Today from a curmudgeonly Paul Kelly:
While voters are disillusioned with the major parties in Australia and the West, the cause of the problem is deeper than usually depicted — the system of representative parliamentary democracy is being discredited because it conflicts with the mood, culture and technology of the age.
Representative democracy looks obsolete. People want answers now and problems solved by tomorrow. Impatience is now bred into daily life on the escalator of technology. In a society where the pace is set by the mobile phone, digitalisation and the internet, parliamentary government seems trapped in another time.
When the answers seem elusive and problems stretch into years the public descends into anger and disgust with governments and ministers.
Representative government, in fact, can rarely deliver fast responses. Its character was formed in an age long before the motor car, aeroplane or electronic media, amid a culture of personal restraint, respect for authority and regard for institutions — all long since lost.
Representative government is slow, messy, riddled with compromise, drafting of bills, executive instruments and regulation, parliamentary debate, cross-party disputes and implementation by public servants. For many young people today the process seems alien and near hopeless.
Even in the 1950s people believed in God, waited their turn and occasionally heard how Mr Menzies was running the country. There were no press conferences, no electronic media grabs from the day’s events, no 24-hour media cycle, no regular opinion polls and no immediate demands the prime minister had to meet or else. It was a different world.
Our culture today is less forgiving. In the past people got upset, bitter and grumbled. But they didn’t take to social media, vote for Pauline Hanson, organise single issue protests, or say the prime minister had to be thrown out every three years.
Over the past decade the system has rejected as failures a nerdy populist in Kevin Rudd, a professional leftist woman in Julia Gillard and a muscular conservative in Tony Abbott, and seems disillusioned with Malcolm Turnbull, a progressive liberal.
Rubbish, Paul. The failure is yours. As I wrote two years ago:
Political partisanship may be blocking any sensible description of Australia’s economic circumstances, but media partisanship is ensuring that there is no centrist discourse in which it can be delivered.
And that’s why the “death of reform” is your fault, Paul. You, your clique of media storm troopers, and your boss, are not cultivating that centre ground. On the contrary, you’re driving a very deliberate and very partisan wedge straight into it. The ideology being spun out of the Murdoch press is not reform-friendly, on the contrary. It is an oligarchic putsch by rent-seeking business hostile to markets, biased towards rentier profits over labour income, dedicated to covering-up the disastrous capital inefficiency killing Australian productivity.
This reached its crescendo in your embrace of Tony Abbott, Paul, and your open drive for him to enter the Lodge, even though he and his brown shirts had clearly demonstrated themselves as Tea Party mini-me’s with no idea about effective markets or productivity-driven economics.
Then, when they assumed power and rendered decision after decision in favour of vested interests (except cars which was a disaster in itself for other reasons), you cheered them on, failed utterly to bring them to account, and stoked hubris in their ranks. Philosophical pygmies with very little electoral mandate (other than tossing out Labor) looked into the mirror held up by The Australian and saw giants with their pockets stuffed with political capital.
And so, egged on by your pandering, they produced a Budget of epic folly that spent big on political capital that did not exist. Instead of showing the steady hand of conservative government and aiming to stem a deteriorating economic environment via shared burden over time, arrogance produced a radical embrace of the few.
Meanwhile, media on the Left in Australia seized the commercial opportunity of opposing your increasingly extreme embrace of the 1%. The Fairfax metropolitans, The Guardian and Crikey have occupied the ground on the other side of the political isle and driven a massive wedge straight into the new government. With the Australian ethos of “fairness” on their side, they’ve gleefully “pulled a Murdoch” of their own.
More broadly and worse for liberalism, Paul, you’re supporting an ideology that’s driving the global rise of extreme groups of the Left and Right, most obviously in Europe. It’s simple common sense that liberal capitalism and democracy cannot be sustained on individualism without responsibility, on freedom without ethics, on privilege without noblesse oblige. Without balance, the Tea Party vision is hack libertarianism that is no more than a scab grab for millionaires and billionaires.
And so, bringing it back to Australia and its political economy travails, the Liberal Party is not at all out of options. A very large and completely vacant political centre currently waits patiently for someone to fill it. It’s a space that is chock-o-block with reform possibilities that can revitalise the economy and mitigate the coming post- boom adjustment.
It’s not Facebook, Paul. It’s not Pauline Hanson, either. It’s the lying, the lying that you, Paul, have supported to keep your Murdoch job:
- Rudd killed himself by turning against climate change and then was finished off by a Murdoch-supported campaign of mining sedition;
- Gillard was finished off by the mining boom killing house prices in the east and by a Murdoch-supported campaign of carbon pricing sedition, not to mention a vengeful Rudd;
- Abbott was killed off by a class war in the form of a biased Budget and a Murdoch-supported campaign in favour of big business;
- Turnbull is dying of a betrayal of everything he ever stood for which, mercifully, has resulted in a Murdoch press civil war, not to mention a vengeful Abbott.
Sure, technology has sped things up. But policy is policy and people are people. If any one of the above PMs had been honest about Australia’s real prospects, that the mining and housing booms are finished and we’ll need to work for a living henceforth, and had delivered policy to match, then none would have fallen in the same manner. The polity would have given them the time to fix things. Instead each pretended Australia was exceptional and delivered policy aimed at proving it was the better manager of it while a politicised press barracked for their chosen side.
The mismatch is not between some shallow youth and democracy, it’s between the economy and politics. Or, more to the point, between expectations and politics.
Until someone wakes up to that, governments will continue to fall.
