Friday 29th of March 2024

broken faith in politics .....

broken faith in politics .....

from The Monthly by Robert Manne

For Malcolm Fraser, who saw what was happening

In October 2006, two months before he became leader of the Opposition, a little over a year before he became prime minister, Kevin Rudd published his essay ‘Faith in Politics’ in the Monthly. For a magazine that had been launched only 18 months before, this was a kind of coup. ‘Faith in Politics’ not only celebrated the German theologian and anti-Nazi martyr Dietrich Bonhoeffer. It also argued that in contemporary Australia a progressive, socially inflected Christianity had a vital political role to play. It is easy to forget how timid and fearful the Labor Party had become under Kim Beazley. Because of this, Rudd’s essay was, for many, a sign of hope.

Rudd chose three themes – all connected to Australia’s relation to the world – to illustrate how his kind of Christianity might inform Australian public life. In the contemporary world there were 1.4 billion people living in abject poverty, on less than US$1 a day. In John Howard’s Australia, the United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals, which had urged OECD nations to raise their foreign aid to at least 0.7% of their national income, were largely ignored. This “ethical failure” represented nothing less than “the great immorality of our age”. In Howard’s Australia, too, asylum seekers had been treated appallingly. The biblical “parable of the Good Samaritan is but one of many which deal with the matter of how we should respond to a vulnerable stranger in our midst”. Rudd reminded his readers that it was “the horror of the Holocaust” that had inspired an earlier generation to create the “UN convention on the protection of refugees”. Finally, in Howard’s Australia, international action on climate change had been deliberately sabotaged. “It is the fundamental ethical challenge of our age to protect the planet – in the language of the Bible, to be the proper stewards of creation.”

So, after Rudd came to power in 2007, what occurred? The fate of his foreign-aid ambition is most easily analysed. When Rudd became prime minister, Australia contributed 0.35% of its national income to foreign aid. As a simple means of comparison, at that time Norway and Sweden gave almost 1.0%. Immediately, Rudd pledged that Australia would increase its foreign aid to 0.5% by 2015. The Coalition supported this pledge. By 2013, Australia’s foreign aid had reached its highest ever level in dollar terms, $5.7 billion, and risen modestly to 0.38% of national income.

It now began to be scaled back. While under both Rudd and Gillard the 0.5% ambition was never abandoned, as the problem of the federal budget deficit pressed, its 2015 arrival date was twice postponed. Shortly after Rudd’s second government was formed in June 2013, his treasurer, Chris Bowen, announced a foreign-aid cut of almost $900 million. No developed country had been less affected by the global financial crisis than Australia, yet its cuts in foreign aid were moving against the international trend. In 2013, across the developed world, foreign aid increased by 6%. Despite the considerably more parlous fiscal situation of the United Kingdom, by this time David Cameron’s government had reached the goal of foreign aid at 0.7% of national income. Had Rudd forgotten that he had not so long ago described Australia’s parsimonious contribution to the fight against global poverty as “the great immorality of our age”?

All this was nothing compared to what was about to come. Tony Abbott became prime minister in September 2013, and in the 2014 budget his treasurer, Joe Hockey, announced a $7.6 billion cut in foreign aid over the next four years. This was overwhelmingly popular. In an Essential poll, 13% disapproved of the cuts to foreign aid; 64% approved. Perhaps encouraged, in December 2014, Hockey announced an additional cut of $3.7 billion. As a percentage of national income, foreign aid was now projected to reach 0.22% of national income in 2016–17, the lowest percentage in Australia’s postwar history. There were moments at the height of the mining boom when, on a per capita basis, Australia was the wealthiest country in the world. And yet by now we thought it entirely reasonable to give a more meagre percentage in foreign aid than recession-ravaged countries like Ireland, Iceland and Portugal.

