Politics in the age of Dr No

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ScreenHunter_2539 May. 22 14.28

By Leith van Onselen

Former Liberal leader, John Hewson, has written a brilliant critique of the current Australian political landscape, which has increasingly placed spin ahead of the national interest:

…politics has progressively become even more of a game over the last couple of decades. Indeed, now almost an end in itself, the contest is to win the 24-hour media cycle, at all costs. Policy substance and debate has been almost totally eschewed.

The focus has become increasingly short-term, opportunistic and pragmatic. Political positions and daily messages are driven mostly by polling, especially focus group responses, rather than by evidence-based policy, or even ideology.

The game moves almost daily, from one issue to the next, from one location to the next. As it does, the media and other independent commentators mostly get swept along, with little time or incentive to dig into the substance of an issue, or to attempt to insist on transparency and accountability. They are left to focus on the “colour and movement” of it all.

The so-called policies taken to the last election were little more than dot points in a Powerpoint presentation – Stop the Boats, Repay the Debt, Build the Infrastructure of the 21st century, full stop.

The game has become very tribal, bitter, personal and mostly negative. The whole process has been an attempt to “dumb down” the electorate, as the key tribes produce their own evidence and accounting, and then chant it, or spin it, almost incessantly, as if it’s fact.

But no matter how much you repeat a mantra, clinging to simple slogans is no way to “move forward”.

John Hewson was a rare breed of politician who actually placed good policy and the national interest ahead of point scoring. In my view, he is also possibly the best Prime Minister Australian never had.

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Unfortunately, there is also a lot of truth in what Hewson has written.

A dark side of the internet and modern technology is that it has facilitated the 24-hour news cycle, driving politicians from both sides to spend much more time and effort “massaging” their message and responding to the latest media attack, rather than just getting on with the job and developing sound policy.

I also wonder whether the big micro-economic reforms of the mid-1980s and early-1990s would even be possible today. Back then, before the rise of the internet and “instant media”, politicians only had to contend with a few television and radio bulletins a day and generally only one news print, leaving them plenty of time to get on with the job.

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By contrast today, those reforms would likely have faced constant attack from vested interests and opposition political parties, likely resulting in many of the reforms being either watered down or abandoned altogether, in favour of populism.

It’s a diabolical situation that quickly needs fixing if Australia is to successfully navigate the ending of the once-in-a-century mining boom and the ageing population.

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.