A new election will cost the taxpayers about $170 million. It’s a small price to pay for stability, which is something neither side will be able to deliver as a result of the seemingly insurmountable impasse created by Saturday’s mad result.
Governments are meant to operate in the national interest. The biggest worry about the current deadlock is that any balanced sense of national priorities will be compromised, as the party which forms government evaluates every major policy on the basis of what’s in it for Tamworth, Port Macquarie and whichever part of the planet Bob Katter hails from.
The last time we saw this distortion of public policy was in the late 1990s when Independent Senator Brian Harradine held the balance of power, and his home state of Tasmania was showered with extravagant telecommunications riches by the Coalition to buy his support for the Telstra sale.
Both Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor are level-headed men, decent and competent politicians, and would do a better job inside Cabinet than many of the people either side could serve up.
But even so, should we risk sidelining or subjugating the interests of voters in 150 electorates to a trio of men representing just three electorates?
And when the third MP in this triumvirate is Bob Katter, it becomes a more troubling proposition, as his rhetoric over the past few days has been framed around a totally unjustified sense of betrayal where he’s accusing city people of callous indifference to the plight of rural communities.
Both Windsor and Oakeshott have said that they will not use the whip-hand they now enjoy through an accident of democracy to extort benefits for their electorates at the expense of the nation. Their track record in politics, firstly at the NSW state level in the 1990s and now at the federal level, suggests that they can be taken at their word.
It matters less what they say than what the major parties do in order to attract their support. Things are so desperate on the Labor and Coalition side that all sorts of inducements will be thrown around.
Oakeshott has displayed an infectious brand of optimism by proposing “a new politics” and has made some compelling points about how so much important parliamentary committee work, and the thoughtful proposals from major policy exercises such as Ken Henry’s tax review, are often crushed by machine politics and poll-driven short term political expediency. But his proposal for some kind of government of national unity, possibly with ministers drawn from across the parties, is totally unworkable, although it did at least give us all a laugh at hearing Tony Abbott talking up the prospect of “a kinder gentler polity”.
But the biggest problem is Katter. The former Howard Government minister has made it clear that it’s his explicit intention to massively redirect the efforts and energy of Canberra towards rural Queensland and, presumably, the rest of the bush.
He bases this on a very hostile and unfounded sense of persecution. This old-school agrarian socialist appears blissfully ignorant of the billions that are spent on rural assistance, on adjustment packages for industry sectors such as sugar or dairy which have been affected by liberalised trade arrangements or competition policy. He even makes the fanciful and baseless claim that city people and the city media doesn’t care about issues such as rural suicide, ignoring the fact that when the drought was at its worst city people gave millions through the media-led Farmhand campaign to reach out to rural communities, aside what they do already through their taxes.
He also epitomises the unrealistic rural conviction that it’s the job of government not only to support good businesses, but to underwrite businesses which are plainly unviable. No-one whose small business goes south in the city gets any government assistance; yet the Katter view of the world is that if you choose out of a sense of tradition or familial loyalty to grow things in a place which has always been marginal, the state should save you from your own misfortune or lack of sense.
Katter made it clear in his statement on Sunday that he wants to massively shift the focus of Canberra. He said it’s “not payback time but pay-up time”, suggesting that in this overwhelmingly coastal, city-dwelling nation of ours that the suburbs have had it too good for too long.
He’s mused about how it’s no longer even legal to “boil the billy” in this country, suggesting a warped sense of what constitutes our national identity, with putting jumbucks in the tucker bag no doubt next on the politically correct list of forbidden activities.
His stroppy remarks on 3AW made plain how his sense of persecution would determine which party he supported, on the basis of what they’d do for his seat.
I’ve made my position perfectly clear 400 times, so for the 400th time i said if it’s up to me personally, as far as I’m personally concerned, I would give the gong to whoever gives us the right to survive. We haven’t enjoyed that right for 25 years. All we’ve ever seen is our businesses going down, down, down, our farmers just collapsing completely…these are not just figures plucked out of the air, concepts plucked out of the air, I can give you the actual figures, that’s why I’m carrying this briefcase around with me everywhere, i can give you the actual figures. No you listen to me because we have had it up to here with the media, you people have given a run to every single idea known to man, except us. And we got to a stage under successive governments where every four days a farmer in Australia was committing suicide. Did you ever give us a run? No. Now that we’ve got a bit of power you’ll be listening to us, my friend, not dictating to us. I just got 74-75 % of the vote, right? I think there’s a bit of trust there. And I’ve lived with them all my life with my daddy and my granddaddy before that and I would like to think I know a little bit of what’s going on there.
In this election 85 per cent of the country voted for either of the two major parties. Rather than reflecting the will of the majority we now risk government by the few, flimsy and unsustainable government where the interests and appetites of three men who represent 300,000 people will inordinately influence the lives of 21 million. The fact that one of these men is waging some fanciful war in his own mind on the big cities of Australia is reason enough to go straight back to the polls.
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