What then came of Kevin Rudd’s Good Samaritan biblical injunction about asylum seekers? Since the arrival of a small number of asylum seekers on boats between 1989 and 1992, mainly from Cambodia, and a larger but still small number from Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran between 1999 and 2001, both Labor and the Coalition had introduced a series of deterrent measures: first indefinite mandatory detention (Keating, 1992), then temporary protection visas (Howard, 1999), and finally offshore processing and tow-back (Howard, 2001). The first two measures failed to deter the boats; the last two succeeded. Between 2002 and 2008, virtually no asylum-seeker boats reached Australia.

In mid-2008, the Rudd government, while retaining the mandatory detention legislation, abandoned temporary visas, offshore processing and tow-back. Rudd believed that his humanitarianism would come at no political cost. He was mistaken. Predictably, the asylum-seeker boats returned. In 2007–08, only 25 asylum seekers had arrived by boat; in 2008–09, there were 1000 and in 2009–10, 5600.

As a Good Samaritan, Rudd called for generosity to the asylum seekers. As an embattled politician, confronting a new Opposition leader, Tony Abbott, who promised a sympathetic public that only he could “stop the boats”, Rudd looked to Indonesia to stem the flow, and characterised the people smugglers who brought the asylum seekers to Australia as the “scum of the earth”. On 21 June 2010, Julia Gillard emailed Kevin Rudd: “Loss of control of the borders is feeding into a narrative of a government that is incompetent and out of control.” Two days later, citing a variety of reasons, including the failure of his asylum-seeker policies, the caucus removed the prime minister in a coup. Shortly before his removal, Rudd deplored the Labor Party’s “race to the bottom” over the question of asylum seekers.

Under Julia Gillard, asylum-seeker policy became increasingly fraught. Gillard hoped to open an offshore processing centre in East Timor. Dili refused. She then convinced Malaysia to accept 800 asylum seekers in return for the settlement of 4000 from there. The High Court regarded this scheme as unlawful. The numbers of asylum seekers arriving by boat continued to rise; in 2011–12, there were 8000. Even more damaging for her government, many hundreds of asylum seekers drowned on their journey to Australia. In desperation, in August 2012, Gillard reintroduced offshore processing on Nauru and Manus Island. However, because only a small number were despatched offshore, there was zero deterrent effect. In 2012–13, more than 25,000 boat asylum seekers arrived, as many as in the entire previous history of Australia. It was Gillard, not Rudd, who had truly lost control of the borders. Despite the self-certainty of both the left and the right, there was now no easily discoverable solution to the asylum-seeker problem confronting the government.

Julia Gillard could never muster the ruthlessness once shown by John Howard. On his return to the prime ministership in mid 2013, Kevin Rudd proved that he could. Indeed, Rudd promised something Howard never had: that no asylum seeker sent to Nauru or Manus Island would ever be settled in Australia. This promise was the source of immense future suffering. His foreign minister, Bob Carr, however, thought it a “masterstroke”. Rudd’s invocation of the parable of the Good Samaritan had become a distant memory. When Tony Abbott was elected, only one further turn of the screw was needed: the decision to have the navy, after intercepting asylum-seeker boats, return all passengers either to Indonesia or Sri Lanka. The boats now stopped, although the government did not rest until it inflicted discretionary misery on the tens of thousands of still-unprocessed refugees on Australian soil by reinstating temporary visas, an act of vindictive and purposeless cruelty.

During the past quarter century Australia has earnt the reputation of the least asylum seeker–friendly nation in the developed world. Even more troubling, as the nation has become accustomed to the often long-term arbitrary imprisonment and then the military repulsion of more than 50,000 innocent and vulnerable men, women and children, its moral arteries have hardened.

