In Search of Good Government

by Laura Tingle

  John Howard used to say to me when I first arrived in his office and I was trying to be politically sensitive, “I’d like to know what you think about international relations. Leave the politics to me. I’ll work out how to do it.” And I think that is the way we need to think.

  Thawley identifies the simple but often overlooked truth that politicians think differently to policy experts. Another senior public servant who worked in ministerial offices observes: “Politicians are politicians. That is what they do. We shouldn’t be surprised or shocked by that. They are always looking at an issue from a political perspective. Our job is to make sure that they can see ways that marry the politics with the policy imperatives.”

  Don Russell returned to Canberra during the Gillard period as secretary of the industry department, and in 2014 he reflected on the day-to-day realities of relationships among prime ministers, ministers, advisers and the public service. Watching from the outside, he said, we tend to presume that prime minister’s offices know what the rest of the government is doing. And since Australia is supposed to be run by cabinet governments, we also assume there is an agreed policy work plan. But, as Russell noted, “It can be exceedingly nerve-racking for a Prime Minister and his or her staff to know that they are surrounded in the Executive Wing of Parliament House by a group of Ministers who are working away on bright ideas guided only by the enthusiasms of their staff.”

  In other words, not all prime ministers want their ministers guided by political staffers alone. Russell’s message to the public service was to become less risk-averse and change a modus operandi which only responds to ministerial requests. Public service departments had to understand (and perhaps learn again) that advice was contestable. They should anticipate where policy discussions would go, all the better to be able to assert what ministers needed to know, and therefore be included in the discussions. Thawley had the same message:

  Most of us joined the public service not because we wanted a job forever but because we had ideas about how Australia should be, what sort of a place we wanted our country to be, what sort of society we wanted. That’s what the government needs and that’s what it wants to hear. It doesn’t want a supine public service. It wants to know what we think, what ideas we have for making changes and how to make them happen.

  Some parties will disagree, of course. According to one former adviser, even as the influence – and memories – of seasoned bureaucrats has been fading from ministerial offices, there has been a maturation of a generation of political staffers at a time when the “dark arts” of spin and politics have been professionalised to a much greater extent. Research – as in political research – he argues, has given staffers a false sense of confidence that you “can do it by numbers” – that you can find your way through to a policy option purely by political judgment, by focus-group testing different ideas and avoiding any dangerous ones. But that also means policy is viewed purely in its current context. The history of any particular political and policy issue is so yesterday.

  The dominance of the dark arts and catchy slogans in achieving success in Opposition puts policy development and the prospects for cabinet consultation on the back foot too, even before a new government is sworn in.

  In a “disciplined” and successful Opposition – and this was true of both Labor under Rudd, and the Coalition under Abbott – power is inevitably ceded to the leader’s office. The cost, when finally you get into government, is that the only experience of power relationships on the front bench is of an almost presidential supremacy. Ministers sometimes come to office too cowed to make an executive decision.

  That has helped kill off memories of another aspect of successful cabinet governments: the prime minister as chair of the board. Bob Hawke was famous for his chairmanship of cabinet – for giving all of his ministers both a voice and a sense of ownership over the government’s collective decisions. John Howard also managed his cabinet successfully. In more recent years, particularly under Kevin Rudd and Tony Abbott, it has felt more as though ministers were an annoyance to be dealt with.

  This was the backdrop against which Malcolm Turnbull argued he would restore true cabinet government: that is, a government where the policy issues of the day are decided by the full cabinet after discussion of proposals put forward by individual ministers.

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  The presidential focus on the leaders has not only left ministers out of the general gaze – unless they stuff up – it has also rendered backbench MPs and senators virtually invisible and with much less scope to develop their parliamentary, political and policy skills.

  When I ask politicians, and those who congregate around them, why things have become so difficult, the constant culprit named is the “24/7 media cycle.” So often is it cited as the cause of all political evil that it sometimes seems to have ended thought about how political life has changed in other ways. I refuse to believe it is so simple. Politicians certainly feel that they have to feed the media beast at all times, lest someone else occupy the space. Yet the quandary is why, when the media have so many hours to fill, and when the platforms on which politicians can speak have multiplied to such a degree, they still argue that it is impossible to get their message out.

  A real problem is that the passage of time and the relatively short professional life of most politicians mean most cannot remember a time when it was different. It was once the case that ministers doing an interview spoke only on their own portfolio. If journalists asked them about other issues, they would politely demur and say that this wasn’t in their area of portfolio responsibility so it would not be appropriate to comment, or that they weren’t well-enough informed to be able to comment. I sometimes mention this to staffers and politicians, who invariably don’t know it and cannot fathom that you would pass up an opportunity to pronounce on something, even if you have no idea what you are talking about. A calm and confident refusal – on the grounds of ignorance – is seen as politically risky. The need to comment has attained ludicrous levels of inanity. Each day, the leader’s office (on both sides of politics) circulates “talking points” full of glib phrases, about any issue or controversy that might arise, in the hope that it will stop MPs going “off-message.” All it produces is politicians spouting a lot of glib phrases. If politicians are going to go “off-message,” they still will, by conscious choice or spectacular accident.

