By Tim Dunlop Posted Thu 14 Nov 2013
Photo: The major political parties are pre-selecting the wrong people. (AAP: Daniel Munoz)
As Parliament returns under a new leader, Tim Dunlop offers correctives to the myths and misconceptions pervading the debate on politics and media.
1. Tony Abbott was and remains a creation of the media
His current tactic of starving the beast, of strictly controlling media access, of blocking government agencies from giving the media information, of only giving interviews to those he knows will conduct the interview from a kneeling position, is the logical extension of the previous three years of media coverage where they failed to hold him to account, regurgitated almost uncritically his narratives about Gillard government policy, and acted as if his prime ministership was inevitable. Had they not been so compliant then, he couldn't be getting away with this now. Crocodile tears from Laurie Oakes are just that.
2. Tony Abbott was and remains a creation of the Labor Party
From Kevin Rudd's misuse of the ETS debate as a way to snooker Malcolm Turnbull - which led directly to Turnbull's fall from favour within the party and paved the way for Liberal factions to install Abbott - to the ongoing leadership instability within Labor itself, the ALP fertilised the field of rampant media speculation and breathless rumour-mongering with their own bullsh*t. Labor supporters can fight forever about whether Gillard or Rudd was more at fault, but Tony Abbott will still be prime minister.
3. People do not like Tony Abbott, never have, and still don't
But this is not a fatal flaw in a political leader, something Labor should learn in a hurry. Despite recent mythologising, support for John Howard was generally a mile wide and an inch deep too and he did OK. Longevity as a leader is about much more than personal popularity, something our poll-obsessed media environment rarely acknowledges. Abbott's fall will not come about because of a lack of popularity but because of a lack of competence. Same way it did for Kevin Rudd.
4. There isn't now, and never was over the last three years, a budget emergency
D'uh. The Gillard/Rudd governments ran an efficient, tight economy. As economist Stephen Koukoulas has noted:
In its budget settings, the Labor government implemented the largest tightening in fiscal policy ever recorded. The budget tightened by 3 per cent of GDP in a couple of years and 2012-13 saw the largest cut in real government spending ever.
Labor also ran a reasonably fair economy, though the underlying logic of their economic philosophy inevitably mitigates against such fairness. Which brings me to...
5. The major political parties are not the same, nor are they sufficiently different
Australia's elites - the world's elites - have converged on a very similar idea of what constitutes a properly functioning economy and it is broadly a neo-liberal conception. This is not necessarily a bad thing, as long as means don't become more important than ends, and as long as those ends are subject to genuine political contest. The trouble with subscribing as completely to neo-liberal means as both major parties do is that those means - balanced budgets, the demonisation of deficits regardless of the economic cycle, constant decreases in corporate taxation, the casualisation of work and the concomitant downward pressure on the wages share of GDP, etc etc - make it very hard to then pursue social policies of fairness and redistribution. Not impossible, but more difficult, because the logic of the chosen means not only mitigates against good social outcomes but serves to demonise those outcomes. As Paul Krugman noted in a recent piece about the behaviour of international credit agencies, "... just as the austerity drive isn't really about fiscal responsibility, the push for 'structural reform' isn't really about growth; in both cases, it's mainly about dismantling the welfare state." In other words, neo-liberal means undermine good social ends because those ends are defined as bad economics. This is a gift for the Liberals and a millstone for Labor.
6. Opposition to climate change is ideological, not logical
Climate change denialists inside and outside the Abbott Government cannot be argued out their position on the matter. If you want to address the issue, that's your starting point.
7. There are no bad readers, just bad writers
Those in the media (this, for example) who tell you that people are disengaged, are not interested in politics, that they want politics off the front page, that voters welcome the quiet of a silent and non-responsive government, are not offering any sort of clever insight into the strange alchemy of public opinion, merely testifying to their own incompetence. People's understanding of politics cannot be separated from the media's coverage of it, so to the extent that voters are disengaged, they are disengaged from the way it is covered. As Hal Crawford, head of NineMSN said recently, "If a story is important, it is possible to make it interesting." Hallelujah.
8. Democratic institutions work until they don't
Our voting system, particularly in the Senate, is too vulnerable to manipulation, and that oversized Senate ballot paper is insane. Twice in the past 20 years (1990/1998), the party winning the majority of votes in the Lower House has ended up with a minority of the seats. The major political parties are pre-selecting the wrong people. (One of the reasons we have such mindless political debates is because the system throws up mindless candidates. We seem to get three Christopher Pynes for every one Andrew Leigh, and that's being generous.) Question Time is a farce and the farce is continuing under Speaker Bishop. Even the wondrous Australian Electoral Commission badly blotted its copy book this year by losing a swag of votes in WA, while the gentle compulsion of our compulsory voting system (which I tend to support) isn't working as it should, as evidenced by huge number of missing voters from the last federal election. These things are both cause and effect, but the underlying issue is that when they start to malfunction, it damages people's trust in the system as whole. A comprehensive review is in order.
9. The road to democratic renewal is paved with Sophie Mirabella
If you want to know what a healthy, functioning democracy looks like, study the seat of Indi. It wasn't just that independent Cathy McGowan beat entrenched and feted big-party incumbent Sophie Mirabella, it was that McGowan herself was a creation of grassroots support. In other words, the movement existed before the candidate. Read this excellent account to get your democratic juices flowing:
Indi has never seen anything like this before. For the first time in living memory thousands of people from all walks of life were engaging in politics and having a say in how they would like to see their electorate represented. For too long they had been taken for granted. Labor knew it couldn't win it, so it hadn't ever bothered trying; the Liberals knew they were going to win, so they didn't bother either.
Then sing the song: "From little things, big things grow."
Tim Dunlop is the author of The New Front Page: New Media and the Rise of the Audience. He writes regularly for The Drum and a number of other publications. View his full profile here.
Nine stray thoughts on the Abbott ascendency - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)