What then came of Rudd’s pledge to take Australia to the centre of the international struggle to combat climate change, which he famously and rightly proclaimed to be overwhelmingly the most important moral challenge of our era? In mid-2009 Rudd introduced legislation for his planned Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme. Rudd realised that the major reforms of recent history – the abandonment of the White Australia policy, the opening of the economy – succeeded because of bipartisan support. By November 2009, a deal had been struck with Malcolm Turnbull, the leader of the Opposition. For more than a year, the climate-change denialists within the Coalition, the right-wing think tanks and the mining lobbies had been planning an anti-Turnbull coup. Their time had come. In what can now be seen as a turning point in Australian history, Tony Abbott, a man who in his fatuous manifesto Battlelines had described climate change as possibly “benign” and who would shortly dismiss climate science as “crap”, became the leader of the Liberal Party. Despite the courageous decision of two Liberal senators, Sue Boyce and Judith Troeth, to cross the floor, Rudd’s climate-change legislation, which the Greens rejected as hopelessly inadequate, was voted down.

In December, Rudd went to the vital Copenhagen international climate change conference empty-handed. Despite his frenzied efforts there, the conference was a near-complete failure, and he returned an exhausted and broken man. The April 2010 announcement that his government had decided to postpone climate-change action for several years both destroyed his reputation and provided his enemies in caucus, whom he had frequently treated with undisguised contempt, with the opportunity to remove him.

In her negotiations to form a minority government following the August 2010 election, Julia Gillard agreed with the Greens to form an inter-party committee to negotiate new climate-change legislation. The legislation the committee proposed in July 2011 – a three-year carbon tax followed by an emissions trading scheme, which the parliament accepted in December – was greeted by one of the loudest, most vicious, mendacious and relentless campaigns in Australian political history. It was led by the Coalition and supported by the two most powerful forces in the country – the mining interest and the Murdoch press. Abbott described his mission to destroy the Gillard carbon-pricing legislation as “a pledge in blood”.

When he was elected, Abbott proved true to his word. Tim Flannery’s Climate Commission was instantly dismantled. Without the necessary numbers in the Senate, the Climate Change Authority was marginalised. Protracted attacks were launched on the Australian Renewable Energy Agency and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation. Several denialists were appointed to key advisory posts. Maurice Newman, who had called for the “perpetrators” of the climate-change “madness” to be punished, and who thought we might be facing a new Ice Age, became the government’s chief business adviser. Dick Warburton, who had recently led an anti–carbon pricing business front and who described the conclusions of climate science as “unsettled”, was given the task of reviewing the Renewable Energy Target.

Almost unbelievably, the Abbott government now fought a bitter fight, on behalf of the coal-fired electricity corporations, to reduce the amount of renewable energy Australians would use in the future. It openly sabotaged the solar power industry. Abbott sang the praises of coal, as “good for humanity”. He was appalled by its “demonisation”. When he opened a new coalmine in Queensland, with his characteristically defiant, jovial, anti–political correctness verbal swagger, he called it a “great day for the world”. Most importantly, as soon as the government managed to corral a majority of votes in the new, rather feral, Senate, which convened in July 2014, Gillard’s carbon-pricing legislation was repealed.

The government’s anti–climate change action wrecking ball was not restricted to Australia. In Canada, Abbott advocated a fossil-fuel alliance. He refused to send a minister to Warsaw for a major United Nations climate-change conference. He personally declined an invitation to attend a major New York meeting on climate change convened by the UN secretary-general, Ban Ki-moon. The Abbott government lobbied the OECD Export Credit Group, against the United States and the United Kingdom, in favour of financing new coal-fired power stations in the developing world. It sought to keep climate change off the G20 agenda in Brisbane. Abbott’s ministers and their cheerleaders in the Murdoch press were outraged when US president Barack Obama spoke to students at the University of Queensland about the dangers facing the Great Barrier Reef. Even British Conservatives now regarded Tony Abbott’s climate change views as “flat Earther”, “baffling” and “eccentric”. Australia was now not merely the developed world’s leading per capita carbon polluter. It was almost universally acknowledged to be the world’s most recklessly and brazenly irresponsible nation with regard to action on climate change. How many times must it be said? On this question the future wellbeing of humankind depends.