  Politicians are not just given talking points to break out if they venture to speak to the media. One long-serving member notes with derision that his leader’s office sends out points for use in the weekly period when MPs make short ninety-second statements in the parliament about electoral matters. The only challenge here is how you, for example, get “We have stopped the boats” into a contribution noting the success of one of your local netball teams in the regional comp.

  Press releases are now often generated centrally. “It used to be the case that, as an Opposition frontbencher – or even as a backbencher – if you wanted to put out a press release, you’d do all your own research about the issue, write it up, and then you would send it out,” this MP tells me. “Not anymore!”

  In the House of Representatives, there is now little incentive to put much effort into parliamentary debates. That’s not because the government controls the numbers – it always has – but because nobody listens to parliament anymore. The public doesn’t listen and, for that matter, neither do the politicians, who are usually sitting back in their offices getting on with other business. A speech in the House was once an occasion for MPs to make a mark.

  People often lament the declining diversity in the life experience of new parliamentarians and argue that this is a reason for the drabness of politics. I would argue a countercase. Whatever the background of the politicians coming into parliament, the decline of chamber debate as a platform for ambitious politicians means many members of the House of Representatives never have to learn to be parliamentarians. That is, they don’t have to learn about, engage in and be able to a
dvocate or explain the context of policy decisions, let alone the decisions themselves. They don’t have to learn parliamentary negotiation. Some of them, as a result, don’t understand that parliament is about negotiation. The fact that Tony Abbott never bothered to meet the crossbench senators who held the key to much of his legislation reflects an unfortunately common ignorance and contempt for the Senate and its processes in the lower house. It was a point of pride for Kevin Rudd and much of his cabinet that they would not negotiate with, or even talk to, the Greens.

  The capacity of politicians to absorb the institutional memory of the parliament itself has therefore been degraded. A House of Reps backbencher’s only detailed exposure to a policy issue, and the government’s legislative response, might be if they happen to sit on a parliamentary committee examining that issue, or that legislation.

  It is really only in the crossbench senators that we still see the dramatic impact that a parliamentary life can have on individuals and their views. Crossbench senators are forced to become experts in more or less everything that goes through the parliament. They are lobbied on everything, forced to debate everything, down to clause-by-clause detail on contentious legislation. People with limited life, political or policy experience suddenly blossom under the onslaught of exposure to complex issues. Think of how the much-ridiculed Jacqui Lambie, Ricky Muir, Glenn Lazarus and Dio Wang have developed since they entered parliament in July 2014. They are the best examples of what happens when people are exposed to the institutional memory of not just the bureaucracy and the parliament, but of all the lobbyists and others with an interest in an issue.

  The rise and rise of presidential-style politics has infected every aspect of the way politicians’ days are shaped. In Question Time, almost all the questions go to the prime minister, rather than his or her ministers. The driving force is getting the “grab” for the evening news. The days when an Opposition would ask questions of other ministers, or even “pick off” the weakest minister in a government, seem long past. Even more forgotten are times when oppositions asked questions seeking information, and government ministers took seriously the task of answering them.

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  History and memory are astonishingly potent weapons in politics. This is particularly important at a time when the major political parties are institutions that, in historical terms, are a little bereft of a cause. Labor, the Liberals and the Nationals have all moved far from where they started, as the social and political institutions that helped define them have disappeared. Labor doesn’t really have an ideology anymore. In fact, it spends quite a lot of its time trying not to have an ideology. The Coalition, on the other hand, found itself becoming increasingly ideological under Tony Abbott’s leadership, but voters were somewhat perplexed at what they had apparently endorsed at the 2013 election. If it is not so clear anymore why, as an organisation, you exist, it only becomes more imperative to define yourself by the history of your actions.

  Reflecting on Tony Abbott’s fall in September, the Economist noted that:

  The old class-bound lines, along which Liberal and Labor loyalties once ran, have gone. Both parties are now hunting on the same ground, among an urban, educated swing-voting middle class. When confronted by the findings of the latest opinion polls or focus groups, the parties’ tendency is to panic; the next election is never far away.

  With ideology absent or confused, the battle for the swinging voter who is unaligned in an ideological sense increases the apparent risks of standing for anything. It also increases the difficulty of defining what you stand for.

  But as time goes by, the memories tend to over-glorify the past, and under-comprehend how it came about. The classic case in recent Australian history is that of the period of reform in the 1980s and 1990s. Labor likes to claim it as utterly its own: only Labor had the courage and capacity to take risky policy decisions and pursue unpopular reforms which led to the transformation of the economy. By contrast, the Coalition has argued that these changes could not have been achieved without its assistance and that it was really all its own agenda. Hazy memories of Bob Hawke’s “consensus” politics tend further to blur the memory of what happened into some golden period of universal agreement about the need for change – in stark contrast to the one we face now.

