POLITICAL AMNESIA

Correspondence

Scott Ludlam

Laura Tingle’s thoughtful and at times sombre portrait of the politics of amnesia touched a nerve for me, principally because, as if to prove her point, there was so much in the essay I wasn’t aware of. Modern Australian political history tends to canvas the sharp break-points and scandals, leaving slower-moving institutional dynamics as vague silhouettes below the surface. In this hyper-accelerated and superficial political environment, Tingle suggests, our knowledge of modern political and institutional history has atrophied to a sketchy caricature. Even more damaging, she suggests that this amnesia among political, media and public service actors is cultivated and actively rewarded by a system in which methodical and deliberative debates over public policy have been supplanted by a fevered churn of catchy announceables, seven-second grabs and breathless “gotcha” moments.

Tingle saves her sharpest barbs for the brief, hysterical tenure of Prime Minister Abbott, whose reign hopefully marks the nadir of this kind of blindfold politics, but with Prime Minister Turnbull’s page in history as yet unwritten, it is too soon to tell whether or not the tides described in this essay are turning, at least as far as the major parties are concerned. 

The relentless erosion of the public sphere by private interests deserves further scrutiny, as the public sector has found itself increasingly contorted, downsized and restructured. While Tingle’s essay mournfully describes the loss of institutional memory as a natural consequence of decades of perpetual overhaul and quickening political cycles, the public is also sold the assumption that lean, for-profit corporations will always deliver services more efficiently than lumbering, faceless bureaucracies. As the essay demonstrates, a little historical remembering does substantial damage to this lucrative conceit. 

This is just one way in which our political culture now firmly rewards political amnesia. It has become an adaptive trait. I can’t help but wonder how much that has to do with the convergence of the ALP and the Coalition towards some beige, neoliberal-infected political “centre” so that in some respects they are nearly indistinguishable. Political amnesia helps Labor insiders cope with the quiet abandonment of progressive positions when they move from Opposition to government, and it has certainly smoothed the conscience of the Coalition to forget that had their approach to the global financial crisis prevailed, Australia would probably have gone into a sharp recession. Principally, this cultivated amnesia helps all participants in the major parties stay sane when party positions change or reverse through some urgent expedient, rendering yesterday’s strident rhetoric about Oceania awkwardly incompatible with today’s talking points about Eastasia. 

While precise details might be easily forgotten, the wearisome tenor of this fishbowl politics is having a marked effect on the electorate, which is now voting for non-major-party candidates in record numbers. The combined vote of the ALP and the Coalition has been in long decline, as voters are tempted towards independents and minor parties who, irrespective of their politics, at least appear to have a pulse. Thus the Senate now contains the largest number of crossbenchers in its history and functions from time to time as a genuinely deliberative chamber, a point alluded to briefly in the essay but probably worth further consideration. 

The role of the internet also deserves another look. On the surface, social media platforms have quickened the pace of superficial political churn and deepened our tribal echo chambers, but there are countervailing tendencies that are more interesting. The internet is also a deep repository of political memory – anyone with a modicum of interest and access to a web browser can unearth historical parliamentary reports, statements, press clippings or tweets and pull them into the flow of today’s conversation in a way that was impossible in the relatively recent past. The more conversational, many-to-many nature of the medium also acts as a counterweight to older-style broadcast politics, where rulers could more easily get away with assurances that, “We’ve always been at war with Eastasia.” There are public engagement tools being brought into service in the United States and Europe that are bringing citizens ever closer to direct democracy, and the first pillar of such deliberative techniques is access to good information for all participants, which can’t help but act as a solvent of the kind of cultivated ignorance described in the essay. 

Political amnesia is hardly just an Australian phenomenon – the grotesque US Republican primaries provide one sharp example of that – but we do our forgetting in our own unique way. I can’t help but feel that having swung so far in the direction laid out in Laura Tingle’s essay, maybe the pendulum is at last heading back the other way. We’d best hope so.

Scott Ludlam