In October 2006 in the Monthly, Kevin Rudd outlined three international ambitions for his country – foreign-aid generosity, asylum-seeker humanity, climate-change responsibility. Rudd was not a hypocrite, or at least not in the ordinary meaning of the word. His government began by taking actions or making promises on all three fronts.

All Rudd’s hopes, however, collapsed; beginning during his time in office, and afterwards spectacularly so. Why this has happened and whether the trajectory can be reversed are matters for reflection and debate. But the melancholy fact that the lucky country has in the past few years steadily and cheerfully forged its present character, and embraced without shame its present reputation, as the developed world’s most comfortable, complacent, privileged, self-absorbed and selfish nation, seems, to me at least, beyond serious dispute.

About the authorRobert Manne

Robert Manne is Emeritus Professor and Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow at La Trobe University and has twice been voted Australia’s leading public intellectual. He is the author of Left, Right, Left: Political Essays, 1977–2005 and Making Trouble

 

fractured fairytales .....

from The Monthly …..

It can safely be argued that the past three Australian prime ministers, Tony Abbott, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd, have not been great leaders. And that the trio who preceded them, John Howard, Paul Keating and Bob Hawke, were among our best.

Australia’s history is almost long enough now to spot its repetitions. Tony, Julia and Kevin are the Billy McMahon, John Gorton and Harold Holt to John, Paul and Bob’s Robert Menzies, Ben Chifley and John Curtin. Three prime miniatures, each fated to short, disappointing stints in office after an extended incumbent cycle that changed the nation.

The first thing to note about our present malaise is that you wouldn’t wish a world war or economic stagnation on Australia to cure it. Keep your fingers crossed that the electorate is imposing the equivalent correction by continually turning over bad governments until the system reconnects with the people.

The second thing to note is that Abbott, Gillard and Rudd cannot offer the excuse of a weak economy for their performance. Like McMahon, Gorton and Holt in the late 1960s and early ’70s, they had the advantage of governing in growth. The deep recessions occurred on the watch of the lions. Menzies survived two – the bust following the Korean War wool boom in the early 1950s, and the policy own goal of the credit squeeze in 1961. Hawke was re-elected in 1990 despite the blunder of the 17% home mortgage rate. Keating took unemployment to 11% yet was still able to increase Labor’s majority in 1993.

The governments of Curtin, Chifley and Menzies and Hawke, Keating and Howard had, in common, an agreed economic model. The former was the state-based reconstruction of Australia after World War Two, the latter the market-based revival after the multiple crises of the 1970s and early ’80s. Both eras commenced with the Halley’s comet of federal politics – a long-term Labor government – and ended with the complacency of a conservative government that secured one too many re-elections. Interestingly, the time spans are identical at almost 25 years apiece.

Each of these prime ministers understood the acquisition, retention and use of power. But they had political apprenticeships that are inconceivable today. Curtin was Opposition leader for six years before becoming prime minister in 1941. Menzies was prime minister before he was ready, and spent eight years in the wilderness before he earnt his second chance in 1949. Hawke, Keating and Howard had two decades each in the public eye before they ruled.

Rudd was prime minister after less than ten years in parliament; Gillard after 12 years. Abbott is the exception in this group. He had been in parliament for two decades before declaring that the grown-ups were back in charge, although most of his internship was spent attacking Labor.

This is where the past offers no comfort. The end of the Curtin–Chifley–Menzies era still carried the promise of national renewal because the Labor Opposition still felt an obligation to offer an alternate program. Even after Gough Whitlam was dismissed in 1975, there was continuity of reform. Malcolm Fraser delivered the last rites to the White Australia policy when he accepted the Vietnamese refugees ahead of public opinion. Does anyone believe Gillard and Abbott will forge a post–prime ministerial friendship like the late Whitlam and Fraser, and lecture the next generation of politicians about values?

