Former Labor Lindsay Tanner argues to restore integrity in politics & tackle the culture of passivity in this time of media trivialization of politics, big political parties’ confusion & loss of purpose, the digital revolution, and the Global Financial Crisis. (Heavily edited by Open Labor from Tanner’s speech delivered at the 2012 Jim Carlton Integrity Lecture)
Read the full lecture: Integrity in Politics: The Power of Ideas by Lindsay Tanner 2012
The steady erosion of intellectual integrity in politics
There’s always been a substantial element of theatre in politics. Now, there is a more insidious aspect to all this. Our political leaders have become ever more skilful at the creation and manipulation of misleading imagery. And national politics has become a contest of meaningless announcements and personal narratives. Politicians collaborate with media to produce content that is entertaining but not informative.
Australian politics now functions around two core operational principles: look like you’re doing something, and don’t offend anyone who matters. Politicians and media now collaborate in this process of deception on a daily basis. While neither set out deliberately to deceive, that is precisely the wider impact generated by the combined effects of their behavior.
The outcome of this charade is the steady erosion of intellectual integrity in our national political discourse. Political leaders construct pictures for voters that resemble mobile phone plans: they’re designed to maximize outcomes for the producer by obscuring the real choices facing the consumer.
The transition from rationalism to populism occurred between 1998 and 2001
This trend carries extremely serious implications for the standards of governance in Australia. Intellectual integrity in politics is just as important as ethical integrity. Democratic accountability is undermined by misinformation as much as by misappropriation. The typical excesses of government – waste, cronyism, poor decision-making, lack of transparency and pork-barrelling – all thrive when voters are relatively uninformed.
These techniques are also eroding the established brands of the major political parties. The more they contort themselves to avoid controversial stances that define them, the more they lose definition in the eyes of voters. Like all organizations, a political party must have a reasonably clear purpose in order to succeed. Sustained loss of purpose will ultimately destroy any organization.
By collaborating in the media sideshow, the Labor and Liberal parties are now eating away at their own distinctive underlying purposes. The more these purposes are confused and obscured by short-term media games, the more
voters lose ongoing attachment to the parties. Clarity of choice is essential to democratic politics.
Voters exercise influence over the governance of the country by making such choices. When the content of these choices is blurred to the point of indistinction, democracy begins to lose meaning.
The supremacy of announceables, soundbites and picfacs reflects profound structural shifts in our society.
From the mid-1980s to the late 1990s, national politics was dominated by big debates about big issues. The transition from rationalism to populism occurred between 1998 and 2001. The One Nation juggernaut, the shock defeat of the Kennett Government in 1999, the Tampa affair, and the September 11 attacks shaped and defined the change. And both major parties switched their focus. They particularly absorbed the lessons of the demise of Jeff Kennett, the high priest of the Age of Rationalism.
A battle for the hearts and minds of the disengaged
The Australian population can be roughly divided into five major political tendencies: conservative, liberal, populist, labourist and green. While these categories are obviously very general and infinitely debatable, they provide a useful backdrop to the task of understanding Australian politics.
In the Hawke-Keating era, the liberal terrain was the main political battleground. In more recent times, the battle has moved to the populist zone. Educated and engaged voters are no longer particularly important. From John Howard’s exhortations to “battlers” in 1995 through One Nation and on to Bob Katter and Barnaby Joyce, the contest is now dominated by a battle for the hearts and minds of the disengaged.
The net outcome, though, is both clear and profound: a political class drawn almost entirely from the educated elite exercising most of its energies communicating with the less educated and disengaged, as level of education becomes an indicator of political orientation as significant as income level. When an almost exclusively university – educated political leadership endlessly professes its empathy with “tradies”, everyone outside the political class sees right through it.
The clarity of Labor’s mission has faded
As announceables have supplanted policies and personalities have trumped programs, the clarity of Labor’s
mission has faded.
These symptoms – politics as entertainment, the dominance of populism, and Labor’s loss of purpose – all reflect deep structural economic and technological changes that are sweeping across western societies, producing a structural upheaval more fundamental even than the Industrial Revolution.
