by Donald Horne
What one does witness in Australia is what Hugo Wolfsohn described in an article in Dissent as ‘the institutionalization of mediocrity’. The established rhetoricians and ideology makers of Australia, whose conservative values are ‘largely a third-rate imitation of the paternalistic postures of the nineteenth-century British upper class’, often still set the tone for public occasions to such an extent that even public men who do not believe it sometimes feel bound to repeat this Establishment line. It is this obsolescence of public rhetoric that still holds Australia in its power, spellbound in boredom, rather than any calculating conspiracy, and one does not yet see what will replace it.
From America – federalism
Australia did not ‘earn’ nationhood by struggle against the oppressor or civil war. It could have become a nation earlier than it did, if it had wanted to. At the end of the nineteenth century there was a desultory debate for twenty years as the six separate Colonies began to talk about federating. Finally there was a referendum. Sixty per cent of Australians voted in it; altogether 43 per cent of all electors voted ‘yes’ and on 1 January 1901, by Act of the British Parliament and ‘to the permanent glory of the British Empire’ a federation of States on American lines was set up, with a weak central government and a strong tradition of independence among the States. Many people still living were born into an Australia where there were customs ports on the State borders and which, according to its official texts, did not achieve full status as a nation until 25 April 1915, when the Australian soldiers assisted in the Gallipoli landing by storming Anzac Cove. It was as if the whole process of achieving nationhood was so easy that it was not until men died – if quite irrelevantly, and in a minor and unsuccessful campaign – that Australians felt they had earned their way into the world. This is one of the several reasons why the Anzac legend has been such an important element of belief among twentieth-century Australians.
Although Australia took its federal structure from the USA, with a House of Representatives and a Senate, and a federal court that interpreted a written constitution, the six Colonies had already taken from Britain the system of parliamentary government and the workings of the federal court have been different. Australia’s nation-building was not marked by that eighteenth-century concern for the rights of man that is entrenched in the American Constitution. Perhaps some of the rights of man flourish more in Australia than in the USA but the rhetoric of natural rights in Australia has been weaker (Australia has been more concerned with the rhetoric of democracy than of natural rights) and there are no liberal guarantees written into its Constitution. Because the Australian Constitution is a terse and extraordinarily uninteresting document that does not hold any great truths to be self-evident, its High Court has not been able to play the same role as the American Supreme Court. The only clause that really allows a great deal of interpretative work is Section 92, which guarantees free trade between the States.
Regional interests and loyalties are even stronger among Australians than among Americans – in that in social life they exist almost without challenge. Canberra is a poor thing compared with Washington and there is no great metropolis like New York that sets many of the nation’s vogues. There is no generally acknowledged central city in Australia where the important things are believed to happen and it seems better to be. Not only – in certain senses – is Australia a province of two external powers. It is itself made up of six provinces that do not between them acknowledge that one metropolis is somehow more important than the others. There are few national matters in Australia; the way Australians see Australia is largely the way they see their own States. State differences and State conflicts run through almost every national institution – the political parties (even the Communist Party), the trade unions, the big pressure groups, the Churches, and private firms. As in the USA, it is not possible to understand national politics in Australia without knowing something of the differences in style between the State political parties and where the different pressure spots lie. During the long period of disunity that the Labor Party has suffered, only a knowledge of the controlling factions in each State can make sense of a process that seems otherwise to be merely a perverse neglect of PR and ‘image’. Small regional party machines have stronger power than in the USA; unlike the American party Conventions, where the population of a State governs its number of votes in the Convention, in the Labor Party the smallest State has the same number of votes as the biggest at a Federal Conference. In national Cabinet-making in Canberra each State must be represented in almost exact proportion, sometimes making the choice of dunderheads quite unavoidable.
It is obvious enough that the central government has grown enormously in power and importance since 1901, with much less constitutional change than might have seemed necessary. However residual State powers still hold up national planning. Or they might do so. This question has not been put to the test for some years because not much national planning has gone on. Perhaps more could be squeezed out of the present set-up than is attempted. In 1959 there was joint party agreement that the central government needed stronger powers to engage in adequate economic planning; but the Government did not choose to take up this option and put the matter to a test at a referendum. The question of Federal powers generated much heat in the more ideologically inclined 1940s but the heat has gradually gone out of it since a referendum asking for fourteen more powers was lost in 1944. There are still Unificationists and State Righters, but with a Government that does not want to do more than it is doing, their weapons have grown rusty. One fears that if they are ever needed again – on both sides – they will prove to be dangerously old models.
