About the time Mike Baird moved on from being premier of New South
Wales I was having a conversation with a federal parliamentarian who
still insists politics has to be about ideas.
We were talking about the relentlessness of everything. I told him I’d thought over Christmas about hanging up my boots because the universe we both inhabit now feels hostile to humanity, it now roils like a cauldron. Spend too long in a cauldron and you end up as essential nutrients for a witch.
His response to my expression of mental exhaustion has imprinted itself on my consciousness during the dysfunctional, desperate, pumped-up opening to the federal political contest in 2017: he said politics is now unsustainable for normal people.
By normal people, the MP meant balanced people, people who need to be people as well as politicians, people who think, and read and connect with loved ones and people outside the cauldron.
His reflection went a little further. If politics becomes impossible for balanced people, there are practical consequences.
The profession will attract only a narrow type of personality, the pumped-up pugilists who thrive on adrenaline and gain their power through cycles of destruction, people who can’t function without the constant affirmation of being a public figure, and the endorphin rush of being front and centre.
Politics will, in essence, winnow out its best and brightest and most reflective people, and replace them with a production line of heavyweight boxers looking for the KO, and a cadre of show ponies – enough about you, more about me.
You can see why that’s a clarion thought.
Over the past decade or so, a decade in which the Australian parliament has clearly failed the citizenry, public life has intensified to the point where there is next to no downtime at all, not for the politicians, not for the people who advise them.
The constant deprivation of time to reflect, to ruminate, to be still, and the requirement to be “on” all the time, has raised the collective adrenaline level.
Just as we all hit refresh constantly on our feeds, always in the thrall of the new – never mind the important – politics cascades, never permitted a moment of calm or a moment of mindfulness.
The rise of the 24/7 media cycle, the disruptive power of social media, has created a new style of politics, politics conducted in a fishbowl, a confined space with no space to expand and explore, and no obvious means of escape.
The cycle seethes rather than informs. Public life is conducted in a permanent state of fight or flight. The environment rewards conflict, real or manufactured. So politics dishes up conflict as a substitute for evidence-based policy, over and over again.
I could hear the collective cheer of backbench fight club and the ghastly echo chamber as the cycle declared Malcolm Turnbull was “back in the game” not because he’d succeeded in making Australia a better place, but because he’d thrown Bill Shorten down on the mat, and put his knee on his throat, never mind what went under the bus in the process.
We were talking about the relentlessness of everything. I told him I’d thought over Christmas about hanging up my boots because the universe we both inhabit now feels hostile to humanity, it now roils like a cauldron. Spend too long in a cauldron and you end up as essential nutrients for a witch.
His response to my expression of mental exhaustion has imprinted itself on my consciousness during the dysfunctional, desperate, pumped-up opening to the federal political contest in 2017: he said politics is now unsustainable for normal people.
By normal people, the MP meant balanced people, people who need to be people as well as politicians, people who think, and read and connect with loved ones and people outside the cauldron.
His reflection went a little further. If politics becomes impossible for balanced people, there are practical consequences.
The profession will attract only a narrow type of personality, the pumped-up pugilists who thrive on adrenaline and gain their power through cycles of destruction, people who can’t function without the constant affirmation of being a public figure, and the endorphin rush of being front and centre.
Politics will, in essence, winnow out its best and brightest and most reflective people, and replace them with a production line of heavyweight boxers looking for the KO, and a cadre of show ponies – enough about you, more about me.
You can see why that’s a clarion thought.
Over the past decade or so, a decade in which the Australian parliament has clearly failed the citizenry, public life has intensified to the point where there is next to no downtime at all, not for the politicians, not for the people who advise them.
The constant deprivation of time to reflect, to ruminate, to be still, and the requirement to be “on” all the time, has raised the collective adrenaline level.
Just as we all hit refresh constantly on our feeds, always in the thrall of the new – never mind the important – politics cascades, never permitted a moment of calm or a moment of mindfulness.
The rise of the 24/7 media cycle, the disruptive power of social media, has created a new style of politics, politics conducted in a fishbowl, a confined space with no space to expand and explore, and no obvious means of escape.
The cycle seethes rather than informs. Public life is conducted in a permanent state of fight or flight. The environment rewards conflict, real or manufactured. So politics dishes up conflict as a substitute for evidence-based policy, over and over again.