Rudd did offer a fresh start when he brought Labor back to office in 2007. But his program was dismantled by his own hand. He ducked the “great moral challenge” of climate change and “lurched to the right” on asylum-seeker policy after assuring the community he would do no such thing. He regrets both mistakes now.

These were not routine political backflips but rather the sacrificing of what were presumably lifelong ideals. Imagine Keating increasing tariffs to save the 1993 election, or Howard giving One Nation voters back their guns in 1998.

Holt’s death and the failure of the Gorton experiment let the Liberals promote McMahon in 1971, which is now political shorthand for a government that’s out of ideas. Rudd’s double implosion spread the McMahon curse across both parties, delivering government to leaders who should not have been in the queue, at least not in 2010. The contest between Gillard and Abbott diminished us, and the system is still processing the shock.

Gillard did not feel the need to explain herself, either to the caucus beforehand or to the public after she took Rudd’s job. She was the first Labor prime minister without an identifiable program. Converting to the cause of climate change after the election proved to be too smart by half. She regrets those mistakes now.

Her leadership model was the antithesis of the Labor ethos: Gillard claimed power first, and thought about what to do with it afterwards. But this might be the new Labor way. Bill Shorten has been conspicuous by his politicking. Inspired by Abbott’s example in Opposition, he seems determined to whinge Labor back into office.

Abbott was an accidental leader in 2009; the Liberal party room preferred Joe Hockey at the time but he was counted out first in the three-way ballot with Malcolm Turnbull. Hockey had wanted to give his colleagues a conscience vote on the emissions trading scheme, which would have seen it passed into legislation. But they settled for the unity of negativity.

Then Rudd fell, and Abbott was suddenly an alternative prime minister. One of his dearest supporters in the media has told me that Abbott was not ready to govern in 2010, and was fortunate to have an extra three years to prepare for office. You just shake your head at a two-party system, because the 2013 campaign between Rudd and Abbott was as trivial as its predecessor. And Abbott was no closer to being match-fit for government.

Abbott was the first Liberal prime minister to run against the very institution of parliament. Fraser went close in the constitutional crisis of 1975, but he could always say he was protecting the institution from a reckless regime. Abbott made Australia ungovernable as a precondition for taking power. His colleagues were too smitten with the shortcut he offered them back to office to ask the first, obvious question: what would stop Labor and the minor parties from replying in kind? Especially when the Coalition would have to break promises if it wanted to balance the budget.

These are not quirks of individual personalities, or the collective fault of the media. They are elementary errors of governance. The problem is in the parties themselves.

Under Rudd, Gillard and Abbott, Labor and Liberal swapped identities. Labor became the cynical party of the focus group, Liberal the edgy party of zealotry. These shifts had been coming for some time. Labor people have worried about the machine taking over the caucus since the late 1990s. Liberal people will admit, very quietly, that the ideologues have held the majority in the party room since the middle of the last decade.

If the transplant had been a clean one, the system might be working today, pitting genuine conservatives against inspired reformers. In that debate, national problems could still be solved.

But each side has taken the most contemptible part of the other’s persona. The Liberal Party is the Labor of the 1950s, moralising on issues that are of zero interest to the community. Labor is a digital version of the Andrew Peacock Liberals, all tweets and no meat. The prospect of an early return to power prevents whichever side is in Opposition from doing the necessary internal work of purge and reform.

The Hawke–Keating–Howard consensus of the 1980s and ’90s is misunderstood by many politicians today because it is seen with the hindsight of an economy that worked. It is assumed that there must have been some sort of détente between Labor and Liberal to wave through reforms in the national interest. That is not what happened. The main parties didn’t applaud each other’s agendas. What they agreed on was the nature of the challenge. Then they argued over the detail.

Today if one side says the nation faces a crisis, the other feels compelled to deny it.

Think the Coalition on climate change and Labor on the structural hole in the budget.

