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A BROKEN SYSTEM: To Mend or To Replace?
John Biggs
Australia’s political system is broken. The recent review by the ALP on their election result revealed a
party in disarray. Policies and prime ministers were switched on the run. Kevin Rudd as not-PM
acted as in-house land mine, as PM he acted like a demented one-man brainstorming group. Julia
Gillard saw some excellent legislation through (almost all of which Abbott is pulling apart) but her
government did an appalling sales job, so voters decided that anything would be better than the
confusion they perceived to be prevailing in the Labor Party. But “anything” was the Abbott
Government, and post budget, many voters are discovering that they had made a terrible mistake.
An extreme right wing government, that beat up a non-existent financial crisis in order to fatten the
corporate world to the severe detriment of the underprivileged, is not what Australians need or
want. Most of the Liberal cabinet from the PM down are devout Christians, which allows them their
unique twist to the Magnificat: “We have filled the rich with good things and the hungry we have
sent empty away.”
Liberal-Labor policy conflation
While enacting such legislation as Gonski, NDIS and NBN, Labor had also been singing from the
Liberal song sheet in their legislation on asylum seekers, yes-no to carbon pricing, cutting single
mothers’ payments, and school chaplaincies. Indeed, Labor had been supplying the tenor line in the
Liberal choir for the past thirty years. Labor under Hawke embraced deregulation, privatised Qantas
and the Commonwealth Bank, and lowered both corporate and personal income taxes thereby
distributing some $50 billion from the workers to the already rich, while Keating locked wage
earners’ superannuation into the stock market. Our political centre of gravity had swung sharply
right.
Here are some of the similarities between the two parties on recent policies.
Asylum seekers. While Hawke and Fraser to their everlasting credit were in accord over the
Vietnamese boatpeople, mandatory detention was implemented by Keating in 1992 as a measure of
border protection. Thus was sown the seeds of the myth of “illegal” asylum seekers that sprouted its
strange fruit with the 2001 Tampa crisis when Howard sent in the armed forces to prevent 438
asylum seekers, whose vessel had foundered, from landing in Australian territory. Opposition Leader
Beasley concurred with this brutal decision. It got even more brutal when Labor tried to match the
Coalition’s nastiness with the desperate and ill thought out Malaysia and Nauru solutions. Labor has
disgusted many of its own supporters yet any change in Labor’s immigration policy has been voted
down as I write. The souls of Labor and Liberal main players on asylum seeker policy seem to have
been cloned from the soul of the same cockroach.
Iraq War. John Howard off his own bat committed Australia to war in Iraq, on what we now know to
be false information about weapons of mass destruction, because George W Bush had become a
mate of his. At least Simon Cream argued strongly against going into Iraq but again Beasley was too
weak to stand up to Howard. At least Howard was right about Beasley’s “lack of ticker”.
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School Chaplaincies. For sheer out of nowhere wrong headedness, it’s hard to beat Labor’s support
for the Liberals’ school chaplaincy programme. This commits $245 million to supply schools with
religious “chaplains” many of whom are religious zealots from the hard right. The Scripture Union
would be the supplier for Tasmania and they explicitly state that their mission is to encourage
children to become “followers of God.” These proselytisers will largely replace professionally trained
school psychologists and social workers. This is not only deeply offensive to nonChristians (and no
doubt to many Christians as well) but downright dangerous. Children having problems with drugs,
sexuality, bullying, dysfunctional families and other problems that cry for professional help, will be in
the hands of untrained zealots. Labor’s support for this dangerous and expensive programme is
incomprehensible. The programme has twice been rejected by the High Court as unconstitutional,
not unfortunately on the grounds that compulsory religious programmes are out of place in a secular
country, but that the Commonwealth/State financing would be tangled. If the states are then to give
this programme the go ahead, please, Mr. Hodgman, not in Tasmania
Funding higher education. Both Labor and Liberal governments have severely cut higher education,
making Labor’s criticisms of the Coalition’s cuts to universities and the CSIRO more than somewhat
hypocritical.
Climate change. Labor and Liberals in 2007 were united on the issue of climate change and the need
for carbon pricing. Labor is now for carbon pricing, after forcing Rudd to drop his ETS then changing
their minds again, while the Liberals are now strongly opposed. Given this bipartisan shemozzle, it is
not surprising that, according to a survey by the Climate Institute on the eve of the reintroduction of
the legislation to scrap the carbon tax, one in five people agree that the Coalition has an effective
plan to tackle climate change, and one in four that Labor has. Not much difference there.
Corruption. In recent years corruption looked like Labor’s forte, with the Health Services Union boss
Michael Williamson and secretary Craig Thomson being found guilty of misappropriating millions of
union funds. Then of course there’s the NSW ICAC finding that Eddie Obeid and Joe Tripodi
corrupted parliament itself for personal and mates’ gain. But as The Drum puts it, “ICAC’s
destruction hits both sides”. The Liberal Party accepted massive donations from Australian Water
Holdings, of which Liberal Senator Arthur Sinodinis was Deputy Chairman, in exchange for
favourable legislation with regard to its subsidiary Sydney Water, a saga of dirty dealings reported in
ABC’s Four Corners’ Democracy for Sale. The doozy was that Eddie Obeid is a major shareholder in
Sydney Water. Corruption in NSW had become truly bipartisan.
