The State of Australian Politics

[Rorschach]

Politics is failing us, but we can fix it
Date January 22, 2015 - 2:02PM
Stephanie Peatling
Senior writer

Australia, we need to talk about politics.

More to the point, we need to talk about the way we talk about politics.

The problems we face are big and they are going to require compromise.

We need to talk about some big things and then we need to do them.

We need to use large words, exercise our brains, talk about what is best for ourselves as individuals, couples, families, employees, employers, retirees, welfare recipients and for the future of the country.

Money is going out faster than it's coming in, more people are getting older and leaving the workforce, there are greater demands on our health and education systems and climate change looms over us all.

But we seem unable to talk about these things and how we should best deal with them in an effective way.

We have a government that announces big reforms but is unable to explain why they are needed and then stumbles to reach consensus with the groups and people necessary to make changes.

Reforms are ditched and other parties blamed, leaving us wondering whether the changes were necessary in the first place.

We have an opposition coasting along offering little in the way of alternatives other than a blunt "No".

We have minor parties and independents trying to judge each and every piece of legislation as well as raise new ideas and issues but getting blamed when they do not support either of the major parties.

We have a media that operates so rapaciously and quickly that a story can be covered, reported and archived within hours. We blame them for giving us too many sugar hits and not enough fibre but we take the treats every time.

We have a community worried about the future but cynical about the political process. It is easier to cast a protest vote in the Senate or sign an online petition and then blame the politicians for not listening.

It has become fashionable to say that politics is broken, that "the system" is letting us down.

But I'm not sure this is the case.

Representative democracy is working just fine. We have regular, peaceful elections where the will of the people is expressed without bloodshed.

Have we gotten to the point where we, all of us, take it for granted?

We do not need to fight for our right to vote or to have our say.

But the problems we face are big and they are going to require compromise, that each of us give up something in order to get something back or just to get something done.

Revenue shortfalls, the taxation system, the cost of a universal health and education system, welfare, climate change – no one, no one interest, no one party is going to get exactly what it wants.

Instead of walking away could we not look for a better way to talk about, debate and solve these problems?

At the very least could we make a genuine attempt to reach solutions rather than one side of politics asserting its views, the other side saying no and everything grinding to a halt.

I'm a policy wonk, I like data and there's not enough of it about at the moment.

If we are to have conversations about whether to raise or widen the GST then let's first see the data to show how that would affect people, how much revenue it could raise and then decide whether changing it would be a good idea.

What about Medicare and the higher education system? There's a lot of talk of both being unsustainable.

But are they? And what does unsustainable mean? Just too expensive or worth having but with the understanding the money must come from somewhere?

Maybe allowing universities to set their own fees would be a good idea but it's hard to say when very few of them will say what fees under a deregulated system would look like.

It's difficult to expect people to consider an idea if you can't or won't tell them what it will cost them.

It's difficult to expect people to find politics interesting when it feels like much of the time it is an argument about tactics or one side simply saying no to an idea.

Just the other day President Barack Obama was talking about the same thing.

"Imagine if we broke out of these tired old patterns," President Obama said in his State of the Union address.

"Imagine if we did something different. Understand – a better politics isn't one where Democrats abandon their agenda or Republicans simply embrace mine."

"A better politics is one where we appeal to each other's basic decency instead of our basest fears. A better politics is one where we debate without demonising each other; where we talk issues and values and principles and facts rather than 'gotcha' moments or trivial gaffes or fake controversies that have nothing to do with people's daily lives."

Is it too much to ask that we all do a little bit better this year?

[mantra]

A good article, but the author is dreaming if she thinks that anything is going to change. The masses thrive on gossip and the social media draws them in like flies.

We have a government that announces big reforms but is unable to explain why they are needed and then stumbles to reach consensus with the groups and people necessary to make changes.

Reforms are ditched and other parties blamed, leaving us wondering whether the changes were necessary in the first place.

We have an opposition coasting along offering little in the way of alternatives other than a blunt "No".

Exactly right. Those who do care about how effective a government should be are completely disillusioned. There are some good things about this government, but they don't outweigh their failures. The opposition is a bleak prospect too.

[Rorschach]

I have no idea why you like putting down your fellow Australians all the time mantra.
Since the Australian MSM is largely LW Prog in mindset you also seem to think they control the "masses".
I would like to think that like me most Australians are capable and do make their own minds up based on experience and facts.

Personally I give my fellow Australians the benefit of the doubt and hope most of them make thinking choices and are not as you seem to think merely mindless sheep.