Everything is contested, not as a means to a policy end, but simply to annoy the other side. This politics is American in its effect – tribal and petty, fanatical and consciously dumbed down. The Australian voter has picked it for what it is, even if the two parties don’t realise it yet.

The best of Australia’s political culture was pragmatic in the true sense of the word. It resisted the extremes of Reaganism and Thatcherism in the 1980s, and avoided the celebrity traps of Clinton and Blair in the ’90s and noughties. Hawke and Keating could be trusted to free up the economy while maintaining a decent social safety net. Howard kept us relatively sane with his ordinariness. When he made mistakes – for instance, on petrol prices and the GST – he said sorry. Not always. His contrition was selective, and it could leave a hole in the budget. But he said sorry often enough to maintain public faith in our system.

Today neither side wants to concede even the smallest human error for fear of losing that minute’s news cycle. They are so immersed in the game of politics that they have imported the very thing the Americans hate about their own system: its partisanship. And then they wonder why the electorate has been so volatile.

Yet the flipping of leaders, and governments, risks making the system even more American. Both sides know their bases are shrinking. Logic would suggest that they would try to repair those bases, or build on them with new supporters. However, the two-party system is a mandated duopoly. Compulsory preferential voting means most seats still boil down to a choice between Labor and the Coalition, even if the primary votes of each have a three in front of them. That creates a perverse incentive for the parties to play to their diminished bases. This, in turn, opens a gap in the political marketplace for splinter parties. And so the two-party system becomes more polarised, as Labor competes with the Greens and the Coalition competes with the parties to its right.

One of the reasons the two-party system worked in the reform age of the 1980s and ’90s was that both sides chased the mythical swinging voter in the centre. It was conceit, of course. But it did ground our politics. The danger now is that both sides no longer care enough about the voter in the centre to know how to speak for the nation.

Rudd, Gillard and Abbott may not be the deviation from the mean. They may be the new normal – disappointing leaders with limited shelf lives.

History repeats

howard and hawke were crap...

Abbott is the worst of a kind, taking everyone down with him in his menial dishonesty.

Now, Dear Monthly, tell us what Julia did which was wrong? Nothing much wrong, not even trying to sort out the deadly boat influx by creating a policy of immigration linked to it. Simple: boat people would be sent to Malaysia, looked after by UNHCR, while Australia would take 10 times the amount of official refugees to the number of people sent there. No Nauru death camps, no other fiddle, no using the defence forces alla deceitful operational fecal matter of Turdy Abbott. 

As well Julia instigated a Carbon Pricing which was high but did the job to make sure Australia was at the forefront of fighting global warming.

As well Julia instigated a Royal Commission into "institutionalised" sexual abuse. 

Julia also started the NDIS.

and Julia had a few more policies of "independence" that benefited this country.

The economic outlooks were still promising. 

None of the others, Hawke, Howard, Rudd, had the guts to do it. In order to achieve some of these policies she had to compromise on a few issues like "same" sex marriages. So what. This will come eventually, but she had to deal with nutcases like Joe De Bruyn and other rabid religious idiots in the ranks, including old ratbags like Simon Crean. And Rudd leaking to the merde-och press to undermine her tenure.

Over all, Julia did not go to war, nor did she do anything for her own benefit, apart from the trimmings of office. No corruption. She had to fight a rabid media, a rabid Labor party and a rabid Liberal (CONservative) party. An impossible task which she did for four years. The voters were swindled by the rabid Turdy Abbott and his deceitful enamoured media...

There was so much Julia could do in this toxic political environment in which the country was declared the best to survive the GFC and the most happy country on earth. Not a bad result. Now we're in the dumps, thank to Turdy Abbott, who had pledged revenge against the witch and the bitch, for not getting the gig but got it eventually at OUR GREAT EXPENSE.

Julia was a class above, not perfect, but far better than Hawke and certainly far better than Howard. An equal to Keating in different times... Her misogyny speech is a classic and still relevant.