  Just as important in determining the history of the 1980s and 1990s were the motivations and political perceptions of the times. With the political memory of the Whitlam government still fresh, Labor was perennially on the back foot and desperate to prove its economic credentials. The Coalition was always seen as the party that the business establishment believed would undertake much harder-line reform. That meant that the Coalition’s struggle through the 1980s and 1990s increasingly became one of proving to voters that it wasn’t too hardline. In other words, not much has changed in the way voters see the two parties today.

  The competition to “write” the history of any period becomes even more intense as a vehicle for explaining to voters, in memories that are comfortably familiar, what you stand for. One of the benefits of winning a political battle is the likelihood that your version will be the one remembered.

  The myth of Howard’s support for Labor’s reforms still powerfully plays out in our politics. Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey and their colleagues regularly asserted that the Coalition supported Labor’s economic reforms in the 1980s as a way of gaining ownership of them.

  Yet blurred memories of past glories can have devastating effects. When Tony Abbott won government in 2013, it was with a promise that he would bring back the glory days of Howard. For much of his cabinet, who had been part of the declining end of the Howard years, that meant simply taking what they believed to be Howard government plays out of the book and repeating them. Nowhere was this more obvious than in the 2014 budget.

  The Coalition had been quite open about its political strategy even before it won office. It would arrive without having made many positive proposals; it would spend its first term getting rid of various Labor policies against which it had campaigned; and it would fix the budget to establish a strong foundation from which to go into a second term.

  The Coalition’s absolute belief that it could simply replicate what John Howard and Peter Costello had done was something to behold. It refused to recognise or contemplate the many changes that had taken place since 1996. In 1996 the economy was lifting out of a savage recession. The revenue bases of the government had started to snap back into shape, as they had always done in the past. A new – and what would eventually prove historic – resources boom was around the corner. In addressing the budget, Howard and Costello had thirteen years of Labor policy to undo or reshape.

  The exceptionally different circumstances that would confront Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey were hardly a secret. The world economy had been failing to extricate itself from the aftermath of the global financial crisis. Australia’s revenue bases had collapsed. Our boom was over and we had already spent the proceeds well into the future by giving ourselves unsustainable tax cuts. There were only a few years of Labor policy to undo, even if there had been an explosion of government spending after the global financial crisis.

  Yet this all came as a real shock to the Coalition when it finally won office. It had believed its own story that all the problems lay with the incompetence of Labor. It had refused to countenance that some things really had changed.

  History remains the most intense of political battlefields. No one understands that better than Tony Abbott, who, in the wake of his fall, set about attempting to rewrite the history of the challenge and to nobble his successor by claiming that Malcolm Turnbull was keeping to his plan. It was a Shakespearean moment: Tony Abbott, the Julius Caesar assassinated for overstepping his powers, was suddenly playing the part of Mark Antony at the Roman forum telling us that Brutus was an honourable man.

  At a time when the old ideological divides have faded and been transformed, history has become an even more potent part of the political play. Ironically,
though, in the way politics is actually conducted our leaders regularly take catastrophic decisions either because they have hazy memories of what has gone before, or because they work in structures that don’t require them to consider history and experience. Without the ballast of memory, it is hardly surprising that they often seem to be so little in control of where they are going.

  Tabloid Times

  The Crimean War is well-nigh forgotten today, save for the Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingale and, in Australia, a legacy of streets named Balaclava and Sebastopol. As the historian Orlando Figes noted in his 2012 book, The Crimean War: A History, there would not be many people who could say what it was all about, even in the states that fought, which included Russia, Britain, France, Piedmont-Sardinia in Italy and the Ottoman Empire, and even though three-quarters of a million soldiers died in the conflict. “Historians have tended to dismiss the religious motives of the war,” he writes:

  Few devote more than a paragraph or two to the dispute in the Holy Land – the rivalry between the Catholics or Latins (backed by France) and the Greeks (supported by Russia) over who should have control of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem and the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem … Until the religious wars of our own age, it seemed implausible that a petty quarrel over some churchwarden’s keys should entangle the great powers in a major war.

  Instead, the war has been seen as an outcome of imperial rivalries and the actions of statesmen.

  The context in which we understand the past fluctuates over time, influenced by contemporary events and changing fashions of thought. Think how Shakespeare’s Henry V is regularly reimagined and reinterpreted every few years through the prism of contemporary fascinations. As Figes says, we might now understand the Crimean War as a religious war rather than an imperial one because religion, in the last couple of decades, has suddenly re-emerged as a recognised cause of war and a present danger to the Western world. But you could equally argue that our focus on ideological struggles of a political nature, and our ignorance of the past, incline us to see religious wars as something totally new – when of course they are not.