The opening question on ABC’s Q&A program last week was from a young man named Jake Miller-Randle. The day before, Malcolm Turnbull had claimed victory with the slimmest majority after eight days of vote counting. Jake asked the panel: “What has happened to the state of Australian politics?” We’d already had six prime ministers in a decade, and some conservative commentators were demanding Turnbull resign. “Should Australian voters blame the headline-grabbing media, our opinion poll-hungry politicians or ourselves?” Jake asked.
I was interested in the answer to this question – as hard as it was – because surely it touched on something fundamental in the aftermath of this election, the rumblings beneath the seat count, the discontent behind another record vote for minor parties and independents, the shaky ground on which our politics play out.
First up, Derryn Hinch, the new senator for Victoria: “Well, you can’t blame the media. We just report the stuff.” Really? I cannot believe someone as experienced as Hinch could believe that journalists are mere messengers in our political system.
Then it was the turn of the other panellists, who delivered a grab bag of intensely partisan points that missed the cry at the heart of Jake’s question. Turnbull would survive, Turnbull was gone. Labor’s primary vote was pathetic. The Coalition lost votes, too, and was tearing itself apart. Blah, blah, blah.
“We won the election,” said the ever-smug attorney general, George Brandis.
Tanya Plibersek: “But you lost a million votes. You lost a million conservative votes between one election and the next. And that’s all right, is it?”
Brandis: “Well, Tanya, as you know, there are no prizes for second place in this business.”
Host Tony Jones tried to bring it back to the question: “So no need for any soul searching whatsoever by the sound of it?”
Brandis replied that all parties reflected after an election. “There’s no such thing as an election campaign, successful or unsuccessful, that you can’t take lessons from. So of course there’ll be that discussion.”
Of course. A bewildered looking Jake explained that his question was not meant to be a partisan one, although in truth he did get an answer, loud and clear.
It took effort not to switch off this show. To do so would have been a tiny suburban protest, a thing to do with this sinking feeling of annoyance, despair and sadness. It is a rational choice, surely, to leave politics to those who love it as sport, who have a stake in the game staying the same.
It is astonishing how little reflection there has been since 2 July. After his churlish election night speech, in which there were no lessons for the prime minister apart from Labor’s hoodwinking voters on Medicare, Turnbull acknowledged a few days later that yes, there might be a problem.
“There is no doubt that there is a level of disillusionment with politics, with government, and with the major parties,” he said. Mostly though, he continued to blame Labor’s “shocking lie” on Medicare for the government’s poor showing after a single term of office, conceding only that perhaps the Coalition had left some “fertile ground” for that lie to take root.
“There are lessons to be learned from this election. It’s too early for definitive judgments and it will take time to analyse and absorb all of the learnings from the campaign.”
It will be interesting to see what Turnbull believes those lessons to be once they are analysed and absorbed. His deputy Julie Bishop was asked the following night on the ABC’s 7.30 why she thought the public was so turned off. “There’s a level of frustration, a level of disillusionment,” she said. “They want to be heard, they want their concerns heard.” Again, she said it would take some time to work it out.
The danger is that the lessons learned will be tactical ones: that negative campaigns really do work, that ground campaigns targeting individual voters need to be sophisticated and better-funded, that media fragmentation can be used more intensively for political advantage. One wonders if the deeper messages, those that have been apparent for several election cycles but are growing louder and more insistent, will be ignored again, as though a sullen, mistrustful citizenry is something only to be managed and manipulated.
The election result to date is 50.37% to the Coalition, and 49.63% to Labor, making any statement about “mandates” from either party beyond parody. Twenty three per cent of voters gave their first preference in the House of Representatives to minor parties and independents, up from the 2013 election, itself a record. In the Senate, more than one in three people voted for a small party or independent.
There’s nothing inherently troubling about that – it is pointed out often enough that many countries have multi-party systems and they can work well – yet there is no evidence that Australians were casting their votes in a spirit of joyous choice. The evidence suggests the opposite.
Survey after survey, here and globally, point to declining trust in politics, business, the media and institutions. A poll a couple of years ago by the Australian National University found that only 56% of those surveyed believed their vote made a difference – down from almost 80% in 1996.
A recent international study, the Edelman Trust Barometer, fleshed out the nuance behind the figures – wealthier, better educated people were more confident and trusting in public institutions than the rest of the population. Public trust in institutions, it found, was “evaporating”.
None of this is new or surprising, but surely this phenomenon has gone beyond providing interesting research topics for academics. The suggestion that there is something systemically wrong with our politics, that it has proven inadequate to address our challenges, is not new, either. It is just that there is a surreal disconnection between what most of us know to be true and the way our political system grinds on as though oblivious.
The Australian’s Paul Kelly writes that “deep tremors shake our democracy. Unless they are managed and defused Australia will succumb, in some form or another, to the more virulent revolt against the political status quo that now bedevils both Britain and the US”.
In his Quarterly Essay earlier this year, George Megalogenis wrote that “something deeper is happening here than the predictable incompetence of politics”. His thesis was that the belief on both sides of politics in the open economic model had to change because the challenges we face require a stronger government role, especially in areas such as infrastructure, education and climate change. “The political system cannot restore public confidence without a more responsive government,” he wrote.
Professor Helen Sullivan, the outgoing director of the Melbourne School of Government at the University of Melbourne, wrote recently that our politics has deteriorated to such an extent that it was now “too late for sound decision-making, too late for sustainable public policy, and potentially even too late for democracy.” She suggested that there is a case for a more consensual style of government now, but she acknowledged that this will not happen.
I thought this election might prove a tipping point, that this might be the moment when the crumbling of our politics could no longer be ignored. I was wrong. Perhaps it will take a Brexit or an earthquake of the magnitude that is now shaking American politics to bring about a reckoning here.
The new UK prime minister, Theresa May, may or may not prove up to the task, but she at least gets what the problem is, and is willing to speak about it with candour. She wants “a democracy that works for everyone, so we can restore trust and confidence in our most important institutions – and the political process itself”.
“Right now,” she says, “if you’re born poor, you will die on average nine years earlier than others. If you’re black, you’re treated more harshly by the criminal justice system than if you’re white. If you’re a white, working-class boy, you’re less likely than anybody else to go to university. If you’re at a state school, you’re less likely to reach the top professions than if you’re educated privately. If you’re a woman, you still earn less than a man. If you suffer from mental health problems, there’s too often not enough help to hand. If you’re young, you’ll find it harder than ever before to own your own home.”
Neither Turnbull nor Shorten appears capable of making such a speech, to address citizens directly about the crisis in our own democracy, the failure to achieve significant reform, the insecurity of our young, the injustices of growing inequality, the institutionalised unfairness in our education system.
Instead, we have conservatives such as Eric Abetz aware that the election was a “big kick up the pants” for the Coalition, but claiming the crux of it was resentment about proposed superannuation reforms that would impact only the wealthiest. We have Shorten already planning for another election, and a Coalition divided.
Normally after an election, there is a sense of a fresh start. Whether your favoured party won or not, there is at least a moment of relief, and hope in the energy of a new government with new ideas. On Monday, as the Coalition party room meets for the first time after the election, there is no sense of a fresh start. The gulf between our citizens and our political system is too wide, the mistrust that our politics can deliver solid, equitable policy too deep. At some point, one day, ignoring it won’t be an option.