[mantra]

Debating anything with you is totally pointless. I'm wrong whether I agree or disagree with you or one of your articles. You are better off just talking to yourself here.

[Black Orchid]

The trouble is that most Australians ARE sheep and will stick with their party no matter what.

Continually voting in Bob Carr as Premier of NSW when there was so much dissatisfaction in his performance is a case in point.

[Rorschach]

Debating anything with you is totally pointless. I'm wrong whether I agree or disagree with you or one of your articles. You are better off just talking to yourself here.

Don't like the truth? Don't post... but don't waste my time replying to whining crap ok.
Hard to agree or disagree or agree with me since I haven't made a comment on the article yet mantra. As for the article you hardly commented on it.

[Black Orchid]

Where's the naughty corner?

[Rorschach]

Oh and BTW 60% of voters are basically tribal here. That leave 40% that are not.
That's a majority.

[Rorschach]

This speaks as much about Australian Politics today as it does about Abbott and the current situation.

Abbott's choice: change or face the axe
Date January 30, 2015 - 9:47AM
Mark Kenny
Chief political correspondent

It is startling that the Abbott government, which has styled itself in contradistinction to the Labor mess, has succumbed to some of the same problems.

There's a reason that the time-honoured Westminster conventions around parliamentary representation, cabinet decision making, and ministerial responsibility came to be: they work.

Yet time and again, in the era of professionalised and presidentialised politics, these protective conventions are being observed only in the breach. Leaders, in the interests of presenting as strong, decisive and beholden to no one, are given their heads by their parties – like CEOs brought in by desperate boards to rescue failing companies.

Cabinet and party rooms are relegated. Election campaign strategies de-emphasise parties and focus mainly on the leader. The line between politics and celebrity is deliberately blurred as the ad men assume primacy over MPs and party members. Leadership is personified. Professional pollsters, tacticians, and political spinners dictate the message. The dignity of elected office is eroded as backbench MPs and even ministers are reduced to mere numbers. Winning becomes the only goal, the only metric. The everything.

The longer-term result is invariably bad, as Tony Abbott and his now bewildered colleagues are discovering. Yet they might as well look to themselves, for just as Abbott's chief of staff Peta Credlin has been granted too much power by her boss, the Cabinet has ceded too much power to Abbott. One automatically flows from the other. In a succession of dud decisions, their PM's gone quietly rogue, unburdened by the normal checks against gross error built into the system.

As he lurches from one captain's pick to another, they lament his poor judgment, his tin ear. Prime ministerial apologies stack up, as do promises to consult more. But structurally, little changes.

We've been here before.

Remember when Kevin Rudd was rampaging towards the Lodge through 2007? It seemed nothing could stop him. John Howard certainly tried, shovelling money at voters while embracing everything from an emissions trading scheme to what some dubbed his "Vaseline moment". This was the grudging restoration of a safety net in his beloved WorkChoices, or, as one wag quipped at the time, the moment when the government acknowledged what its industrial-relations system had been doing to workers.

Howard's loss of composure was being matched on the Labor side by an adolescent anticipation of victory. After nearly a dozen years shouting in the wilderness, they'd opted for an outsider few Caucus members knew well and even fewer liked. He offered a path to the promised land and there was almost nothing they would not do to ensure they got there.

Which was why, as the election neared, they even ceded to him the power to choose his frontbench – a sacred Caucus right jealously defended since 1905 – just so he could say he answered to no union or factional powers. This never-embarrass-the-leader mindset streamlined Labor's campaign and characterised the entire Rudd government. Initially it worked well. It was also perhaps the single most critical factor in the explosive downfall of first Rudd and then the whole Labor edifice.

Internal frustration that the Rudd administration was an idiosyncratic show that had sidelined cabinet turned out to be volcanic. In the pyroclastic avalanche of truth that followed his removal, we learned how much power had been aggregated in the prime minister's hands. And we also learned that Rudd's power over his ministers was such that not a single Cabinet minister had issued the ultimatum to observe cabinet government, or face removal.

The 2010 removal of Rudd was a public-relations disaster for Labor yet it had its wellsprings in the meek surrender of collective decision-making from before he took office.

Coming back to the present day, it is startling that the Abbott government, which has styled itself in contradistinction to the Labor mess, has succumbed to some of the same problems.

