David Penberthy: Time for pollies to think about us for a change
RECENT antics show our politicians are indulgent and consumed with issues that have no bearing on our lives. It’s made me wistful for the consensus of the Hawke and Howard eras, writes David Penberthy.
IT has often been said over the past eight years of pretty ordinary Australian politics that our elected representatives act like student politicians.
Watching the conduct in Canberra of late, I think that this assertion sells student politicians short.
Casting my mind back to my university days in the late 1980s, the three key issues that energised people on campus were the proposed introduction of tertiary fees, the need to install more campus and parklands lighting in response to a string of attacks on female students, and the discovery that the fish being sold in the refectory was being sourced from what was then apartheid South Africa.
While the fish boycott might have fitted the bill for zany leftist campus activity, as noble as it was given the horrors of apartheid, the other two issues were bread-and-butter ones that directly affected student’s lives.
Reflecting on Canberra this past few days, it has been stunning to see the extent to which vast amounts of time have been chewed up on issues that have zero bearing on anyone’s life in Australia.
There was the largely imagined and wholly exaggerated issue of gay students being expelled from religious schools, the wackiness of Pauline Hanson’s “OK to be white” motion — accidentally and embarrassingly endorsed by the Government — and then the least relevant discussion our MPs may have had, ever, about which city in Israel should be home to the Australian embassy.
The past few days have been indicative of a period in politics where entire sitting weeks have often been wasted on issues and events that have no relationship to the needs and interests of the average person.
Usually, these distractions have come in the form of the interminable leadership intrigues that became standard with the knifing of Labor leader Kevin Rudd in 2010.
But there have been so many moments this year where fringe issues became the dominant theme of the week, a recent case being the ABC board dramas, which was of passionate interest to a handful of poncho-clad people who drive old Volvos emblazoned with “Hands off our ABC” stickers. This week, however, felt like a new low.
Maybe it’s the onset of middle age but I find myself feeling increasingly wistful about the Hawke and Howard eras where, from 1983 to 2007, government seemed to be about one thing — how do we all band together to make the economy strong and life affordable for people who work hard?
There was a broad consensus on the economy then, and a broad consensus on the need to focus on generating jobs. In 2018, the twin curses of personality politics and gesture politics mean Parliament increasingly resembles an indulgence.
Further, there is a tactical bloody-mindedness that has crept into political operations, whereby oppositions and the Senate seem hellbent on obstructing governments to make them look inept whereas, in the past, there was a much more sincere and thorough search for common ground.
This was particularly true in the 1980s when Bob Hawke was Prime Minister and John Howard and Andrew Peacock led the Opposition, with them backing Hawke on confronting reforms such as the elimination of tariffs, knowing we needed to modernise our economy.
This consensus only came about because people who were on the opposite sides of politics could have frank discussions, arguments even, where they made and conceded points and ended up somewhere in the middle. In 2018, this is the most imperilled art of all.
Courtesy of those on the left and right extremes of politics, we are at risk of becoming so doctrinaire that we don’t even want to be confronted with an opinion or idea that we disagree with. You see this with the push for campus bans on disagreeable visiting speakers and the black-banning of authors at writers festivals. You see it every Monday night on the vaudevillian spectacle that is the ABC’s Q&A, where people don’t exchange ideas but barrack for their preferred ideological team and boo their opponents.
One of the best recent examples of this mindset came from our own state of South Australia with the debate around religious instruction in schools.
At the moment, parents are given the right to have their children opt out of such instruction.
Labor’s left faction wants that changed so that parents now have to explicitly state that their child will opt in. The change has the effect of being an added obstacle to ensure no student ends up confronted with a set of beliefs that they are uncomfortable with.
To that end, Pauline Hanson’s dopey motion about white people was an absolute work of art in capturing the binary spirit of the times. Its compelling internal logic was to suggest that if you disagreed with the assertion that it’s OK to be white, you were, by default, implying that there is something wrong with being white, and probably actually hated white people.
It is possible to disagree with the motion for the more persuasive reason that it’s a complete joke and total waste of time, especially when you are being paid more than 200 grand to fly to Canberra to represent bread-and-butter interests of your constituents.
The manner in which it was dealt with by both sides of politics was appalling, with the Coalition being incompetent in backing it, especially when they knew it had originated from Hanson, and Labor beating this embarrassing error into proof that the Morrison Government was somehow in cahoots with the KKK.
These are our tax dollars at work folks, 23 weeks a year.