By Mungo MacCallum Monday 13 October 2014

Photo: Tony Abbott, rather than blaming his predecessors, needs to do something about the lack of trust in politics. (AAP: Lukas Coch)

Polls show our faith in politicians is hitting new lows, delving even deeper than during the Rudd-Gillard years. We must not let this disaffection undermine our resolve for democracy, writes Mungo MacCallum.

It is hardly news that Australians aren't too keen on their politicians; after all, bagging the pollies has long been a national sport.

Bludgers, layabouts, only in it for the perks - the opinion polls usually show our elected representatives fall somewhere between used car salesmen and journalists down in the national hit parade.

But even so, the extent of the disaffection revealed last week is both alarming and depressing. The Australian reports that a national survey from Griffith University shows that only a bare majority - just 52.5 per cent of the populace - have any faith in the federal Government at all and 46.5 per cent believe it to be untrustworthy to a greater or lesser degree.

Worse, 28.6 per cent, more than a quarter, say that democracy itself does not work, although they appear to have no alternative, falling back to the Churchillian position that democracy is undoubtedly the worst possible system of government - except for all the others.

But wait, there's more. The federal Government is now seen as the bottom of the barrel, less trusted than state and local counterparts. That includes the New South Wales mob, exposed by ICAC as serially corrupt on both sides of politics; the rest might be less on the nose, but in the past they have often been regarded as less than salubrious. And the local council chambers sometimes appear to be no more than venues for developers running in and out with brown paper bags.

The feds, by and large, were at least thought to be cleanskins. So what has gone wrong? Tony Abbott, ever the wishful thinker, says that the survey is what he calls a lagging indicator: it only reflected the previous government, and now he is in charge everything will be all right again. If only it was so simple.

True, the Rudd-Gillard years started the decline. Kevin Rudd's ascension was, for a while, seen as something of a renaissance; his popularity soared to undreamt of heights. But then came December 2009, when Abbott replaced the well-regarded Malcolm Turnbull and while he was limbering up his wrecking ball, the Copenhagen summit on climate change, which Rudd had regarded as crucial, failed to deliver.

The then prime minster went into a decline: he squibbed the opportunity for a double dissolution election and then shelved the whole climate change issue. While the voters were still trying to come to terms with that tergiversation, he was unexpectedly and inexplicably, it appeared, deposed. Julia Gillard, unannounced and unprepared, went on to lead a minority government that was never considered either functional or acceptable by its vociferous opponents, and a bewildered and disillusioned public eventually agreed.

So Abbott was somewhat reluctantly given his chance. He was not loved, but he could have been respected as the man who cleaned up the mess. Instead, he brought in a budget that broke a raft of promises that were deemed to be unfair and unreasonable - a conclusion last week confirmed by a NATSEM report that found almost all the pain went to the poor and hardly any to the rich, including - especially - the constituents of Abbott and his cabinet cronies. To put it mildly, trust was not restored.

The war (which Abbott  refuses to call a war) has helped a bit; wars always do, in their early stages. Both the aims and the strategies are muddled, but while the actual action involves no more that dropping a handful of bombs from a safe altitude, the majority are willing to sign up to Team Australia. Certainly Bill Shorten has on behalf of the Opposition, a bipartisan commitment that has left the dissenters at the fringes.

But while terrorism may be - indeed, is - Abbott's main game, it is not that of the voters. According to another survey, this time by Roy Morgan, only 11 per cent of the voters regard terrorism/wars/security as their top priority. More than three times as many gave the nod to another form of security altogether - economic security. Treasurer Joe Hockey seems to realise that; but his ham-fisted attempt to conflate the war with Labor's opposition to the unpopular budget measures only produced a public backlash and an applied rebuke from his bellicose leader.

But Abbott himself may also have overreached: the massive escalation on security has produced some unexpected and unwelcome critics from his most faithful followers. Last week in The Australian the libertarian Liberal Democrat, David Leyonhjelm, wrote a piece warning that the new legislation was both unnecessary and dangerous. And amazingly, in a companion piece the paper's foreign editor, Greg Sheridan, agreed.

Breaking the habit of a lifetime of supporting the spooks, he inveighed against the very idea of special intelligence operations - SIOs. These may not only be left unexamined and unanalysed by the media - they cannot even be mentioned. So if our trigger happy spooks may carelessly harm or even kill a suspect while confiscating a plastic sword, for instance, they will be totally unaccountable.

Sheridan hurriedly explains that such a misadventure could only happen by accident; he has not entirely abandoned his naive faith in spookdom. But it is a worry, because the accident could never be reported - forever; the legislation has no sunset clause. Clearly this is asking an already mistrustful electorate for a step into the unknown they are unlikely to take.

It is not the first time Abbott and his gung-ho Attorney-General Gorge Brandis have had to retreat: Leyonhjelm has already insisted on legislation to specifically ensure that the spooks reject torture as a security measure. Only physical torture of course; psychological torture, as inflicted by Scott Morrison and his agents with the indefinite incarceration of asylum seekers in the hell holes of Nauru and Manus Island is not only tolerated but encouraged.

But once again the message is blunt, even from such apparatchiks as Sheridan: you can't trust the Government. From which, as the Griffith survey indicates, it is a small progression to rejecting the system of democracy altogether. We cannot, must not, afford that. And Abbott, rather than incessantly blaming his predecessors, needs to do something about it. A sincere, if belated, mea culpa would be a good start to restoring a least some of the lost trust.

Mungo Wentworth MacCallum is a political journalist and commentator. View his full profile here.

Keep faith in democracy, if not politicians - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)