Frustrated though they are by Commonwealth control of taxation and loan-raising (and loan-spending), the State Governments are nevertheless the single most important pressure groups in Australia. State issues (particularly regional questions of employment) may decide Federal elections and at every Premiers’ Conference and Loan Council Meeting the Prime Minister sees not only State Ministers and their officials but the people of Australia, cut six ways and intensely regionalized in their economic interests. In a book this size, State politics are indescribable. Each State party has its own style and problems. There is one characteristic however, once they gain office, that they all share: they tend to hold on to power by rearranging constituency boundaries strongly enough in their own favour to sustain any but the biggest swings in voting. Sometimes an entrenched State Government is unseated not by voting, but by party schisms.
The six State Governments hold many powers that immediately and obviously influence the ordinary Australian’s life – the education activities of his children, control over the criminal code, control over traffic, shopping, leisure activities, decisions on all kinds of urban and rural development and many of the other most significant matters in day-to-day living. And since local government is weak in Australia, the State Governments also set the tone for most of the activity in Australia’s 1000 or so local government units. (Local government in Australia was largely invented by the States at the beginning of this century: the States forced a weak version of it on to a people who still seem largely indifferent to the idea of local independence.) What is supposed to happen to the State Governments – at present blessed with many powers, but not with the power to raise their own money – is one of those questions that might finally be taken up again in Australia some day.
From Britain – Parliaments
It is hard to escape the conclusion that in Australia Parliaments are now mainly of ritualistic significance and that the significance of the peculiarly parliamentary part of Australian democracy is quite slight. A political leader achieves leadership through his party and normally he then uses his position and power of patronage to dominate, or attempt to dominate his party machine; and rebels work through the party machine to try to affect the policies of the leaders. In this power situation Parliaments are subsidiary; it is through the parties that political changes are effected –
if they are effected at all.
Power within the parties is not gained by any significant appeal to mass membership. There isn’t a mass membership. Party branches are small and, with exceptions, moribund. Power within a party is usually gained by secret contrivance and manipulation. Except in the sense that the rival party machines have to submit themselves to regular parliamentary elections, the idea that Parliament represents the people is simply one of the fictions of Australian public life – as is the idea that Parliaments have any particular relation beyond a ceremonial one to the administration of the Commonwealth and the States. All that happens is that the people have a veto; they can keep one of the party machines out of office – at the cost of putting the other party machine into power. And when a party gains power it uses its Parliament as its legislative and propaganda instrument.
The checks on an Executive’s arbitrariness are mainly non-parliamentary (although considerable): there are checks within the party machine itself, there are checks from pressure groups, there are the checks of publicity and exposure (here Parliaments are of some significance, but of perhaps less significance than the Press), the checks of regular elections, the checks of the Constitution and of conventional standards of behaviour. There is no lack of checks on Australian Governments – although a better informed and more active legislative body such as the American Congress might provide greater checks because of its ability to acquire information through committees and then act on the information. What seems to be almost altogether lacking in Australia is a channel for the invigoration of the political parties. The political structure tends to ossify.
Parliaments are all but useless for the invigoration of the parties. With one of the party machines in control of Parliament and with the Executive in control of the party machine there is no prospect of Parliament – as Parliament – having any effect on administration, unless – as sometimes happens – a rival party machine controls one of the Upper Houses. But again this is not a parliamentary check – it is a party machine check.
The sheer dreariness of parliamentary life – its lack of political meaning and its old-fashioned rituals – repel many of the kind of people who might make good members of an Executive and also the kind of people who like to acquire information and to probe into the processes of government (and would make good parliamentarians). An able man in the prime of life is not usually prepared to make the sacrifice of listening day after day to speech after speech of almost complete drivel. The friction that Parliaments are hotly debating whether they will pass a Bill, as if they were still made up of eighteenth-century squires, combined with the demands of party discipline and the general poverty of parliamentary candidates have produced a banality in ‘debate’ that is of world class. It is doubtful if there are any Parliaments anywhere in the world where the standard of speaking is lower than it is in the Parliaments of Australia.
Apart from the windbags who get a sense of relief from opening and shutting their mouths life can assume useful meaning for an Australian MP only in his constituency. Here he performs a useful if rather menial job of getting telephones, or jobs, or pensions for constituents, and, in general, trying to pull strings in government departments. Sometimes he corrects an injustice; more often – by gaining a privilege for a constituent – he may create an injustice for others.
There is one simple fundamental weakness in the Australian Parliaments: they haven’t got enough to do. And there is a fundamental weakness in the system of providing an Executive from the ranks of the parliamentarians: most of them are not good executives. The kind of man who is prepared to sit through years of boring ritual in parliamentary sessions before he is rewarded with power in Executive office is not likely to be a good political leader. And the kind of man who is likely to be a good leader finds it impossible to break through quickly into public office – so he doesn’t try.
