the government/ To dissolve the people/ And elect another?”

The idea that no commentator seems prepared to entertain is that austerity simply can’t be sold to a public that has already endured three decades of privatisation, cutbacks and belt tightening, with very little to show for it. Nor that it might be the case that the widespread support for public spending and the welfare state that characterises working class attitudes in Australia is a legitimate sentiment and logical reaction to the experience of neoliberal “reform” at both the state and federal level, under both Labor and Liberal governments.

Those who are sincere about supporting democracy should wake up to the possibility that the bosses’ agenda needs to be questioned, not the resistance to it on the part of the public, nor governments’ inability to peddle it. Democracy is, after all, supposed to be rule by and for the people, not the bludgeoning of the people into accepting yet more neoliberal “reform” by and for the rich and powerful.

That democracy is dispensable in the face of ruling class demands for austerity is not just the stuff of right wing ideologues’ dreams. In Europe – the storm centre of the world economic crisis that began in 2008 – unelected technocrats were appointed in 2011 to “solve” the economic problems plaguing Italy and Greece.

Neoliberal economist Mario Monti took over the prime ministership of Italy without being elected by the parliament or people. In Greece, a former vice president of the European Central Bank, Lucas Papademos, was similarly installed to run the parliament for the bankers.

Australia may not be at that point, but nor were Italy or Greece until relatively recently. Important as parliamentary democracy is to defend in the face of attacks, however, it is not sufficient to guarantee the rights and living standards of workers in the face of austerity today. Pro-austerity governments are prepared to concede to uncooperative populations only for so long, and it remains the case that both major parties of government in Australia are committed to furthering the bosses’ agenda, whatever their cosmetic differences.

Our side needs a fighting, uncompromising and well-organised movement on the streets and in the workplaces. We need a movement that can put the needs and interests of the majority at the centre of politics, and that the rich and powerful cannot ignore or subvert when their authority is challenged. That’s how we’ll defend our rights today, and win real democracy in the future.