Forestry. Both parties, at state and federal levels, have subsidised the forestry industry although it
has been unsustainable and it was and is making heavy losses. Whoever was in power at whatever
level, taxpayers shelled out millions, reaching into billions, to support an industry that employed
fewer than 2 per cent of the work force. The CMFEU, one of the most powerful in Australia, had
relations with both parties. Who can forget Labor Premier Paul Lennon and 2,000 CFMEU workers
cheering John Howard in his 2004 election campaign in Braddon?
Another bizarre aspect of the forestry industry is the saga of the Tamar Valley pulp mill. Public
opinion was strongly against; it had been rejected as “critically noncompliant” with the guidelines of
the government’s own assessment body, the RPDC; Gunns couldn’t get it started by the deadline, so
the Tasmanian government obligingly extended their permits twice. When Gunns went belly up, the
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state Labor government, with Liberal support, extended the construction permits a third time. All
that effort and again for nothing, for nobody wanted to buy the permits.
The forestry industry was in such dire straits that in 2010 it initiated discussions with
environmentalists to seek a way out of their tribulations. After intense discussions over three years
an agreement was negotiated to bring peace to the long standing forest wars. But astonishingly, that
agreement, as Labor Premier Lara Giddings announced, was in order “to get the pulp mill up”. That’s
not what most people had thought, but no matter, Liberal and Labor parties both state and federal
were again backing the wretched mill. But whatever role the pulp mill did or didn’t have in achieving
the peace agreement that was eagerly awaited by the industry, environmentalists and the general
public, state and federal Liberal governments have committed to tear up the agreement. Looks like
we’ll be returning our old growth forests to their traditional role of battlefield.
These capers of the major political parties and their policy conflation have marginalised, alienated
and disenfranchised many Australians. Much of that damage is due to the collapse of what was a
major reason for Labor’s very existence: social justice for the underprivileged.
The Liberals for their part have remained consistent in their remit, although far more ruthless in
enacting it under Howard and especially Abbott. Further, under Abbott they are facing a massive
credibility problem. The Coalition’s pre-election promises are a mind-boggling mismatch with their
post-election actions, particularly as realised in the recent budget. Then Tony Abbott walked the
world stage saying that President Obama’s climate change policy had been lifted from Abbott’s
Direct Action policy, and that he and Obama are “on the same page” with respect to climate policy.
Perhaps in his excitement he hadn’t noticed that his policy flatly contradicts Obama’s.
Labor’s flaccid acceptance of many Liberal policies, and the Liberals’ rock-hard rapaciousness, have
delivered a thundering vacuum for voters on the centre and left of centre.
Can the problem be mended with a new party or a coalition of parties on the left? Or is the two
party system so broken we need multiple parties representing more specific constituencies? Or
should an issues-based system of government replace a party-based one?
A new coalition on the left
What is the place of the Greens in this? While current Green policy largely addresses this vacuum on
the left, the problem is that the Greens are doing very well if they get 20 per cent of the vote. This is
not enough to form an alternative government.
The irony is that probably a large majority of voters would agree that a government should:
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act immediately and firmly against climate change,
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increase public participation in political decision-making,
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remove inequalities of wealth and power that inhibit participatory democracy,
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legislate in the interests of social justice,
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make spending on health, public education and public transport a major priority,
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support small business, including farmers, over giant corporations,
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engage in greater public consultation and transparency,
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establish a more labour-intensive, diverse and sustainable forestry industry,
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adhere to established due process in policy making.
These policies distinguish the Greens from the two major parties but many who would agree with
these policies would never vote Green. Relentless and irrelevant name-calling and blatant
misrepresentation of Green policies have poisoned the public perception of the Greens.
Dennis Altman, addressing “a Labor-Green opportunity” in Inside Story, doubts that after the recent
turbulence Labor can ever win government in its own right:
Labor has yet to find a convincing definition of progressive politics … . Any serious
questioning of the mantra of growth and consumption is regarded as electoral suicide. The
party is trapped in the legacy of economic rationalism, which leads to the contradictory
position of its current leaders, who simultaneously talk about the need to focus on climate
change while also increasing economic growth.
Altman points out that although Green numbers are small, they comprise a high proportion of young
voters that would make the Greens more powerful in future than present numbers suggest. Further,
Green policies – as is clear in the above list – range far beyond environmentalism per se. On social
justice they are where Labor was years ago (and still should be).
As both Greens and the Labor are, or originally were, social democratic parties, Altman suggests a
coalition between the two, with each party preserving its own identity.
While many Labor voters would probably resist a coalition with the Greens, the numbers for forming
an electorally viable coalition are not impossible. If only 30 to 40 per cent of Labor voters rethought
matters, the new coalition could indeed form majority government with the Greens. The fractured
Labor-Green arrangement in Tasmania should not be taken as proof such a coalition would not work.
