POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Allan Behm

Like the Quarterly Essay, papal encyclicals deal with matters of contemporary moment. In 1958, Pius XII issued Meminisse iuvat (“It Helps to Remember”), addressing the plight of the Church in Eastern Europe. No doubt he was channelling Ovid, just as Laura Tingle has in the dedication appended to her excellent and very sobering encyclical. But while the Pope employed the consoling language of prayer and the imagery of an ancient iconography, Tingle has delivered a much more forensic and mordant account of the dysfunctional nature of modern Australian government.

For those of us who cannot remember whether we have amnesia or not, it is confronting to have the trite and ephemeral character of our national politics so ruthlessly flensed and filleted. It is as though we are doomed to live in a Kafkaesque present that comes from nowhere and goes to the same place. And for someone like me, who spent three decades grappling with the major themes of foreign, defence and national security policy, not to mention a subsequent four years wrestling with climate change policy as a chief of staff in the Rudd and Gillard governments, it forces the unanswerable question, “Why did I waste my life like that?”

Yet political amnesia is not new. We simply do not care to remember it, thereby permitting its constant repetition. Just three years before the Anschluss that helped to set Europe on its path to hell, in a famous speech attacking German rearmament, Churchill commented on the futile Stresa agreement between Britain, France and Italy.

When the situation was manageable it was neglected, and now that it is thoroughly out of hand we apply too late the remedies which then might have effected a cure. There is nothing new in the story. It is as old as the sibylline books. It falls into that long, dismal catalogue of the fruitlessness of experience and the confirmed unteachability of mankind. Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.

He could have been talking about Australia’s experience.

If one cannot trace the lineage of a policy, placing it in the broader narrative of history, then it will lack relevance and durability. The troubled story of Australia’s climate change policy offers a poignant example of this. It was not so much the inability of the Gillard government adequately to explain its policy as it was Abbott’s refusal to countenance Howard’s slow but steady journey to the Damascus of a price on carbon that destroyed a market-based approach to tackling global warming. The inane repetition of “Axe the tax” failed to distinguish between a tax and a price. More importantly, the trashing of the Clean Energy Future package both deprived Australia of an economically efficient means of reducing the atmospheric carbon burden and destroyed our reputation as a progressive and constructive member of a community of like-minded nations intent upon creating a global solution to “the greatest moral challenge of our generation” – and all this for a short-term political victory that was inevitable. It is a delicious irony that the victor is now himself vanquished, joining his soulmate, Canada’s recently repudiated prime minister, Stephen Harper, in the pit that is amnesia’s doppelganger – oblivion. 

But the etiology of Australia’s governmental paralysis does not depend on amnesia alone. Tingle weaves at least three other symptoms of dysfunction into her lament for a broken system. 

First, the hollowing out of the public service, with the consequent loss of institutional memory, has contributed enormously to our political amnesia.

Second, the rise of the political class has effectively promoted personal political preferment over the national interest, or even the interests of the party. While Labor boasts a greater collection of dunderheads (especially in the Senate) who have arm-wrestled their way through the union movement, the Liberal and National parties are not immune from the careerists and crazy-braves unable to distinguish between pragmatism and principle. For the political class, the tide of history is no help in surfing the wave of the moment.

And third, the arrival of the political staffer – reflecting the need of many politicians to surround themselves with adolescent claqueurs rather than experienced counsellors – reinforces the triumph of evanescence over substance. The half-life of the average political staffer is about two years, with changes in ministerial appointment and, more particularly, changes in government precipitating major clean-outs. As Tingle reflects throughout her essay, churn is the enemy of continuity. It, too, causes political amnesia.

This amnesia, however, is reinforced by a number of equally pernicious developments that could be added to Tingle’s list.

Chief among these, at least until Turnbull’s resurrection as prime minister, has been the absence of any articulated vision for Australia, or even for the government of the day. The electorate simply has no idea what the government aspires to, what it stands for or what its values might be. The recurrent slogans of “queue jumpers,” “they’re coming to get us,” “the economy’s a wreck,” “we pay too much tax” and “small government” betray a craven inability to imagine a future that improves upon the past. This is not just amnesia – it is cynicism.

Second, leadership is the vehicle that delivers vision. That, too, is in deficit. The sight of prime ministers lurching from one self-generated crisis to another serves both to undermine the confidence of the electorate and to reinforce the popular view that we are governed by hollow men and women. One of Howard’s strengths was to manage the news cycle, rather than being managed by it. Rudd, Gillard and Abbott all failed to assert the authority of their office, preferring to start at shadows or manufacture “announcements” that were little more than a recycling program to an electorate that couldn’t be bothered remembering what might have been said yesterday.

A third factor that contributes to Australia’s political malaise is a rejection of reform, less a result of reform fatigue (the past decade has not seen enough reform to tire anyone) than of reform phobia. And where reform has been attempted, such as the Clean Energy Future package managed through the parliament by Greg Combet (more an economic reform than an environmental one, it should be noted), it has been unceremoniously dumped by fear-mongering ideologues.

A final and even more cynical contribution to the mess that is contemporary Australian government is the disdain for effective accountability. A procession of ministers, for instance, has hidden behind the fiction of “operational security” in refusing to comment on so-called “on-water matters” when questioned about the plight of refugees and detainees.

The Abbott government’s draconian Border Force Act made it a criminal offence for anyone working for or contracted to the Department of Immigration and Border Protection to reveal anything that happens at the offshore detention centres. This effectively removes an element of public administration costing over $1 billion per annum from parliamentary and media scrutiny, morphing it into a quasi-security operation. The black uniforms and martial tone sit oddly with Turnbull’s new emphasis on reconciliation, inclusiveness and engagement.

And the security organisations, never especially accountable, have themselves become even less accountable for the actions of their employees, who are now indemnified against prosecution if they commit a crime in the course of a “special security operation.”

The 2001 Children Overboard affair and the subsequent parliamentary inquiries showed that ministerial staffers are not accountable. While public servants are subject to a biannual pummelling at the hands of inquisitorial senators, ministerial advisors are not answerable for their actions or for the policy advice they provide to their ministers. This is symptomatic of the pathology modern governments have towards any form of accountability, whether it is media scrutiny or parliamentary review. Yet accountability is central to a vibrant and robust democracy. It is also a powerful stimulant to memory.

In 1979, John Paul II issued his first encyclical, Redemptor hominis (“Mankind’s Redeemer”), offering the promise of redemption as the solution to the doubt, crisis and collapse affecting the contemporary church. We should all look forward to Tingle’s third encyclical in the hope that it will inspire confidence and optimism that our governmental system is on the mend. To that end, Cicero’s De Officiis (“Concerning Responsibilities,” often mistranslated as “On Duties”) may be a more instructive text than the Annales of Tacitus.

Allan Behm