The Inspector-General of Misconception (12 page)

In his book,
The Textbook of Wisdom
, Edward de Bono says one thing which we feel resonates with the contemporary condition: ‘In legislative assemblies the opposition feels obliged to give the impression that what government does is stupid, unfair and possibly corrupt. The governing party does the same to the opposition. Increasingly the public does not go along with the childish game.'

Nor do we at the Office of the Inspector-General.

It befalls us then to investigate the future of party politics – or ‘tribal politics' – in Australia.

First: It has become ritualistic for the incoming Prime Minister to pledge that, regardless of his party allegiances, he ‘will govern for all Australians' (we are unable to establish which Prime Minister first said this).

This pledge is seen as a ‘higher political sentiment' which Prime Ministers intuitively feel will resonate with Australians.

The critical thing is that we have moved away from having two major political parties representing radically different views of the way the society should be organised.

The ending of the Cold War was not only an international relations issue, it also formally ended a long debate within some of the Western domestic political systems.

This has led to an evaporation of partisanship based on this old division; although the major parties, still caught in the old-fashioned partisan politics, still try to strut and pretend that they are distinctive and inherently different.

But there is still much energy and resources expended in a silly ‘selling' and ‘packaging' of the parties, almost as sporting teams or commodities, with barracking slogans and supporters' tee-shirts.

We agree with de Bono that this increasingly goes against the public grain and is seen as a form of nonsense and wasteful posturing.

The reality is that the Labor Party is not the party of 1930 or 1940 or 1960 or 1972.

It is not proposing a distinctly different society or a differently organised economy.

The Liberal Party is not pursuing the same policies as its founders in 1944.

And for this reason, Old Lefties bemoan the similarity of the parties. It is not to be bemoaned or applauded. It is a fact of Western life.

Parties actually ‘accuse' each other of ‘stealing' their policies, as if this is evidence of some sort of deficiency.

The parties are now ‘management teams' and the party which goes to an election with its opinion poll-based policies and leadership personnel often has little connection with the party of the same name which contested the last election.

This makes the act of voting a more subtle and perhaps more demanding exercise.

Both the inherent similarity of the parties and the falsified ‘difference' is extraordinarily demonstrated by the crazy controversy over a tax on goods and services, the GST.

The Labor Party originally proposed this and it was bitterly opposed by the Liberal Party and the Labor Party abandoned it. The Liberal Party then took it up and the Labor Party bitterly opposed it, and the Liberal Party dropped it after losing an election because of it.

And then in the year 2000, the Liberal Party introduced it.

Each time the GST arose, it was treated as a life-and-death issue of ideological significance by both parties. It is not. It is a fiscal tool used by most governments.

There are now no eternally true and dominant core ‘party values' (if there ever were such things) which would lead us to predict which way the parties would vote on any given contemporary issue.

Many members of parliament would be hard-pressed to state what their party position would be on a set of hypothetical questions about immigration, the environment, the armed services, the re-organisation of welfare services, foreign aid, and so on.

Nor is a person's position in the workforce any guide to how they might feel about nine out of ten issues (if it ever was).

At this point, we could now run a reader quiz with the answers to the questions printed upside down at the end of this chapter but we feel that is beneath us.

To refresh our memories.

The Thatcheresque deregulation of the economy and dismantling of the more pernicious aspects of trade union power came from?

Answer: The Hawke and Keating Labor Party.

Significantly increased emphasis on the role and public funding of the arts in Australian society came from?

Answer: Gorton's Liberal government. Gorton set up the Commonwealth arts funding organisation now known as the Australia Council and introduced public funding of the film industry. Whitlam followed.

Which government established SBS?

The Fraser Liberal government.

Who supports the independence of the ABC?

The Friends of the ABC in 1988 stated that the Labor administration was a greater threat to ABC independence than the Fraser Liberal coalition government.

When in power, both parties have appointed their supporters to the Board.

The breaking of the power of unions and the use of the military to do it?

The Labor Party – under Chifley and under Hawke.

And the two dramatic interferences in the free market and commercial life – the bans on cigarette advertising
and warnings on packets and the restrictions on the trade in guns – came from the Liberal Party.

The old anti-Asian White Australia Policy originally came from? The Labor Party – but was supported by all parties up to the late sixties.

It was effectively abolished by?

The Liberal government in 1966 with the Labor Party immigration policy unwillingly trailing behind.