The Tasmanian case was so structured it allowed Labor to be portrayed as a Green front although it
wasn’t, while the Greens were seen to have compromised their principles.
An alternative is to form a new party with a new name, such as the Australian Social Democratic
Party. This would lighten the baggage from a Labor Party that is Labor in name only, and would
neutralise the mud-slinging at the Greens when many people mostly agree with Green policies. An
Australian Social Democrat Party after unsuccessfully contesting the 1983 election, threw their
support behind the Bob Hawke. But Hawke swung the Labor Party away from social democracy.
With Labor now in disarray, maybe it’s now time to rethink ways of strengthening the party in a way
that respects its principles.
Both alternatives preserve the broad left-right two party structure. But maybe that’s not the best
way to go, given the problems of two party systems:
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pre-selection of candidates is in terms of their allegiance to this or that faction of the party,
not according to their ability or their acceptability to their own electorate. Such candidates
usually have little experience outside the party machine and represent the party not the
people,
politicians vote according to caucus or cabinet dictates, often against their own judgment or
conscience, and against the interests of their constituency,
the present orientation of the major parties presents the electorate with the choice of a
hard right neoliberal government or a centre right neoliberal government. In either case,
neoliberalism represents the interests of the corporate world, not those of the people.
issues that concern voters are not even raised if cabinet or caucus doesn’t want them to be.
These factors are antithetical to a properly functioning participatory democracy.
Multiple parties
Many European countries have parties representing narrower constituencies than a single left-right
divide. France for example has ten parties, Belgium 14. These smaller parties have the advantage of
more accurately representing the spectrum of views and values across the population and they vote
accordingly, allowing that they can also form alliances for getting a broader and representative
range of legislation through parliament. Australia, the UK and the USA on the other hand have two
or three party governments that provide an ill fit for the spread of views that exist in the electorate.
In Australia we have small parties but they are almost entirely restricted to the Senate, such as the
Hunters and Shooters Party and the Motoring Enthusiasts Party. These parties achieved Senate seats
by manipulating a deeply flawed voting system and have miniscule representation in the population.
It is difficult to say how a multiple party system might be instituted and made to work in Australia.
While it works in many countries (and admittedly not in others) we have been wedded to the idea of
a governing party and an opposition party since Federation. But then that might suggest, to pool
political clichés, that it’s time to be moving forward.
Issues-based government
Something like issues-based government exists in Hong Kong. The Legislative Council, which enacts
legislation, comprises 35 members elected by citizens and who may be members of political parties,
and 35 members elected by functional, occupation-based constituencies, such as education, health,
business, transport, and so on. Thus, decisions are made by politicians who are responsible for
different sectors of the community. The tendency for councillors to horse-trade amongst themselves
is mitigated by the presence of democratically elected members to keep the bastards honest.
The problem in Hong Kong is not the Legislative Council, which works reasonably well, but the Chinaappointed position of Chief Executive, who then appoints an Executive Council to advise him. We
certainly don’t want politicians to be appointed, but the notion of functional constituencies has
merit and could be applied to Australia.
Young people today are accused of narcissism and political apathy. The Whitlam Institute’s Young
People Imagining a New Democracy project on the other hand suggests that young people only
appear apathetic because they see that the party system is failing them, that their interests are on
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issues they see as important and that the party system is neglecting, climate change being a major
one. The fact that young people are the up and coming demographic in the Greens reflects the fact
that of all parties, the Greens focus on issues that look to the future.
An issues-based governmental structure may take many forms, but first the issues and the
constituencies that support them would need to be defined, such as health, education, transport,
the environment, the rural sector, science, the arts, and so on and on. Candidates up for election in
each constituency would then need to show their credentials for such a post. There would also need
to be a second rank of advisors, a public service, and checks and balances. Whatever the structural
and operational specifics, legislation is passed on the basis of politicians’ commitment and expertise
in the area in question.
For such an ideal system to be put in place however the existing system would have to be
dismantled. While such a consummation is devoutly to be wished, it is presently baying at the moon
to expect parties to vote themselves out of existence.
But, who knows, a new generation might well see in a new era.
So?
It is evident that our political system is increasingly detaching itself from engagement with the
values, concerns and needs of ordinary people. Our politicians inhabit a cocoon spun by the
corporate world.
I see three broad possibilities. The most conservative one is to retain some sort of party system by
creating a social democratic coalition from existing parties to correct the right leaning tilt that
currently exists. The most radical possibility is to go for a new structure that is based on issues, not
party allegiance. A multiparty system is somewhere between the two.
The up and coming generation are angry and frustrated that the present system is not looking to a
future that is theirs. Future systems are their call and all the signs are that they won’t be hamstrung
by a party-based boa constrictor but a system that resolves issues by requiring evidence, rational
argument and cooperation. Political structures for the future should be in the hands of those
forming the future polity, not in those of rapacious corporations and their political henchmen who in
their greed are endangering the planet itself.
This proverb is attributed to the indigenous North Americans: “We do not inherit the earth from our
ancestors; we borrow it from our children.” At the moment we are cheating our children big time.