This is the first in a series of essays adapted from The Centre for Policy Development‘s book More Than Luck: Ideas Australia needs now. Stayed tuned to The Punch this week for more Big Ideas.
What use is politics? It’s a question many Australians began to ask in the lead-up to the 2010 election as the Rudd and then the Gillard government ditched what seemed like a policy a day in a bid to lighten their electoral baggage. It was as if the government stood for nought except getting re-elected. What do we expect our governments to deliver, beyond our narrow self-interest?
Some say we get the governments we deserve. To some extent, this is true. When we stop paying attention to politics, we make it easier for politicians to stop paying attention to us.
Yet it is also true that governments get the citizens they deserve. If politicians treat elections as a marketing campaign instead of a genuine contest of ideas, then they should expect people to shop around for the best deal they can get for themselves.
Last year, both sides of politics were happy to abandon their values and fight on their opponent’s territory, with Labor attacking the Coalition’s parental-leave policy as “a big new tax”, and the Coalition arguing that Labor’s refugee policy is cruel to boat people because it fails to treat them badly enough to discourage them from coming.
But it seems we do expect more from our government than naked electoral self-interest. As The Australian’s George Megalogenis concludes in his recent Quarterly Essay: “Australians elect Labor governments to change things. They never give them large majorities, but they reward them with successive terms if they can look after the heart as well as the hip pocket.”
Past governments – Menzies, Whitlam, Hawke, Keating and Howard – all delivered their own sweeping reforms, and staked their political futures on big gambles: policies they believed in so strongly that they were willing to lose office to implement them. It is much harder to discern such beliefs in the cohort of politicians currently in Parliament.
What exactly is this government prepared to fight for? Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Fear dominates when there isn’t a compelling positive vision to advance. Despite, or perhaps because of this, neither major party was telling a positive story last year. In the absence of political courage, it often seemed as though key decisions were made chiefly in response to focus groups and opinion polls.
But the present stasis isn’t simply the product of weak leadership or cynical populism from those at the top of the political food chain. The current Labor government is a symptom of a broader political system that no longer seems to know or care what issues are important, even crucial, let alone how to begin to address them. Modern politics is a system bogged down in its own culture.
Australia’s media is not serving us any better. Politics is usually reported as though it is a horse race. Journalism lives for the leadership contest and little else. The political demands of a twenty-four-hour news cycle, where issues rarely get more than three days’ sustained coverage, combine with opinion polls which rarely delve into voters’ deeper or longer-term aspirations. The result is a system that resembles a hall of mirrors. Whichever direction our political leaders look, they see infinite images of themselves, reflected back into infinity.
In short, despite all the talk about the “new paradigm”, “politics-as-usual” is everywhere.
These are unusual times. Our planet is reaching its environmental limits and approaching critical tipping points. The global economy remains unstable and deeply unequal. Shortages of energy, food and water loom just over the horizon. Our cities appear sclerotic and overloaded. Such times call for leaders able to rise above the mire of politics-as-usual, and make innovative, bold decisions.
Almost fifty years ago, in The Lucky Country, Donald Horne wrote that Australia was a second-rate country living on its luck. Primary industry had sustained a fundamentally weak economy and a weak leadership class. A decade into the most recent mining boom, the same can be said today. We must consider whether we can continue to coast along, or whether we should make the changes needed to regard ourselves not only a “lucky country,” but a country run by people who know how to make the luck last.
Unlike the goldfish who swim in the glass bowls of government media centres, most citizens can see beyond the election cycle to dream of what life will be like for our friends, our families, and ourselves in fifty years’ time.
More and more ordinary Australians are realising that business as usual won’t cut it anymore. In areas like urban infrastructure, electricity generation, or the dominance of men in our corporate board rooms, Australia is pursuing policies designed for a world that no longer exists: a world of cheap oil, or endless credit, or single-income families, or a climate that will remain stable forever. In some areas of Australian public policy, like our love affair with suburban freeways, or our workplaces’ attitudes to child-bearing, we have barely changed course in two generations.
But it’s not enough to point fingers and complain about what we don’t like. We also need to map a viable path to the future we want. To begin to map out a new political agenda for Australia requires at least two things. First, we need a conceptual framework in which to think through what is new about the world we live in, and what that means. Second, we need to find our way past the obstacles to change.
In this series, based on the Centre for Policy Development’s recent publication More Than Luck: Ideas Australia Needs Now, the authors consider how we might do politics differently - where both big and small ideas add to a much needed new narrative about the future given the failures of the recent past.
Kate Gauthier tackles the challenge politicians face of gaining community support for humane policies for asylum seekers. Jennifer Doggett argues for a sharper focus on addressing the issues which matter most to consumers: out-of-pocket expenses, co-payments and unequal access to health-care providers. Ben Eltham says we must move beyond the ‘funding paradigm’ if we are to have more than a fragmented cultural policy. Chris Bonnor challenges the market principles dominating current schools funding and argues that the ability for schools to pick and choose students is creating a social and academic apartheid.
The series presents ideas for citizens who want to see fundamental changes. It’s a to-do-list for politicians who want to look beyond the next poll or the next election cycle. It’s a must-read for anyone who thinks we need to tackle the future before it tackles us.
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