Australian politics

In this extract from On Disruption, Katharine Murphy looks at the demise of thoughtful long-term policy making and the ‘new, now’ news cycle

Conflict is not a new commodity in news. It’s always been critical. One of my early journalistic mentors told me it wasn’t really a news story unless there was conflict, and preferably the conflict needed to appear by the third paragraph.
But media disruption has intensified the conflict cycle, compressing it into smaller, louder, intraday bursts, and those constant interruptions have a material impact on political decision-making, both here and around the world.
Conflict is absolutely essential to the democratic process. It is a mechanism to settle contested points of view, or determine they can’t be settled. The process of legislating is active conversation between competing worldviews, interests and ideologies – a kind of structural balancing.

But a couple of things are happening. The “new, now” news cycle, where minute developments are reported in real time, means internal processes of consideration and decision-making, as well as the external process of negotiation, are disrupted much more frequently.
The disruptions then often materially affect outcomes – governments change course, drop ambitious ideas, shape shift to try to avoid an unmanageable stakeholder backlash.
Activism on social media also intervenes, and the combined effect is a ceaseless public commentary that now sits as an adjunct to policy making.
Martin Parkinson, the secretary of the department of the prime minister and cabinet, reflected on this phenomenon in late 2017. He said the contemporary media cycle was focused on “gotcha” moments and sensationalising routine internal government processes, which then had a ripple effect on internal deliberative procedures, stirring up rent seekers and what he politely termed “stakeholders”.

"Prosecuting the war has become more important than negotiating the peace"

“You begin to try and have a conversation with stakeholders about an issue and all of a sudden the social media campaigns are running either for or against the policy option,” Parkinson told Glyn Davis, the vice-chancellor of the University of Melbourne, on Davis’s podcast The Policy Shop.
Parkinson said stakeholders now take definitive positions on policy before it is finalised, and the tempo has increased as a consequence, “and that makes it much, much harder to do this sort of thoughtful, careful analysis and policy design that in the past we were able to do”.
Former Labor cabinet minister Greg Combet expressed a similar view when I interviewed him in 2017 for a long-form piece about the toxic work environment of modern politics that was published in Meanjin. He lamented the absence of time to think and reflect.
“With technology and social media, the issues just move now with enormous dynamism,” Combet said. “In years gone by, 20 or 30 years ago, issues could be considered more thoroughly. One issue could keep coming back to cabinet on a regular basis. Now everything needs to be determined more efficiently. Things get easily reported in the media, you have to react to them. All of the circumstances mitigate against carefully considered long-term public policy.”

As well as the constant disruption to routine political deliberation, political conflict also appears to have entered a new phase.
In structural terms, conflict in a democracy is ultimately about synthesis and dispute settlement. It’s a mechanism to achieve an outcome. But increasingly, conflict manifests in contemporary politics as a commodity or an end in itself. Prosecuting the war has become more important than negotiating the peace.
It’s useful to step through this, bit by bit. As Michael Wolff notes in Fire and Fury, his controversial fly-on-the-wall account of the Trump White House, politics is now immersed in the internet-driven culture of “immediate response” – or what the media baron and former New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg has characterised as the “instant referendum”.
Wolff talks about the Trump svengali Steve Bannon, who ran Breitbart, a rightwing “news” website, before advising Trump while he was still a presidential aspirant.
“Bannon’s entire political career, such as it was, had been in political media. It was also in internet media – that is, the media ruled by immediate response,” Wolff says. “The Breitbart formula was to so appal the liberals that the base was doubly satisfied, generating clicks in a ricochet of disgust and delight.
“You defined yourself by your enemy’s reaction. Conflict was the media bait – hence now, the political churn. The new politics was not the art of the compromise, but the art of conflict.”

Malcolm Turnbull
‘Turnbull likes to contrast his pragmatism with Abbott’s obduracy, but he also persists with zero-sum rhetoric.’ Photograph: Mike Bowers for the Guardian

Abbott’s government replaced the first minority government formed at the federal level in Australia since the second world war. That hung parliament was characterised by deliberation and compromise, and by practical progress. Labor had to build coalitions for everything it wanted to implement, in two chambers. That parliament had a distinct deal-making milieu.
Abbott characterised this behaviour as aberrant and illegitimate, and he styled himself as a crash-through figure, defined by strident rhetorical simplicity. Instead of “Make America Great Again” and “Drain the Swamp”, we had “Axe the Tax” (which wasn’t a tax, but never mind) and “Stop the Boats” – his own nationalist pitch.
Malcolm Turnbull has toned down Abbott’s combativeness, and in the early phase of his prime ministership, he tried to create some public space for complex debate.
But his government also speaks out of both sides of its mouth. Turnbull likes to contrast his pragmatism with Abbott’s obduracy, but he also persists with zero-sum rhetoric.
Turnbull faces significant internal pressure to muscle up against his Labor opponents, to be aggressive with product differentiation, and to play the man. As the public posturing appears not only ludicrously theatrical, but at times completely counterproductive to securing cross-parliamentary support for important public policy, I’ve asked government MPs to explain why they counsel in favour of ad hominem muscling up.

Cover of On Disruption by Katharine Murphy


The answer is that public muscling up fires up the base. “The base” in contemporary politics is a concept uttered in reverential tones. “We must carry the base. We must not offend the base.”
But who is this base? In this country, with due respect to people in this category, the base is an unrepresentative sample of the Australian community – partisans, and partisans prepared to stick with voting for a major political party, fundraising for a major party and volunteering in campaign efforts at a time when the electoral trend is moving in exactly the opposite direction.
So the product differentiation we see in daily politics is not only manufactured conflict – partisans locked in studious dialogue and dog whistling with other partisans – but manufactured conflict carried out in a bubble, a kabuki play for a boutique audience, egged on by shock jocks and partisan bobble heads in the mainstream media, intent on their own narrowcasting exercise.

This is an edited extract from On Disruption by Katharine Murphy (MUP). RRP $14.99, Ebook $9.99