It was a Liberal government which in 1967 finally ended legal and franchise discrimination against Aborigines.

The first significant move towards free trade, traditionally seen as ‘anti-worker' was Whitlam's Labor government's reduction of all tariffs by twenty-five percent in 1973.

The first environmental protection authority was set up by a Liberal government.

The Woomera missile base was established by a Labor government.

The first parliamentary move towards decriminalising homosexuality was made by a Liberal member of parliament.

The Liberal coalition may have committed Australia militarily in Vietnam but a Labor government committed Australia militarily in Malaya (albeit with resistance).

Civil liberties? The most important attempt at political suppression in Australian history? The Liberal government's Communist Party Dissolution Act (1951), a party proclaiming British democratic values. But the suppression was supported by the ALP and most of the
trade union movement. And the Labor government prosecuted the chair of the Communist Party for sedition. Sharkey was gaoled for three years by a Labor government.

Pharmaceutical and medical benefits paid by the government? Liberal Party.

Compulsory military service? First introduced by Labor in 1911 and reintroduced by the conservative government in 1939 and in 1964.

Labor established ASIO in 1949.

Equal pay for men and women came in under a Liberal government.

Closer ties with Asia and the Pacific was first seriously stated not by Keating but by Liberal Prime Minister, Robert Gordon Menzies in 1939, the important Near North speech: ‘What Britain calls the Far East is to us the near north … I look forward to the day when we will have a concert of Pacific powers … This means increased diplomatic contact between ourselves, the United States, China and Japan … and the other countries which fringe the Pacific …'

This became concrete policy with the Colombo Plan in 1950 which provided massive economic and educational aid to South East Asia – a Liberal government initiative and one of the first experiments with multi-national aid (and which placed Australia in fourth place in foreign aid expenditure; it
slipped
from this position under Whitlam).

We could go on and on. For some time now on many issues, party has been no guide to policy. For a long time,
it has been little guide on significant issues. We just pretended that it was.

And now ‘Liberal (or Labor) for life' is true for fewer and fewer voters.

This is shown by the number of voters who do not make up their mind until the end of the election campaign – about thirty percent. The other survey figure which is growing is that of those dissatisfied with both the mainstream parties.

More and more, people see the conflicts between the parties in parliament as false, party-tied conflicts with artificially generated heat.

For good or for ill, the Senate has become a second chamber of smaller parties not represented in the House of Representatives. It is no longer the chamber which sees as its role the protection of the interests of the states.

It is also a seriously undemocratic chamber with all states having an equal number of senators regardless of their population size.

This means increased negotiation by the government with the Senate parties controlling the Senate to get their legislation through.

This negotiation in the Senate has resulted in very few bills presented by the last Howard government being contested when it came to the vote in the Senate. It was all pre-negotiated.

And it is unlikely that any single party will ever control the Senate again.

At its heart, most of the contemporary political arguments are not about ideology or ‘values' but about tools
for achieving an agreed tangible result – for example, a fall in unemployment.

Let there be quarrels. As a British Prime Minister, Arthur Balfour, once said, the political arrangement of democratic parliaments ‘is in order that we may quarrel'.

And there can be disagreements on judgement of the effectiveness of a policy or unfairness of impact.

And there will always be irreconcilables in all conflicts of interest.

The method of reconciling differences is by increasing the flow of data about the problem.

So governments use official inquiries, research projects, overseas fact-finding missions, surveys, and the upgraded resources of the Bureau of Statistics and Parliamentary Library to throw information at the problem.

The future is with these information-based processes along with controlled experiments in social policy. The federal system is useful for experimentation. Something can be tried in one state before it is implemented elsewhere.

Very few governments can now ‘know' the answers by simply consulting their core values or party traditions.

No one ‘knows what to do' with any certainty on any major issue. It is embarrassing to see politicians pretending to certainty on say, ways of reducing unemployment or drugs policy or on welfare policy.

And how do we decide now where we stand in any great dispute? On what do we now base our political positions?

We authorise the search for a new political rationale
for Australia. Why is it that the country often divides about fifty/fifty or sixty/forty on major issues? Is this a hangover from tribal politics or does it demonstrate that there are only two inherent ‘political temperaments' in this country?

Norway has eight parties represented in its parliament with the highest percentage gained by any one party being about twenty-five percent.

