In Search of Good Government

by Laura Tingle

  There has been much angst at the blatant recent attempts at political influence by news organisations or individual broadcasters. If there was a deep, deep irony in Malcolm Turnbull’s toppling of Tony Abbott in 2015, however, it was that a tweet in support of Abbott by Rupert Murdoch, and a story about a front-bench reshuffle leaked to News Corp’s Daily Telegraph, which was probably supposed to be helpful to the government, were two of the final straws for Abbott’s prime ministership. They both convinced the plotters that they had to move sooner rather than later.

  I believe that the way the media are losing their memory and no longer providing a reliable contemporary record is more insidiously dangerous for our politics than the attempt by some in the press to become political players.

  There was much that was jingoistic in the coverage of the Crimean War – reports of the Charge of the Light Brigade comes to mind. But the reporting of the suffering of the troops transformed the medical care of armies, and ultimately the work of nursing, as represented by the figure of Florence Nightingale. One wonders whether, in the modern era, the Charge and the Lady with the Lamp might have done no more than briefly flare in the 24-hour news cycle and then vanish. Would the Charge have become famous without footage of it? Would journalists keep on the case of unsanitary conditions in military hospitals?

  Changing technology too often traps the media in the present tense, yet it also provides a new, almost infinite space in which to give readers all the background and context they need to understand events. But for these links to consist of more than just the standard time-lines and quotes will require a memory of what has gone before – not only a memory of events, but also one which tells us how things were once done differently and, as a result, how they might be done differently again.

  Learning to Remember

  Two thousand years ago, Tacitus painted a chilling picture of the transition from the Roman Republic to the Roman Empire. It was chilling because it depicted in just a few phrases how the combination of personal will, the destruction or decline of Rome’s institutions of power, and a population prepared to forget the past and make the most of a new political order cleared the way for a profound transformation of one of the world’s great civilisations.

  We often wonder how societies allow themselves to be led into war or dictatorship. Often such things emerge from other crises and sources of misery. But at some point – as happened to Tacitus’s Romans – it becomes easier to accept the present than to yearn for a past before things went bad. And the present envelops societies all the faster if they don’t understand or remember what has gone before.

  I’m not suggesting for a moment that we are on the edge of such a precipice. But I am pointing out that the institutions which have made Australia’s political system so vibrant and successful have been changing profoundly over the past few decades. These changes include the rise of an unstable executive government (because it has lost the capacity to build institutional memory) at the cost of the parliament (which has also lost its memory as it struggles for relevance); the decline in the influence of the public sector (as a result of a range of forces which have robbed it of much of its institutional memory); the relative rise of the national security establishment (which maintains its influence and its memory); and the transformation of the media into a channel for present-tense information, rather than a reliable repository of the historic record. In the background there has also been a steady nibbling away at our civil rights, as relentless incremental change has left many of us unaware how far the law has moved in the past couple of decades.

  Australia was a pioneer in the ways of politics and governance at the time of federation. We fancied ourselves a workingman’s paradise and valued the power of law and government to shape society through industrial relations and wage-setting, and the protection of particular industries. That gave us a particularly strong set of expectations about the way the country worked, and the role of government in this. But it also gave us, over time, an exceptionally strong set of institutions – from stable government (which at different times has been boringly unadventurous and profoundly innovative) to a vibrant parliament and a public sector made influential by world war and rapid national expansion.

  The past few decades have seen a waning of much of the powerful government influence on our lives. That is not necessarily a bad thing. Nothing I have written here is a nostalgic lament, a plea to go back to the good old days. But with that waning have also gone memories and really deep understandings of how things were done in the past. We have reached the point where there isn’t a widespread recognition of just how much this political amnesia affects what we know and understand about our country, and what has been involved in making it tick.

  We talk endlessly about how Australia needs to lift its game, how things need to change for progress to occur. But the conversation is perpetually narrowed and burdened by being framed as a series of character assessments of our leaders, as if one individual can determine our fate. I argue that the steady decline in our collective institutional memory is having a profound impact on the quality of our political and policy debate. While we talk endlessly about what needs to change, we don’t stop to consider what has already changed and the unintended consequences of this – the shifts in the nature, effectiveness and relative power of our institutions of government.

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  Tony Abbott won office in 2013 on a platform of undoing things: reversing specific measures like the “carbon tax,” but also removing the sense of chaos which voters felt surrounded the Gillard government. Apparently more by accident than design, Abbott then proceeded to do the reverse of everything he had promised: he didn’t keep his word about the budget, and he ran a government which couldn’t persuade voters that it was in control of things. Not only that, voters were alarmed and confused by the person they found occupying the prime minister’s office and the messages that his actions sent out: the flags at press conferences, the knighthoods, the assent to legal racial bigotry.