I could hear the collective cheer of backbench fight club and the ghastly echo chamber as the cycle declared Malcolm Turnbull was “back in the game” not because he’d succeeded in making Australia a better place, but because he’d thrown Bill Shorten down on the mat, and put his knee on his throat, never mind what went under the bus in the process.
Let’s spell it out. What seems to have gone under the bus in the last little while has been a real chance to end a decade of partisan hand-to-hand combat over climate and energy policy which has left the national electricity grid literally creaking under the strain of collective failure.
To plot the path of the first major failure of the political year, we need to walk back a distance to the repeal of the carbon tax (that was never a carbon tax) when Tony Abbott won power, and Labor’s response to that setback.
It’s a bit hard for voters to understand what happened because Shorten and the shadow treasurer, Chris Bowen, have been utterly unable to explain their own policy this week, flailing around like a couple of brain dead numpties, in a week where explaining the policy and the thought behind it actually did matter.
Perhaps Shorten and Bowen don’t know what their own policy is, perhaps they are clueless, or dangerously complacent. But if you read the documents, the policy and the intention behind it, is reasonably clear.
After the defeat of the clean energy policy, Labor licked its wounds, and lowered the ambition of the Rudd/Gillard period, coming up with a policy that would have some prospect of gaining bipartisan support in the event Turnbull could walk the Coalition back, slightly, in the direction of where he was in 2009.
Labor proposed a thing that was real, albeit lacking in critical detail: an emissions intensity scheme for electricity – and some political feelgood, an “aim” to have 50% of Australia’s electricity generated from renewable sources by 2030 – which Labor dresses up periodically as a “target”, which it isn’t, and never has been, except in the loosest sense of the word.
Rather than a manifestation of some wild and reckless green leftism, as Turnbull currently likes to characterise it, Labor’s stake in the ground was actually a bunch of signposts, which to mix a metaphor (sorry about that), had more holes in them than Swiss cheese.
The ambiguity and omissions were deliberate – partly to avoid having to answer questions it would be politically inconvenient to answer, like what does all this cost – and partly to give themselves room to move.
It was a bit of signalling to the Coalition, look guys, when you are ready, we are over here. It was an attempt to press reset on the rancid partisan conflict and anticipate the next cycle of the debate – a time when pressure from industry would begin to build on the government to fix up the mess that was clearly beginning to manifest in Australia’s energy sector.
Because I repeat, all the crap you currently see in Canberra isn’t a victimless crime, a bit of abstract culture war, it’s failure with practical consequences.
We are fast getting to the point when the last person out after the climate and energy debate won’t need to turn out the lights, because the lights will already be off.
But the government has decided, for the moment at least, that generating a short-term political sugar hit is better than trying to lock in on a long-term solution; that politics needs again, to worship the conflict god.
A prime minister who cannot conquer the toxic internal dynamics of his own party by the steady assertion of reason (which was his first resort) needs to assert mastery over his political opponent to get himself back into the redrawn, hostile to humanity, political game.
Fight, fight, fight.
Perhaps the chief scientist, Alan Finkel, can rescue the parliament from the straightjacket of short-termism, but given the government has already tied one hand behind his back it’s a bit hard to see how.
And if the political dynamics on climate policy intensify, Labor will again end up being pushed off the beach head they established carefully to try and salvage a deadly serious public policy conundrum.
Pretty ghastly, right?
Again I go back to the observation I started with at the beginning of this column – if you step back from the fray, and try and diagnose what on earth is going wrong with our politics, and why – it is reasonable to conclude that Australian politics is the writhing baby shark in the fishbowl, synapses short-circuiting, snapping wildly at whatever passes.
We saw it again this week with a tax debate that in a matter of an hour or two ran the gauntlet of being mildly interesting into being dead on arrival.
Clearly officials were working up some options on capital gains tax concessions as part of a housing affordability strategy. The musing leaked to the Australian Financial Review. Before anyone could even scratch themselves, the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, killed the proposal in such clear language that he stranded the prime minister and the treasurer.
The rest of the government had no option but to fall into line.
Perhaps if the government and Labor could actually come to terms on capital gains concessions there’d be nothing left to fight about.
But you know, guys ... fighting.
It’s important.
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