The future role of politicians will be to contribute to a mood of reasoned discourse not of bi-polar conformity (characterised by the old party system); of
informed negotiation
both within parliament and with the nation.

Imagine this.

In 1939, a former Australian Prime Minister, Stanley Bruce (our eighth Prime Minister) was invited by the ailing Prime Minister Joseph Lyons (our tenth) and by the leader of the Country Party, Earle Page (briefly our eleventh), to come back to politics as Prime Minister.

Bruce said that he would.

But he placed a condition. He would return as Prime Minister only if he was not required to belong to any political party.

Bruce was one of our best-educated prime ministers and politically experienced. His attitude to political parties was certainly startling, but in the traditions of Australian political leadership, it was not aberrant.

As it was, Bruce did not become our first non-partisan PM but it was not because of his laid-down condition – other things blocked it.

There had always been an approach to the role of
Prime Minister (and to the premierships in the states) which was non-partisan.

As our second Prime Minister, Alfred Deakin (and he was to be PM two more times) often said, ‘policy before party'.

George Reid (our fourth PM) said outright of his party colleagues: ‘… I have a strong disposition to support them when I believe them to be right, but … I feel under no obligation whatever to support them when I think them in the wrong.'

The PM is the most powerful person in the country, whose power, if he controls both houses of parliament, is virtually unlimited (within the constraints of a liberal democracy).

In fact, William Hughes (our seventh), when challenged after buying a fleet of ships without consulting parliament said, ‘my fountain pen is the constitution'.

And in the heady days of the new Whitlam (our twenty-first) government in 1972, newspapers each day carried a box outlining dramatic changes of policy on the front page headlined, ‘What the Government Did Today'. Daily, Gough Whitlam and his deputy, Lance Barnard, would make important decisions without referring to parliament.

On close examination, the Prime Ministership is a strange animal with three natures.

Firstly, the PM is the
leader of the party in power.

But many have chosen to shrug free of this narrow role to take on the mantle of
Leader of the Nation
as they become aware of the aura and potency of ‘the office'.

As has been noted, on election nights, we have PMs making the solemn pledge: ‘I will govern for all Australians.'

Traditionally, at times of war, of national crises, at times of national tragedies, and even at times of sporting victory and defeat, the electorate expects the Prime Minister to put aside his party affiliation and to somehow represent and express the feelings of ‘the nation'; the polity.

When travelling abroad, the Prime Minister very much becomes the Leader of the Nation and is watched closely by the media and people back home for embarrassments and stumbling (especially physical stumbles).

If the PM does something embarrassing, the nation is embarrassed. If he trips, we all trip.

And, finally, there is another role inherent in the office of Prime Minister – that of representing not only the
living nation
but also all who have lived in the nation from its inception; and in Australia's case, the people who lived here before the nation was formed, which now, in political consciousness, at last, includes the indigenous peoples.

The PM represents that
national ethos
(which is not a fixed thing; the values and emphases within it are rearranged constantly).

This more ornate Prime Ministership role comes in part from the demands which people make on the role of PM. In a way, the electorate defines the role (although the position and role of Prime Minister is not mentioned or defined in the constitution).

And it is this
representative of the ethos
role which causes
some groups to ask our current Prime Minister, John Howard, (our twenty-fifth) to apologise to the Aboriginal peoples for past wrongs. To speak on behalf of the
nation's past.

The PM already does this on certain public occasions when he is expected to praise the first settlers for their tenacity and endurance; the explorers for their opening of the continent; the Anzacs for their bravery (and implicit in this ceremonial praise, is the taking on of this heritage as part of ourselves).

And it follows that it is possible to condemn the behaviour of the past as well, and to apologise for the past.

There have been examples of the non-partisan role of PM in recent political history.

The joint sitting of the parliament on racism convened by John Howard and its all-party resolution against racism was an example of the national leadership role.

So were the gun laws which John Howard pushed through the federal parliament and on to the states.

The convening by Robert Hawke (our twenty-third) of non-partisan ‘summits' on national issues was another example of the extended national leadership role of the PM.

These examples and others like them stand out as exceptional but could be seen as a pointer to the evolution of the office and, at the same time, oddly, a harkening back to the earlier days of federal government.

It is possible that the role of the Australian Prime Minister could be redefined back to what it was before ideological differences arose in the country; that is, before
the socialism versus capitalism argument (although we are suffering a long hangover from that debate which still corrupts the civic discourse).

It takes us back to before the existence of a tight party system.