  More than that, Abbott revealed a surprising lack of political dexterity. He could not adjust his tactics or his thinking to the times. He “closed down” to a binary world of black and white. In political terms, you were either on Team Australia, or not. Well before the events of September 2015, two particular incidents turned the tide irrevocably for the former prime minister. Abbott’s attempt to steamroll his cabinet on stripping citizenship rights from terrorists forced six ministers to break spectacularly with their leader. His attempt to steamroll the Liberal Party room on marriage equality – by insisting it was an issue that needed to be considered by the joint party room, where Nationals’ votes would support his position – was equally fatal. Both moves went a step too far in challenging the political structures of government.

  A black-and-white world sees many issues pushed “off the table” – not through fear, but because of the sense that there is no point discussing things that will not be countenanced by the powers that be. If we are thinking in black-and-white terms, we are not consulting our memories of what has happened in the past, but instead reacting purely to current events and to ideology. We don’t talk about the need for an overall change to the tax mix, for example, because politicians or interest groups have ruled out changing the GST. We don’t contemplate modification of our border-protection or asylum-seeker policies – even at the margins – because the policy has been declared and is unalterable. We can’t have a rational conversation about industrial relations because one side of politics simplifies it to an attack on workers and the other side finds it politically dangerous.

  Beyond a penchant for black-and-white thinking, Tony Abbott’s greatest sin may have been his remorseless degradation of our political institutions. Abbott’s failure to run a successful cabinet government, his disdain for parliamentary negotiation and his undercutting of the public service were all the more perplexing given his avowed conservatism. As a “true conservative,” he might have been expected to feel an affinity for o
ur institutional history, for the way things were done in the past.

  That is why the significance of the shift to Malcolm Turnbull was potentially much deeper than the outcome of the election. Tony Abbott didn’t just (try to) shut down dissent in his own ranks. He sent out a message of deep distrust of the public service. It started with the sacking of four department heads, but continued through, as far as many other senior bureaucrats were concerned, to the way he dealt with them. There were persistent attacks on institutions like the ABC, the Human Rights Commission and “activist” courts, yet a constant drumbeat of approval for anything to do with the military. Abbott was not the first prime minister to erode the standing of our institutions, but he was one of the most aggressive.

  What Turnbull said he aimed to do was to restore not just proper cabinet processes but a system of consultation to elicit the expertise that may lie within executive government. We might see this as a mere matter of “process,” but it is implicitly much more than that. Ministers, under this system, are assumed to know a lot more of the history of an issue than the prime minister’s office, and it should be they who advise their colleagues on the best course of action. By definition, this diffusion of power should foster more internal debate on policy. Debate relies on a more complex set of arguments, which requires the debaters to go in search of information, including examples from history, to back up their case. Turnbull brought into the centre of the government people with a memory of how the executive worked under John Howard. Public servants returned to ministers’ offices as chiefs of staff and ministerial advisers in greater numbers. Turnbull immediately engaged with the Senate crossbench. His ministers opened pragmatic negotiations with Labor to achieve compromises that had been flatly ruled out under the previous leader. Turnbull has gone to great pains to re-engage the public service in government. Well before he became leader, he recognised it as an institution that needed to be nurtured. “There’s no single answer to this but managing a talented workforce is very, very hard,” he said in June 2015. “You’re in the talent business. The talent is the real asset of the Australian Public Service, so we have got to have a focus on the APS, a respect for the quality and seek to promote and improve the quality of that workforce all the time.”

  These were the fine intentions, anyway. We have yet to see whether, in the hothouse and hurly-burly of politics, Turnbull can start the long turnaround in the way our political institutions work. It is hard to change habits, particularly when you are in a hurry. And it is particularly hard when people don’t remember that things can be done differently.

  And in any case, it would be a huge mistake to see what was happening only in the immediate context of the shift from Abbott to Turnbull – to think that Malcolm Turnbull’s pledges to change the way government works could reverse all the crumbling of our institutions of several decades. The changes to executive government – as documented in this essay – stretch all the way back to the Whitlam years. Turnbull was effectively promising to leapfrog back over Abbott, Gillard and Rudd to the last time it seemed to work well. The questions we can’t answer yet are whether Turnbull’s methods will produce better results than those of his immediate predecessors, or whether other factors – notably technology, or the changing nature of the issues now on the federal agenda – mean the old system is well and truly broken. The very deterioration in the way our institutions have operated in the past eight years – the loss of memory in the public service, in the parliament and within the ministerial wing of Parliament House – may also hinder the new regime.

