Here’s a simple question in a democracy – if over 80 percent of the electorate support, through a formal vote, candidates who clearly run on a specific policy, what should the new Government’s position be on that policy?
Well according to the Greens – and their cheerleaders such as Deborah Cameron on the ABC – you should first decide whether those candidates were duped by focus groups. When you decide they were – it’s fairly obvious really – you then tell the voters what they really wanted, what deep in their hearts they should believe.
Just on the primary vote, let alone the two-party preferred results, an overwhelming majority of citizens supported candidates committed to off-shore processing of asylum claims.
On ABC 702 Thursday morning, Cameron, calling for bipartisan support of the Greens position, suggested that voters had all been swayed by the politics of fear. The possibility that off-shore processing might by an unpleasant but effective way of reversing the privatisation to criminal traffickers of refugee processing is not one she or her heroes of the ‘new’ politics, the Greens and Independents, will countenance. It’s one thing, however, to disagree on the substance of policy – it’s another to claim as a new virtue an unwillingness to respect the majority vote on such matters.
The problem with the new politics Cameron and others laud, is that the electorate gets policy and resource allocations based not on what was presented to them as platforms at the election, but what comes from post-election deal making.
Of course the Greens and Independents claim their new politics is all about dialogue and transparency. The use of the term ‘transparency’ becomes almost Orwellian at this point. Consider, for example, that while the policies and spending commitments of the major parties were publicly tested before the election, as part of the new politics the policy and spending positions of the Independents are announced after the deal is done and without public scrutiny.
Likewise, the claim that cloaks the Greens and the Independents in apparent moral legitimacy, that citizens are fed-up with parties not willing to listen to the electorate, is forgotten when it comes to forcing on the electorate a policy – rejection of off-shore processing – that was clearly repudiated at an election only completed within the last week!
In a democracy, a minority must work to persuade the majority. They must not seek to manipulate legislative processes lest they provoke an even more intolerant position from the majority.
In this policy matter, those opposed to off-shore processing should develop the following case: the number of refugees the communities across the country can prudently receive, the processing system to deliver that intake in an orderly and responsible way, and the sanction system that will manage illegal trafficking and unauthorised entry over and above that level.
It’s not clear to me that after persuading their fellow citizens that we should, say, double or triple or quadruple our intake, those in favour of greater intakes will end up avoiding the need for a sanction system, and the need for a strategy for people trafficking, including detention centres and ‘market frustration’ measures.
But we are not at the point of testing whether they can cope with this inevitable ‘dirty hands’ dilemma. We are at the point where they have simply failed to carry their fellow citizens in any significant numbers and are attempting to by-pass the obligation to persuade that democracy imposes.
More worryingly, we are at a crucial point where the minority despairs of the majority, seeks to take advantage of a minority government to ignore that majority, and tells the majority to catch up or suck it up. The question is – on how many policy areas in the next term of government will this new politics disregard the hard work and obligations of real world democracy.
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