One person can make a difference to the spirit in which politics is conducted, provided they have clear priorities and a measure of courage.
Tony Smith’s crusade to improve the status quo may or may not work but should be applauded, as such efforts too often get lost in the wash of habitual disappointment.
Last modified on Sat 5 Jun 2021 07.40 AEST
“Before we move to a couple of things, I have a couple of very brief remarks,” the Speaker of the House of Representatives, Tony Smith, told MPs just after question time on Thursday. The post 3pm hubbub and milling in the chamber paused so the presiding officer could have his say.
“Obviously in the course of the last week I’ve enforced the standing orders vigorously,” Smith said. “I intend to keep doing that, and the reason for that was to get an improvement in parliamentary standards.”
If you’ve missed this particular development, last week I chronicled Smith’s opening salvo of Operation, I’ll Sit You Down If You Persist in Being a Dickhead – which was quite the thing.
Smith evidently wanted to make sure he imprinted his intentions clearly on the chamber, so during the course of question time last Wednesday, the Speaker rebuked Scott Morrison forcefully when the prime minister failed to heed his warning to return to the substance of the question he had been asked.
The health minister Greg Hunt and the treasurer Josh Frydenberg also experienced rhetorical whacks.
Smith has continued with his mission since.
He’s booted out MPs who are serially disorderly, and rebuked ministers who use the mind-numbing and excruciating Dorothy Dixers to sledge their opponents under the cover of being asked to explain “alternative approaches” – which is the question time equivalent of a coward’s punch.
Late this week there was also a sustained tussle with former policeman and one-time Liberal leadership aspirant Peter Dutton, who seems to be enjoying going full Elliot Stabler with his daily management of the chamber, having taken on Christian Porter’s responsibilities as leader of the government in the House.
At the end of the two-week parliamentary session, Smith reported his impressions to the House. He felt his corrective was working. “It has certainly been quieter,” the Speaker noted. “That’s for two reasons: those making the noise don’t stay in the chamber very long and the vast majority of members have understood the need for an improvement in standards.”
He thanked the MPs who had approached him privately to spur him on, and the people outside politics that had welcomed the change. “I thought it was important to make that point as we finish up the sitting week.”
I’m starting here this weekend because Smith’s modest campaign against wanton vituperation reminds us about something that is easily forgotten: one person can make a difference to the spirit in which politics is conducted, provided they have clear priorities and a measure of courage.
The backdrop to Smith’s decision to try to stop the chamber presenting to the world as a thuggish zoo was a report from a parliamentary committee recommending modest changes in the standing orders – changes that could render question time ever so slightly less appalling.
Smith presumably knew the whole complex was so heavily invested in being appalling that those changes had little to no chance of being adopted, so he decided to set about resetting the spirit of question time using the authority of his office as Speaker.
I strongly suspect the Speaker thinks the problem with behaviour between the hours of 2 and 3pm on sitting days isn’t a function of deficient standing orders. I suspect he thinks it’s a function of two things: MPs choosing to behave badly, and presiding officers more worried about not offending powerful people than about being custodians of important institutions.
In any case, I think it is important to recognise people when they put some personal capital on the line to try to do the right thing, because small excursions like this can easily be lost in the wash of habitual disappointment.
Smith’s crusade to improve the status quo may or may not work. But the point of drawing attention to it is to provide a level of reassurance to readers that there are people around who would like to change the culture, even modestly.
Whether cultural change is possible is a question I’ve tried to explore journalistically for years as political life has become increasingly hostile to humans.
It’s a long-term preoccupation. But it is particularly front of mind for me of late because I’m conscious there are a number of parliamentary staffers who have endured experiences in politics ranging from sub-optimal to bruising to absolutely reprehensible.
Some people’s professional experiences in the belly of the beast have been entirely benign, but the toll on many people has been terrible, and I’m going to be candid. I carry their pain and anxiety with me.
I’m aware a number of former parliamentary staff are preparing to either make submissions or to be interviewed by people conducting the inquiry into parliamentary culture, spearheaded by Australia’s sex discrimination commissioner Kate Jenkins. Re-prosecuting various traumas, in the spirit of trying to make things better through the exercise of individual agency, takes considerable courage, and we’ve seen the most stellar example of that this year with the former Liberal staffer Brittany Higgins telling her story.
I’m sure it can feel very often like no progress is being made, and certainly the barriers to genuine progress remain substantial. But from my vantage point, there are some slivers of hope.
The government on Friday released a report conducted for Scott Morrison by senior bureaucrat Stephanie Foster which recommends an independent complaints mechanism be established in the parliamentary workplace to deliver (as she puts it) “proportionate consequences for misconduct”. It also recommends that a serious incident team, independent of employers, governments and political parties, be established with a “presence” in the parliament so staff experiencing trauma have an obvious place to go if terrible things happen.
A couple of things. Foster recommends applying the new structures in the “initial phase” to “complaints that relate to the current term of parliament”. So these procedures aren’t, at least currently, massively backward looking, which I strongly suspect will trigger objections.
Another statement of the obvious. There is also a lot of detail still to be worked through, including how these processes (assuming the parliament adopts them) sit with where the Jenkins review ultimately lands.
But if you’d asked me at the start of the year whether political parties would ever seriously countenance a more normalised human resources structure for their staff, and transparent mechanisms for serious complaints, I would have laughed.
That would have felt totally implausible.
So small steps. Forward not backward. Keep eyes wide open. Always mind the gap between aspiration and reality.
But also, every now and then, dare to hope.
No comments:
Post a Comment