Liberals are increasingly identifying that the list of captain's picks is a also a tally of signature government failures. The most prominent of these will finally be put to the sword closer to the budget when Abbott's friendless paid parental leave scheme is subsumed into what is being billed as a comprehensive child-care package. This is a welcome retreat and has been a long time coming. So long that the damage has been done with the $5.5 billion PPL attracting withering contempt from business and neutralising the government's spending restraint message since the budget. Whether it be because of knights and dames, the back and forth over Medicare changes and other broken promises, or allowing his chief of staff to sit in Cabinet and exercise more authority than senior representatives, Abbott's judgment is now a live discussion topic in the party-room.

It would be foolish to underestimate the significance of that development. History shows the judgment question is the most reliable portent of all leadership complaints. According to one Liberal, the only way Abbott can now turn around what some worry is a terminal decline in his leadership, is to go back to proper cabinet government.

Liberals are looking for nothing less than a grand and comprehensive statement. This would include a commitment to no more captain's picks. None. They also say that if they cannot be discontinued, future knights and dames should be selected exclusively by the same honours council that picks the other recipients. And they want the chief of staff's role circumscribed substantially.

The gold standards are Bob Hawke and John Howard. While dominant figures in their own right, both knew how to run a cabinet, and rarely departed from due process. And both lasted a lot longer than any prime minister since. Hardly a coincidence.

Mark Kenny is Fairfax Media's chief political correspondent.

[Rorschach]

Queensland vote: Swinging voters don't like leaders who take them for a ride
Date February 1, 2015 - 4:00PM
Tony Mitchelmore

Forget health and education, forget the national economy or cost of living. What matters now in winning elections is behaviour.

Voters are sick of being misled and lied to, they are sick of politicians governing for themselves.

For a long time now, the strongest theme coming through in political discussions in our research with swinging voters is the distain they have for our politicians, the way they play the game and the way they feel they are treated by them. On Saturday in Queensland they carried those feelings all the way to the ballot box.

Swinging voters relate to politicians in a very human way. No one likes feeling like they have been taken for a ride. Voters resent it and it creates an emotional prejudice against anything politicians try to do or say. They don't see much between them in rational policy terms anyway. Voters think "they are all the same" and many don't believe they can make much of a difference, "so if you cross me it's no big deal to just chuck you out".

Swinging voters have a distrust and personal dislike of Tony Abbott and their resentment over his budget "lies" runs deep – very similar to their feelings about Campbell Newman. The stark reality of the potential of this emotion to override their strong doubts about the Labor Party, the economic mess they are perceived to have got the country in and their dysfunction in government was hammered home in the Queensland result.

Newman's personality and polarising approach defined the political environment in Queensland. He was seen as arrogant and anti-community in his decision-making. They did not feel he had them in mind. All relationships are about power and on Saturday Queensland voters were driven to win that power game and "show him".

The LNP strategy in the back half of last year was to put Newman on ice, to hide him and bring down the political temperature. They did not want him being the story.

The problem is it is hard to hide a leader in an election campaign. Newman was the story day after day. His message that the election was about "his plan for Queensland's future versus Labor's no plan" rang hollow. Communication is largely about perceptions of who is saying it, not what is said. There was a personal prejudice against him. It didn't matter what he said it only hurt more than helped, in the same way it didn't matter what Julia Gillard said, and in the end what Kevin Rudd said.

The Liberals have lost the past three state elections. However, the dynamics in Victoria and South Australia were quite different to the federal scene. The Queensland election was much more of a blueprint of federal politics. An unpopular leader wanting to make unflagged budget cuts, and a recently thrown out Labor Party with very poor economic management and self management credentials. This parallel will deeply worry federal Coalition MPs who are now no doubt even more worried about their own seats, which will heighten their consideration of a change of leader.

The Queensland result also reflected the reality of voters' appetite for budget reform despite the great concern they express about debt. Budget reform is going to be tough in this country. Just like acting on climate change, when the rubber hits the road and middle Australia is asked to pay a personal price that appetite wanes.

Newman was right about one thing. In his concession speech he said "we live in uncertain times". Many Australians are anxious about the future. They see mining waning, feel we can't compete with Asia on manufacturing and understand the budget is broke. They wonder what is going to sustain the country. At a personal level cost of living is a struggle. It is still a highly aspirational country but unlike the buoyant Howard years and pre-GFC Rudd years, many now doubt whether their aspirations will come true.

What the country needs now more than anything is stability and certainty.

However, instead of a solid period of stable government like the Hawke/Keating years and then the Howard years, the recent years of political leadership has only added to uncertainty. The Queensland election showed in the starkest terms that with the mood of voters being what it is, attaining a long, solid, stable period of government in this country is going to be harder than ever.

Tony Mitchelmore is managing director of research company Visibility, and has been a pollster for nine federal and state Labor campaigns.