There is still some current of discussion in Australia about constitutional reform but most of it is concerned with the relations of the Commonwealth to the States. Hardly anyone discusses radical reform of the parliamentary system. Assuming that at some time or other in the future Australia must declare itself a republic one can at least hope that by then there will also be some debate both on how it can be governed better and how it can use its Parliaments more democratically. The American system of presidential government is one that might be considered.
An Australian Prime Minister who gets firmly in the saddle and can manipulate his party has a kind of power an American President lacks; he has the legislative machine completely in his grip. (Although he does not have the same powers of patronage.) The main difference is that in theory an Australian Prime Minister is in the control of his parliamentary party but in practice this is not always so and in any case it is arguable if this is an advantage to anyone except the factions struggling for power within a party. It might be of advantage if he were appointed to office as an American President is and told to assemble a team of men to run the government. This would take him out of the control of his parliamentary party but it could place him – to some extent anyway – within the control of a Parliament that had the duty to inform itself on all public issues, legislate on some of them and act as a conscience.
There are no ideal ‘solutions’ in politics and this one has dangers too: but it would allow breakthroughs into political life and an invigoration of administration by the appointment of good administrators from outside Parliament to the Executive; and it would allow Parliament to play a much stronger democratic role than it can possibly play when it is so tied up with the Executive. Imagine the effect on government in Australia if the Chief Executive could choose able administrators from all over the country to act as Cabinet Ministers and if Parliament were able to examine in detail what the Executive was doing and begin to exercise its now-fictional legislative powers.
One of the difficulties of political life in Australia is that the processes of policy-making tend to gum up. A leader more or less controls both his parliamentary party and the bureacracy and that’s that. Political systems need ways of recognizing what issues there should be decisions about and ways of formulating alternative decisions but this process moves slowly in Australia – and often it does not move at all. If new Executives could move into office with a President this might galvanize the Canberra bureaucracy by introducing it, as it were, to some of the men who knew what was happening out there in Australia, and if Parliament had something to do this might draw attention to the kind of things governments should be concerned with.
Australia’s four-party system: the struggle for the Labour Movement
Australia does not have a two-party system. At times of Labor Party unity it has a three-party system. At times of Labor Party schism (in the 1930s, and again since 1955) it has a four-party system, with two Labor Parties. The other two parties – now the Liberal and Country Parties – normally form partnerships but sometimes the tensions between them make this impossible.
The schismatic character of the Labor Party has proved to be one of its significant characteristics. It has suffered four main explosions. In two of them there was a parliamentary split in which Labor leaders joined a hastily renamed conservative party, and led it; in the other two explosions separate parties were formed out of some of the fragments thrown out by the explosion.
The normal state of the Labor Party has been one of schism, or impending schism, for a complex of reasons. One of these comes from the kind of tension that is also found in the British Labour Party: a fundamentalism about maintaining principle finds itself in conflict with a desire to compromise and enjoy the challenges of power. The party is not fully ‘legitimate’, in that it contains elements whose beliefs lie outside the general consensus of values among the people. However it is more in Australian Labor’s differences from the British Labour Party than in its similarity that the reasons for its fissiparousness are to be found: the union-domination of the party, its federal structure and the greater importance of both Comm
unist sympathisers and Catholics in it.
The real machine men of the Labor Party are almost all of them union leaders, entrenched in their own State Executives. At some of the State Conferences as many as 85 per cent of the delegates are from the unions. When the prevailing group of union bosses in a State puts up its ticket for the State Executive it knows it will win because it has the numbers. Some non-unionists will be put on the ticket, but they are there by favour of the group of union leaders who run the State branch; ‘in the interests of party unity’ they may even put on their ticket a few representatives of their opponents; but they all know who runs the branch. This means that six different prevailing cabals of union leaders run each of the six State branches. The natural tendency of these powerful union groups is to try to discipline the parliamentary party in each State. Their main interest may not be that the Party should engage in the compromises of office but that they, the party’s union bosses, should keep their own power in the party machine.
The fact that the Party is organized on strict Federal lines, with the real power in each of the States, means that on the Federal Executive (with each State enjoying equal representation) the six cabals get together and if four of them can agree, they try to enforce their policy on the Federal Parliamentary Party (and this will cause tensions within that party): if they cannot agree the party is split. There is no strong central organization at the Federal Party’s separate disposal, to give it strength of its own. Even when a State group wishes to see the Federal Party in power it is often so oriented to State politics that it lacks touch on Federal issues.