  One of the big changes is not in what the prime minister does, but in how his cabinet behaves. It was Howard who ushered in the era of the permanent campaign. Thinking elections all the time has a profound impact on the way politicians act. Everything becomes (even more) political, obviously. But the idea that an election campaign may be only months away – because a minority government may collapse, because a double-dissolution election may be called – imposes a discipline on a parliamentary party that might otherwise not exist.

  The tight discipline of the Rudd-led Opposition and then the Abbott-led Opposition produced a culture that, from the outside, seemed much too subservient to the leader, lest any perceived division become a matter of political controversy. Unfortunately, having established that culture, that memory of how things were done, it was very difficult to break with it in government. Yet the events since 2013 have forced the Coalition front bench to reconsider. Ministers now acknowledge the need for a truly collegiate, cabinet-based government. That is, it is not just the prime minister who has to change, but ministers too, in how they conceive of their role and assert their influence. The departure of many of those on the front bench during the Rudd–Gillard years – and much soul-searching within Labor ranks – is also producing a more feisty internal debate in the Opposition. If there is indeed a successful transition back to cabinet-style government, this will form the core of a new set of institutional memories for both sides of politics.

  Yet politics is a transitory business. Writing about the traits and trends of the forty-third parliament at the end of 2013, Martin Lumb of the Parliamentary Library noted:

  As at 1 July 2011, of the 226 members of the 43rd Parliament, nearly two-thirds (148 MPs or 65 per cent) had served less than 12 years; 45 members (20 per cent) had served less than three years.

  It only takes a couple of elections for a considerable amount of the parliament’s working memory to disappear. Consider, for example, how few MPs would have direct experience of all the shifts in national security legislation that have taken place since 9/11. The number of really long-serving MPs and senators – particularly those who have been ministers – is dropping. You peak in your career as a minister, and then you get out. (Some argue this is one of the side effects of changes to parliamentary superannuation.) Former ministers are useful not only to their parties, but also to the parliament as a whole, with many long-serving MPs sitting on committees dealing with their old portfolios and able to enlighten new members on past considerations. Clare O’Neil and Tim Watts, young Labor MPs who published a book, Two Futures, in 2015, observed that:

  Rapid turnover of leaders is not intrinsically negative. Like the directors of companies or other organisations, political leaders must be accountable to the system that elects them. There are some countries where leaders hold power for decades unchallenged, and this can reflect a failure of accountability. But, at the same time, the pace of turnover of political leadership has real costs for our democracy … These days, former leaders will often quickly leave parliament. New generations of parliamentarians must learn the lessons of politics without the benefits of on-the-job mentoring.

  O’Neil and Watts also propose in their book that we should consider some radical uses of technology to make parliament more relevant. They suggest a proportion of every parliamentary sitting week be dedicated to citizens’ business, “in which Australian citizens directly propose topics for debate by their elected representatives.” They note that the Finnish parliament requires a parliamentary debate and a vote on:

  the substance of any motion that attracts more than fifty thousand online signatures. A platform that enables Australians to vote online to determine the issues that their MPs debate would give parliamentarians direct feedback about the strength of community sentiment on particular issues, and give citizens concerned about those issues the satisfaction that their parliament was engaging with them.

  There’s a lot more, too, on radical reform of Question Time, even moving it to prime viewing time as a way to put more pressure on MPs to behave.

  The key thing, as I see it, is to revive the institution of the parliament. If MPs once again see it as a powerful platform, that will only increase their desire to become not just good politicians, but good parliamentarians.

  The extent to which we seem to have forgotten what our parliament is for can be illustrated by the fact that more than once in the past five years the idea has been float
ed that a “citizens’ assembly” should get together to discuss a particular issue. When Julia Gillard suggested it in 2010, she was rightly ridiculed by those who pointed out the parliament was, in fact, a citizens’ assembly. It reflects how little confidence the broader community has in the parliament as a representative community body – and one capable of capturing a multiplicity of views – that the suggestion keeps arising.

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  At an event to support Andrew Hastie, the Liberal candidate in the 2015 Canning by-election, Tony Abbott introduced two of his colleagues by their military titles. Hastie himself is a decorated former army officer. A political strategist commented at the time on the increased number of defence personnel entering politics. Whatever the merits of the individual candidate, he observed, the thing that political parties find attractive about military people is that their pitch to voters is credible and straightforward. It is taken as read that they want to serve their country, so awkward questions are unlikely to arise about their motivations or professional background. Equally, in polls asking respondents to rate different professions, nurses and police are invariably near the top of the list. People in these professions are overwhelmingly public servants. Public servants as a category in their own right also rate pretty highly – certainly higher than either politicians or journalists.