Rapid technological change and associated globalization have undermined the market value of the labour of large sections of the workforce in developed economies. Faced with the obvious challenge of declining living standards, political leaders opted to paper over the emerging gap with debt, both public and private. We are still working our way slowly and painfully through the consequences.
Within a generation, western economies have moved from requiring specialized skills from only a minority of workers to needing skilled input from most workers. We are accustomed to viewing our economy as an artifact of three factors of production: land, labour and capital. I think it should now be four, with human capital added to the list. That’s what we are living through. And these changes don’t just affect economic relationships. They challenge entrenched identity.
People don’t vote their self-interest, they vote their identity
Human beings are obsessed with status. If your contribution to society is devalued by technology, the consequences are much wider than the purely financial. That’s ultimately why populism is on the rise around the developed world. As George Lakoff memorably noted in Don’t Think of an Elephant, people don’t vote their self-interest, they vote their identity.
Our legacy institutions and political parties are creatures of the industrial age. That world is receding. It will simply change shape, with old debates, old processes, and old mentalities ceding ground to the new.
All industrial societies have developed political systems built predominantly around a simple polarity between fairness and enterprise. Each has a party of fairness, like Labor, and a party of enterprise, like the Liberals.
This polarity no longer completely dominates politics. New fault-lines like environmental sustainability and globalization have emerged. More and more, the issues of tomorrow will revolve around different poles.
The Age of Populism will eventually pass, just as the Age of Rationalism passed. it may be sooner than we think. Pauline Hanson demonstrated how easy it is for a single individual to have a huge political impact if the underlying conditions are favourable. I don’t know if there is any counterpart to Pauline Hanson out there, but conditions in the political marketplace are ripe for a revolt of the engaged. Mounting anger with our childish political discourse will inevitably find an outlet at some point.
Fiddling with rules won’t deal with the effects of elemental structural change
There are no simple interventions that will solve this problem. We must beware of the simplistic siren song of political reform. There are good reasons why well-intentioned proposals like secret ballots in Parliament have never been introduced: they wouldn’t help, they’d make things worse. Fiddling with rules is no way to deal with the effects of elemental structural change.
The issue is much wider than parliamentary politics. Crucial non-government institutions like universities, business and unions aren’t exactly generating lots of ground-breaking public policy ideas either.
Consumer behavior governs the fortunes of businesses, and voter behavior ultimately shapes our politics. And voter behavior consists of a great deal more than merely voting.
Other than a relatively small minority of partisans, most politically engaged people are passive, content to express their frustrations to those around them without ever doing anything about it. It is surprisingly easy to influence the direction of Australian politics.
The most important thing to restore integrity in politics is to tackle this culture of passivity
Technological change is ushering in a new world where this will be normal. The era of rigid hierarchy, demarcation and control is passing. It’s time we tackled the entrenched habits of reserve and self-containment that constrain so many who could make valuable contributions to public debate. The powerful demand for high quality politics this would unleash would be an irresistible force.
Integrity in Politics, the Power of Ideas – speech by by Lindsay Tanner, delivered at the 2012 Jim Carlton Integrity Lecture, jointly hosted by the Centre for Comparative Constitutional Studies at Melbourne Law School and Accountability Round Table.
Related readings
Politics with Purpose – by Lindsay Tanner Scribe Publications 2012
Easy lies and influence: the familiar face of corruption in Australia – by Fiona McLeod, Pearls and Irritations, 23 Aug 2021
A pox on both your houses – Andrew Charlton & Lachlan Harris, The Monthly, Dec 2016
Labor’s branch-stacking scandal – an opportunity for reinvention – by James Button, The Guardian, 21 June 2020
The ALP must repair trust between leadership & members – by James Button, Open Labor, Oct 2020
From Secret Ballot to Democracy Sausage: How Australia Got Compulsory Voting – by Judith Brett, Text Publishing, 2019
Lindsay James Tanner held the seat of Melbourne from 1993 to 2010 and served as Minister for Finance in the Rudd and Gillard Governments from 2007 to 2010.
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