Economy
Fixing Australia’s democratic deficit
Australians buying a used car benefit from clear consumer safeguards, writes Geoff Heriot. Why not accord voters similar protection from the excesses of campaigning politicians?
Acts of grand political corruption like the ones revealed this year by the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption can have shocking consequences in law and public perception. But there are many less spectacular ways of corroding the social contract between governors and the governed. Corrosion is a process that occurs over time.
Professional politicians engage in misleading and deceptive conduct when they knowingly make promises that are abandoned once an election has been won. Although not the first victorious leader to do so, prime minister Tony Abbott has made this a defining characteristic of his first year in office. Even if the short-term public reaction is lost amid the ongoing political din or with the onset of new crises, such conduct is corrosive of long-term trust in the system. The news and electoral cycles move on, but many citizens are left angry and resentful.
Evidence of discontent is plentiful. In the 2014 Trust in Institutions survey, for example, only 25 per cent of respondents expressed faith in the federal parliament and 13 per cent in political parties. For the past few years, the annual Lowy Institute Poll has revealed ambivalence among Australians as to whether democracy is the most preferred form of government, with only 42 per cent of respondents aged between eighteen and twenty-nine believing it to be so. The most emphatic reasons given for this ambivalence were that there seems to be no real difference between the policies of the major parties and that democracy only serves the interests of a few and not the majority.
Perhaps the most remarkable observation to make about these findings is that so many Australians find them unremarkable. In contemporary Australia, writes Simon Longstaff of the St James Ethics Centre, the state of politics “has reached a point where it is only the blatant corruption of an Eddie Obeid that seems worthy of condemnation.”
All about Geoff Heriot: Geoff Heriot is director of Heriot Media & Governance Pty Ltd. He is a former corporate executive, producer and foreign correspondent for the ABC. gh@heriotmedia.com