To rework a line from those garish billboards which make the kids ask embarrassing questions, Australia is suffering from election problems.
The quaint notion that voters get to decide who does or doesn’t run the country has been challenged during the past few shambolic years in Canberra. I know, I know – it’s up to the Caucus to elect a leader from its team of MPs. But there is a widely-held and completely understandable public view that when that leader goes to the polls, and receives a popular mandate, their continuing employment will be decided by a general election, rather than covert conversations by king-makers and trouble-makers.
It’s why the hurdy-gurdy leadership transitions by State Labor governments over the past decade have usually failed. It’s also why federal Labor is in the mess it is currently in. By dumping Rudd in record time back in 2010, the factions and the Caucus failed to realise the extent to which voters would regard their conduct as an act of gross impertinence, an usurping of the power of the popular ballot. It was this act which martyred Kevin Rudd and he has capitalised on his martyrdom ever since.
It has rendered Julia Gillard terminal even if she wins on Monday. If the Caucus doesn’t get her by going for Rudd or another candidate, the voters definitely will after this paralysing, top-shelf chaos.
The chaos has come after an extended period where so many Australian voters have felt disenfranchised. It’s not just because of the perceived impertinence of the 2010 leadership transition. It’s also because of the cursed “victory” of Julia Gillard where by forming minority government with a disparate packet of ratty inner-city Greens and rural independents, so many issues for which the Government has no popular mandate have been foisted onto the national agenda, and pledges have been shredded (none bigger than the carbon tax) to accommodate their demands.
The conduct of these people has often been a genuine affront to democracy. Take Independent MP Rob Oakeshott. In a breathtaking suggestion, Oakeshott has now indicated that despite his previous position that he made a deal with Julia Gillard and would only support her as Prime Minister, he might be prepared to switch to the Coalition, as long as the Party Room agreed first to dump Tony Abbott and install Malcolm Turnbull.
With people such as Oakeshott in Parliament it seems wasteful to have elections at all. Maybe they can just draw up a roster and take turns running the country. Or we can just leave it to some bloke who lives in Port Macquarie to decide not only who forms the Government but to also pick the Leader of the Opposition.
Another undemocratic feature of the way politics has come to be played is the use, or arguably misuse, of the off-the-record convention in political reporting out of Canberra. The accusation against Kevin Rudd – that he has continuously briefed senior editors and senior journalists to destabilise Julia Gillard – has become a major feature of this fight. I am certainly not about to breach any confidences. But I would note that there have been so many published unsourced stories which have been negative towards Gillard’s leadership, and talking up the prospect of Rudd comeback, for which there can only be two explanations.
The first is that every one of these journalists simply made all of them up.
The second is that Kevin Rudd and/or Kevin Rudd supporters brief senior editors and senior journalists.
This is not necessarily a new thing but the scale and ferocity of these types of stories is. Historically the off the record convention, whereby people can talk to reporters with guaranteed anonymity, existed for two reasons. The first was to protect whistle-blowers and other sources from retribution, a la Deep Throat in Watergate, meeting Bob Woodward in an underground carpark to hand on information about the Committee to Re-Elect President Nixon. The other was to add more nuance and context to a story by fleshing out background details around a news event.
The type of stories we have seen about the Labor leadership could be described as dump-and-deny. They have done newspapers damage, with Rudd habitually popping up on the day any anti-Gillard story appears to declare himself a happy little Vegemite, reinforcing the understandable public suspicion that a story containing neither names nor attributed quotes has probably been fabricated by some half-drunk hack in an ash-covered tweed jacket. As the unbridled and open hatred between Rudd and Gillard is now demonstrating, these stories were not even close to being fabrications.
We in the media should reflect on our complicity in this type of journalism. It’s my view that we have not only damaged ourselves, but more gravely we have let down the public by feeding them stories which look thin, tendentious, convey deliberately misleading sentences to blur the origin of the information.
Take Rudd’s press conference on Friday where he flatly denied ever running down Gillard to anyone in the media, then quickly demanded that the assembled media remember and respect the off the record convention.
Why the urgent reminder?
And if he had in fact ever criticised Gillard on background, what does it say about political journalism that we would rather knowingly play along with the bullshit and keep the truth from the public, out of respect for a clubby and highly questionable journalistic convention.
So much of this has been turned into a parlour game for the political class, whereby both politicians and journalists know more than they would ever be prepared to tell a confused, fed-up public which forlornly wants the country to be governed.
In passing, I’d also note that the irony is that a lot of these stories are also so bloody boring that they wouldn’t sell you a newspaper or get you a click anyway. I apologise for adding to your boredom and hope the remainder of your Sunday is free of this political carry-on.
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