The parties, historically, despite their posturing, have never been that far apart in reality, and their policies and their behaviour were rarely predictable from the party platform.

It has always been more accurate to label a government not by the party name but by the name of the PM – ‘The Whitlam government', the ‘Keating government', ‘the Howard government'.

The early Prime Ministers of Australia were praised for what we would call ‘conflict resolution' skills and their talents for innovative leadership.

During the Depression, Lyons and three others defected from the Labor Party in response to the Leader of the Opposition, John Latham's, call for bi-partisan government to cope with the economic crisis.

Lyons tried for bi-partisan government but Labor Party suspicions and rancour frustrated this attempt.

Lyons and others then formed a new party, the United Australia Party with Lyons as PM.

Now, with the slow evaporation of ideological conflict, there is an absence of significant disagreement among the parties as to the nature of the economy and the society.

All parties believe that a market economy needs supervision in areas of environment, working conditions,
safety, urban planning, pricing and competition, oversight, corruption, and ‘national interest'.

It is true that some people still see the parties as clans to which they must stick for life and for which we should be prepared to die – intellectually, at least – on the electoral battlefields.

But, we suspect that along with the evolution of the Prime Ministership, parliament will change to being a more fluid political arena – that there will be more non-partisan bills, more referendums, more ‘free votes' in parliament, more crossing of the floor, more abstentions, and more private member bills.

Work occurs in committees and inquiries.

Government will become more the politics of negotiated compromise or approximate consensus led by the PM.

After all, most of the great issues during the life of a government arise after election and are not foreseen – the stolen children, gun laws, the East Timor crisis, the New Guinea crisis, the falling dollar, who comes into this country or doesn't, Pauline Hanson's rise, whatever.

Most parties do not have thought-out policy or basic philosophy to meet these issues and nor are the answers to be found in their party handbook or in their ‘hallowed' party traditions (which, anyhow, are usually rewritten to meet the issues of the day).

Nor do voters have philosophies which give them push-button answers to political issues.

If freed more from party constraint, the parliament would display a more accurate and flexible picture of the
true preferences of members of parliament and their electorates than do their party affiliations. The American system is more flexible about party allegiances. Both Republicans and Democrats in both the Senate and the House of Representatives frequently vote with the other party.

And there is a need for a new style of political opposition which goes beyond the debased idea of high school debating which characterises our politics now.

High school debating has done much damage. It is training people in talking to
win
not to share, investigate, or negotiate.

It would be one which has more understanding of the fog of government, will have a more sophisticated appreciation of human error and of the limitations of governmental intervention.

The new opposition will form from those showing creativity and lateral thinking on social and international problems and it will develop a new repertoire of intellectual exchange with, hopefully, an abatement of political piety.

We sense that we are slowly breaking out of the safety of the old bonding clichés and curses (while all conversational networks need bonding clichés let's find some that are intellectually more respectable). Much of our demonology is stale.

We suspect that this new opposition will take very little from the heritage of the Western Left.

And who knows? We may see the idea of cabinets elected by the parliament-at-large or chosen by a
dominant group from the parliament-at-large (as happened in earlier state parliaments).

So cabinet selection would be based on talent not on party.

At the time of Federation, this idea of parliament-elected ministries had much support.

Although the American government is a different system, President Bush has a Democrat in his Republican cabinet.

We don't pretend that this style of government would be all sweetness and light. As Samuel Butler said in
The Way of All Flesh
(1903), ‘it is reasonable not to expect too much reason'.

It could be a messier way of running government but it could also be a truer reflection of the state of opinion, come up with more creative solutions, be more open to reasoned negotiation (and, yes, yes, of course, at times open to unreasoned and venial negotiation also).

We do not see the new style of government and Prime Ministership as being ‘presidential' or ‘dictatorial' – it is something distinctive which lies latent in the nature and history of our governmental system and is inherent in the art and mystique of Prime Ministership.

And it is not going to happen overnight (or is it?!). But the next generation of political leadership will increasingly have to face an urge for more non-partisan politics. (Already the Labor Party is beginning to detach itself from the trade union movement.)

We would have loose ‘parties' as major issues arose, more networks than parties.

A Prediction:
It is our hunch that the first Prime Minister who transforms the election night covenant to ‘govern for all Australians' into a non-partisan and negotiated agenda will find a special kind of power, approval, and charisma in this changing Australian electorate.