Parliament has been enslaved by its fetishes – and it's time to end the downward spiral

Extract from The Guardian

Australian politics

We cannot have another pointless, rudderless, parliament like the one that has just limped to an end

Katharine Murphy Political editor

@murpharoo

Sat 6 Apr 2019 06.00 AEDT

Josh Frydenberg, centre, ‘is one of those politicians who always shows up, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, brimming with preparation and possibilities’. Photograph: Tracey Nearmy/Getty Images

There was a moment or two on Wednesday, during Josh Frydenberg’s traditional post-budget address to the National Press Club, where the room felt so depressurised it seemed like oxygen masks could tumble from the ceiling.
This bit of whimsy gripped me so profoundly, at one point I caught myself looking up at the ceiling, before shaking myself and looking back at the podium.
It wasn’t that Frydenberg was dull, or phoning it in, or lacking in focus. Frydenberg is one of those politicians who always shows up, bright-eyed and bushy tailed, brimming with preparation and possibilities.
Generally, his relentless energy, the unquenchable affability, is infectious, but this week the Morrison government felt prematurely aged and entirely on the clock, and Frydenberg’s vim wasn’t sufficient to eclipse the sum of those parts. The effort involved in pushing the whole contraption up the steep hill of budget week was just too obvious.

Given the proximity of the federal election contest, the political class had two objectives this week. The first was putting the 45th parliament, a parliament absolutely nobody will mourn, out of its misery. The second was telling voters that game night beckons, so now might be a good time to switch on.

The budget the government handed down on Tuesday night was mostly about anticipating Labor’s campaign, not about outlining an agenda for the future. Frydenberg and Scott Morrison matched the tax relief Labor promised people on middle incomes last year, and offered a slightly less generous rebate for workers earning under $40,000. They also increased the health spend to try and blunt whatever Labor was going to lob on Medicare, because Labor lobbing something on Medicare is always a safe bet.
It was a battening down the hatches budget, in the hope that securing the premises might allow scope for some flourishes on productive points of contrast once we tick over into campaign mode. Defensive play is necessary in any contest. Even people like me, who were always picked last in team sports during PE, understand the imperative – but, let’s be honest, it’s not exactly electrifying.
Bill Shorten had the easier task. Oppositions always do in budget week, because they get the government’s offering on the Tuesday, and then get the opportunity to counter with a better offer by Thursday evening.
But it was clear Shorten had thought about the switch-on imperative. He styled his budget reply like a campaign launch, and put a big-spending cancer initiative at the centre of the offering.
The measure was about creating a connection point with voters, and most Australians, regrettably, have a personal connection point with cancer. It was a big promise – $2.3bn – to lob early in a campaign, but Australians are voting earlier. Political parties can no longer bank on people waiting for election day to cast their ballots.
If we compare the two offerings of budget week, I think Shorten was more successful than Morrison in triggering the voter switch-on.
Because we are going to spend the best part of the next two months covering the minutiae of an election campaign and its aftermath, I want this weekend, before the fog of war descends, to spend a bit of time with you, hovering above the fray.
I want to share a few thoughts about what needs to happen next – after the ballots are cast, after the corflutes are stowed, after the venues for the post-election parties are swept, after the departing MPs pack up their offices and the new occupants move in their belongings.

"There has been too much cult of personality, for no good end."

I don’t know who is going to win the coming contest. Going in, you’d rather be Shorten than Morrison, but I’ve been around long enough to know that anyone can lose a campaign, and anything can happen, from unforeseen events to brain explosions. These observations about what needs to happen next in our politics apply regardless of the partisan identity of the next government of Australia.

The first thing to say is we cannot have another pointless, rudderless, parliament like the one that has just limped to an end. We can’t have another governing cycle consumed by personality conflict and leadership intrigue. This has to end, and the only people who can end it are the elected representatives we send back to Canberra when we cast our votes in May.
They need to end it, not only because their unhinging is bringing the profession of politics into disrepute, and the lingering animus is rendering the life unsustainable for balanced people – but because we need stronger executives.
We need incumbent governments to value their conventions and the institution of democratic politics. These are serious times. We need governments that can pull together, resolve internal conflicts and solve problems.
The most terrifying spectacle in global politics at the moment, even more terrifying than the self-absorbed narcissist in the White House, is Brexit, and the live action collapse of the British government.
We are witnessing a government in the United Kingdom that cannot overcome its own strange fetishes, cannot agree on a set of policy propositions, cannot function as a collective, and can’t find its way back from the brink – a government that outsourced its own internal conflict about whether to be in or out of Europe to the British people in a shameful abrogation of representative responsibility, and now can’t deliver what a slim majority of the people asked for. The opposition in the UK has also comprehensively failed to rise to the occasion, and has splintered as a consequence.
I was in London recently, and the anxiety in the city was palpable. One of the great democracies of the world has the staggers, and some of the underlying dynamics contributing to the British implosion are visible in our own political system.
We need to understand that democracies are more vulnerable than they look, and take care to elect parliamentarians who understand the fight they are in, and have some interest in rising to to occasion.
We also need to insist that political parties do the foundational work, and by do the work I mean understand what they want power for. One of the significant weaknesses of this period of Coalition government in Australia is these folks have not done the work, so government roils, and drifts, devoid of an organising principle.

If the Liberals and Nationals hang on in the looming contest, or if they don’t, they need to do some ground-up work. That task is not optional, it is urgent, otherwise there will be more cycles of intrigue, and more drift.
The other reset we need in Australian politics is to move away from the focus on leaders, rather than governments. There has been too much cult of personality, for no good end.
Shorten, by presenting himself at the apex of a team rather than the font of all wisdom, is making virtue out of necessity – polls suggest Australians have not warmed to him – but regardless of the motivation, Shorten’s instinct is the correct one.
The elevation of leaders to presidential-style figures makes them vulnerable, and their governments vulnerable.
So, in summary, this election cycle, the one we now stand on the brink of, has to deliver more than a result on a Saturday night in May.

It has to deliver a reset for Australian politics as well.