Dumb and dumber: why Australian politics is broken February 20, 2011
.Even old foes agree on the dulling of debate, write .
AS POLITICIANS, they rarely agreed on anything. Now, it is hard to separate them on one subject: the dumbing down of federal politics. Jeff Kennett agrees with Steve Bracks. Peter Costello, Gareth Evans and Lindsay Tanner have the same view. Carmen Lawrence and Alexander Downer, unlikely bedfellows on any other topic, have opinions that are virtually interchangeable: all say there is something rotten with Australian politics. All say that the quality of debate about big issues is poor. Not that it was ever perfect, but all argue that politics is now disturbingly superficial and it is causing public cynicism to soar.
“What is happening is that effectively there has been a dumbing down and because of that, it is not so much a policy debate but debates about personal attributes, personalities, in the absence of a philosophical position,” says Steve Bracks, former Victorian premier and one of the authors of Labor’s review of its 2010 federal election campaign. Former treasurer Peter Costello points to substantial debates in the recent past about issues such as the GST and labour market deregulation. “These days politics is more about gaining and holding office than using office to improve things for the better.”
Former attorney-general and foreign minister Gareth Evans, now chancellor at the Australian National University and professorial fellow at Melbourne University, tries to avoid “being dragged back into the weeds of Australian political debate”.
Advertisement: Story continues below But he says: “The quality of policy debate in the last election campaign was as desolate as it gets, including, it has to be acknowledged, on the Labor side: all Hill and no Light.”
Border security becomes an ugly debate about whether the government should have paid the airfares of asylum seekers attending a funeral of people who died in tragic circumstances in December. Our role in Afghanistan is reduced to days of media coverage about whether Tony Abbott’s “shit happens” remark was insensitive to a dead soldier. Reconstruction after the worst floods in Queensland history becomes a stoush over whether the government’s proposed levy is just another “great big new tax” and whether Prime Minister Julia Gillard is “wooden” or her tears genuine.
Former politicians who spoke to The Sunday Age do not glorify political debate in their day. But they do say that conviction and courage are now rare. They say the public are fed rehearsed lines, and know it. Debate is reduced to moronic slogans. Tough decisions are dodged and deferred. Marketing techniques not only sell policies, but craft them.
Independent analysts agree: if the public is cynical about politicians, tactics increasingly adopted by politicians reveal they don’t think much of voters, either.
Respected pollster John Scales, who runs JWS Research, grilled a group of so-called soft voters and a group of swinging voters in Melbourne this month and concluded that something new is going on. ‘‘More than ever before there is an apparent disenchantment with politics and politicians.’’
Most voters are suspicious of Ms Gillard and distrust her motives, see her as weak and reactive and believe she presides over a government ‘‘too scared to spend any political capital for fear of attracting criticism’’.
And Tony Abbott? ‘‘When he is mentioned, the reaction from soft voters is typically one of disrespectful laughter,’’ Mr Scales says.
Former Labor frontbencher Carmen Lawrence points to the media’s role in reducing political debate to trivia and personality.
‘‘There’s a dance of mutual destruction going on between the media and the politicians, and they’re both responsible for dumbing [politics] down.’’
At times, she says, political debate ‘‘gets to be moronic, it so quickly drifts into abuse, reaction, and the ‘biff’ of who’s winning and who’s losing’’.
Dr Lawrence, now an academic at the University of Western Australia, says young people are frustrated and even angry that politicians and the media treat them as ‘‘gullible fools’’.
She attributed the decline to a combination of factors, including the perpetual 24-hour churn of TV, newspaper and social media commentary run by sensation-seeking media. Then there is the selection of political candidates from a narrow circle of political operators — ‘‘minders, dealers and traders’’ — moulded by political parties and with limited life experience.
