Political Amnesia

In reply to Laura Tingle's Quarterly Essay, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How To Govern.

POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence


Jennifer Rayner

If the one-eyed man is king among the blind, what does that make the keeper of memories in a country of alleged amnesiacs? Seriously and permanently exasperated, if Laura Tingle’s Political Amnesia is anything to go by. 

Tingle began covering national politics before many of we “meretricious players” now populating Parliament House were born. The number of people who know more than she does about the contemporary political and policy history of Australia could fit around the dining table at the Lodge.

Having borne witness to Australian politics at some of its greatest modern moments of achievement and ambition, it is not surprising that Tingle would look reproachfully upon the past six years. Between their echoing codas of “wild treachery and weirdness,” and the claustrophobic tug of war that has seen barely a metre of progress gained on key policy issues, these must often have been dispiriting times to cover from up close. 

But in searching for ways to put all that behind us, Tingle may be looking in the wrong place. By placing such emphasis on political memory, her essay implicitly asserts that the past is an accurate guide to the present; that “what worked then” should influence us – public servants, politicians and advisers – when making decisions about “what to do now.” She writes: “Without memory, there is no context or continuity for the making of new decisions . . . The perils of this are manifest. Decisions are taken that are not informed by knowledge of what has worked, or not worked, in the past.”

At the same time, Tingle acknowledges that the environment in which politicians seek to govern is very different now than it was twenty or thirty years ago. She focuses on changes in the media landscape and their effect on the daily practice of politics, but a series of broader shifts beyond the walls of parliament and the press gallery also need to be acknowledged. Taken together, they make today’s political environment so different from the Howard years – and certainly from any prior era – that it is questionable whether we can gain all that much from mining the successes and stuff-ups of those earlier times. The really significant changes include:

 

The decline of government expertise and authority

Where once governments could speak to the people with an authoritative voice (and public service agencies to their ministers with the same), there are now many and competing sources of information, knowledge and opinion. Put simply, citizens in democracies don’t believe or trust their governments just because they are The Government anymore. The mistrust that started with Watergate and the Dismissal, and grew through events like the Iraq War and the global financial crisis, has seen to that; not to mention local outrages like Children Overboard and the steady drip of entitlement scandals, broken promises and internecine brawls that have worn holes in the credibility of office. 

The result is that every idea, every argument, every policy must be developed and prosecuted in an environment that can sometimes resemble a free-fire zone. Competing ideas and information from lobby groups, academics and every wingnut with an internet connection are constantly whizzing by, while media outlets – whom Tingle rightly identifies as increasingly relentless – are hunting for any crack in the plaster before it has even set.

The GST debate was a glaring example of this. By my count, no fewer than seven organisations or individuals – the Greens; David Gillespie MP; Grattan Institute; Deloitte Access Economics; PricewaterhouseCoopers; Parliamentary Budget Office; CPA Australia – recently published detailed and diverse modelling on ways to change the GST and its impact on household budgets. There’s no doubt this adds contestability to the debate, but it has also seen the Liberal government lose control of the tax reform conversation in a way that will make laying out a coherent policy direction mighty difficult (should it ever find the cojones to do so). 

When the voice of government no longer carries a decisive weight in political debate, setting a policy course and steering true takes far more effort and skill than was required of past administrations. 

 

The personalisation and customisation of service delivery

After decades of being told we are not citizens but “clients,” people have internalised this message. As a result, consumers of government services now expect to be king at the Medicare office just as much as they are at Myer. Gone are the days when governments could dictate to Australians how and when their offerings should be accessed, or cleanly delimit their areas of responsibility. As the Department of Finance noted: “citizens are not concerned about which agencies or levels of government deliver the services they require; they increasingly expect coordinated responses that they can access in any way they choose.”

The behind-the-scenes coordination and information-sharing needed to make this happen is diabolically complicated. The introduction of the National Disability Insurance Scheme is Australia’s first serious attempt to deliver truly tailored services on a national scale. Instead of block-funding services that people with disability must take or leave, the scheme offers custom-designed care packages that let consumers themselves decide what sort of supports they need. Successfully delivering this scheme to the half a million Australians who may ultimately be eligible for it will require an unprecedented level of coordination between state and federal governments, as well as among government agencies at both levels. It is a clear departure from the one-size-fits-most approach. 

Whether or not the NDIS succeeds according to its original vision, this is what service delivery will be expected to look like in the future. No past Australian administration – not Howard’s, not Keating’s or Hawke’s before him – ever faced a populace with such high or varied expectations of how government would serve it. 

 

The triple bottom line

Tingle writes somewhat witheringly of Kevin Rudd’s commitment to achieving the “double dividend” of economic and environmental good when designing Australia’s response to the global financial crisis. But in fact, almost all policies are now expected to take some account of the “triple bottom line” of economic, environmental and social impacts. In particular, growing awareness over the past two decades of environmental harms such as climate change and, more recently, social challenges such as inequality, mean that governments must grapple with solving specific problems while ensuring their solutions also address – or at least do not exacerbate – these more general ones. 

Energy policy needs not only to deal with practicalities like pricing or supply, but also to lower Australia’s carbon emissions. Infrastructure investment must boost productivity while remedying service gaps that have fostered inequalities across our cities. Health policy should make us fitter and healthier, and do so in ways that deliver long-term efficiencies to the budget. 

It was far simpler to design and deliver policies back when the only things that mattered were their primary impacts: how many people helped, how much money spent, what contribution to the nation’s capital stock? 

In short then, the present political environment bears about as much resemblance to that of the early Howard years as Kim Kardashian does to Kim Beazley. Today’s governments have weaker authority, but are expected to do more for us and fix more complex problems. All this, while having less direct control over key economic levers and being increasingly hemmed in by events and agreements set in train far from our shores.

Australia’s recent administrations are of course not alone in facing these challenges. In light of this, it seems that asking, “What worked here, before?” will not necessarily unearth the useful insights Tingle has advocated for in her essay. A better question for those seeking to make sound policy may be, “What is working now, elsewhere?”

Rather than studying the rear-view mirror, we should be looking overseas, to other jurisdictions around Australia, to any place where they have faced the same problems we wish to solve and successfully surmounted them in today’s political environment. For example, Canada has a long-term unemployment rate less than half of Australia’s – what can we learn from it about policies that get people back to work and keep them there? Germany’s share of world service exports is five times greater than Australia’s – what might we glean from its success and apply to our own economy? Victorian school kids routinely perform better on standardised tests like NAPLAN than their confreres elsewhere – what should we borrow from that state’s approach to lift standards across the nation? 

To gather promising policies, magpie-like, we do not necessarily need public servants with long institutional memories. However, we certainly do need a smart, analytically rigorous APS staffed by the sharpest talent this country can produce. 

Tingle is spot-on in arguing that continual cuts and disrespect are no way to build a public service of this calibre. But if we can recruit the best people and put them to work in well-resourced agencies held in high esteem by politicians and the public alike, their mission once there should not be to delve inwards and into the past. It must be to look outwards to policy successes elsewhere and in the present. 

Jennifer Rayner

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This is a reply to Laura Tingle’s Quarterly Essay, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How To Govern. To read the full essay, login, subscribe, or buy the book.

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