Opinion: Political gain behind Scott Morrison’s aged-care royal commission

AT THE weekend, Prime Minister Scott Morrison changed the conversation, which is one of the easiest tricks a national leader has in his or her box.

AT THE weekend, Prime Minister Scott Morrison changed the conversation, which is one of the easiest tricks a national leader has in his or her box. Used adroitly, it can enhance a leader’s standing and answer something that matters to the general public.

Morrison’s trick was to say he’d be calling a royal commission into aged care – a sector that is both private and public, and accounts for $17.5 billion from the annual Commonwealth budget. This is one of the most examined aspects of national policy. One assessment of the probing to which this sector has been subjected lists 30 since 1998 when the “kerosene baths” scandal had our eyes popping.

When the Productivity Commission undertook its comprehensive examination of aged care in 2011, they reported there had been six “major” inquiries and, according to one report published since Morrison’s Sunday announcement, there have been 20 further big and small looks at various aspects of the sector. Most commentary in the last few days has focused on Monday night’s first instalment of a Four Corners inquiry into aged care – highlighted as the reason for the Government acting.

Maybe Four Corners could send the Prime Minister’s department a rundown of its topics for the months ahead and the bureaucrats could see what’s worthy of government action. Pictured: PM Scott Morrison talking to recipients of in-home care. Picture: Kym Smith

Instead of waiting until after a Four Corners report is broadcast before a royal commission is announced – as happened with the finance sector and the treatment of young inmates in the North Territory detention and prison system – the Government is now getting ahead of the curve.

Maybe Four Corners could send the Prime Minister’s department a rundown of its topics for the months ahead and the bureaucrats could see what’s worthy of government action.

Putting the aged-care inquiry to one side – as important as the issues raised are and as urgent as action could well be – we do need to get some sanity back into this process.

Or maybe, we just need some genuine leadership. Two new publications examine leadership in these uncertain times, one from a senior political journalist in Canberra, and the other from a presidential historian in Washington.

Laura Tingle’s third Quarterly Essay: Follow the Leader, published this week, has a deep look into the thing we crave most, which is also what’s been found so wanting – political leadership.

In the very same week, revered presidential historian Doris Kearns Goodwin has a new book out, Leadership: In Turbulent Times, which looks at where leadership has been apparent in the political lives of particular presidents and why Donald Trump has snapped the stick for this topic. Tingle hit the nail on the head when she wrote – at a time when she could not have possibly known the aged-care royal commission was coming – that modern politics needs organic conversations rather than pronouncements from on high, and the occasional messenger shooting to make a point.

“A large part of the job of political leadership now, which goes completely unrecognised, is rebuilding the national political discussion after years of being under assault,” Tingle writes. “Maybe that will only happen if and when our political leaders recognise that their own room to move is going to be vastly expanded if there are other leaders in the community with whom they can speak.”

This suggests something like a royal commission into aged care should come from the bottom up – as a result of a series of conversations, which themselves grow out of debates looking at what resources are allocated to the sector and whether services are fit for purpose.

We don’t get that and haven’t done so for many years. Instead, we have a media cycle that has become a mouse in a hamster wheel, running round and round in a process that defines itself. The mouse does nothing but spin the wheel, and the media output generated is just the same old thing. It’s been happening for so long that we know what’s going to happen before the mouse takes a step.

To be more precise in terms of what happened this week, Four Corners had an aged-care investigation in the can and so we have a royal commission. If the doctor hits your knee with one of those little plexor rubber hammers, your lower leg will jump a bit.

As Tingle and Kearns Goodwin point out, we have a crisis in leadership. It has been made worse because of the fragile nature of leadership itself – Australia’s had four midterm backroom leadership changes since 2010 – and the tumultuous nature of the times.

Both writers provide brilliant explanations as to why we are where we are, and give us hints about what we should do about all this. Whether anyone is about to actually do something, is another thing entirely.

Dennis Atkins is The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor [e-mail]