David Penberthy: Stop brawling and start governing

THE main parties have been the chief architects of their own demise with their juvenile squabbling and factional warfare, writes David Penberthy. Voters are over it.

Former PM Tony Abbott was quick to leap on Christopher Pyne’s same sex marriage comments. (Pic: Lyndon Mechielsen/The Australian) Pyne apologises over leaked remarks

MANY of our current crop of South Australian politicians cut their teeth in student politics. When I was at Adelaide Uni in the late 1980s, the campus was home to the likes of Jay Weatherill, Christopher Pyne, Penny Wong, Mark Butler, Pat Conlon, Andrew Southcott and Natasha Stott Despoja, to name a few.

While all of these people matured and mellowed with age, there are times when grown-up politics can look wholly indistinguishable from its student form. To that end, the current crisis within the federal Liberal Party is every bit as juvenile as an all-in slanging match on the Barr Smith Lawns about which campus faction is best equipped to run the Students’ Association.

When you think back on the events of the past few days, it isn’t remotely baffling that voters are abandoning the major parties. What is baffling is that anyone who is a member or supporter of the major parties is baffled by the trend.

When it comes to driving voters away from the political mainstream, the major parties should take a bow, as they have been the chief architects of their own demise. There have been two golden periods of modern political leadership in Australia; the Hawke era and the Howard era. Both men were conviction politicians who also knew the importance of achieving consensus. They could state a case and stick to their guns and bring the waverers along for the ride. They had authority.

It’s now seven years since Julia Gillard knifed then prime minister Kevin Rudd, and the instability shows no sign of letting up. (Pic: Alan Porritt/AAP)

Now, personality politics, factional intrigues and vacillating leadership have become the order of the day.

The crisis in the political mainstream has been escalated by a preponderance of polls and a lamentable journalistic trend towards covering politics as a contest of individuals rather than a contest of ideas.

But none of those unsourced stories or incendiary leaks would appear if the pollies didn’t keep giving us the ammo.

Australia has just observed the seventh anniversary of the knifing of Kevin Rudd by Julia Gillard in a brutal prime ministerial coup. It was an extraordinarily damaging episode, unprecedented in its speed and savagery, where a first-term PM who was still performing reasonably in the polls was knocked off almost wholly on the basis of his personality.

You would think this event and its aftermath would stand as a warning to both sides of politics as something to be resisted forever more. Instead, it has become a template for behaviour, setting our nation on a ruinous roundabout where in the space of seven years we have had Rudd, Gillard, Rudd, Abbott and Turnbull as Prime Minister. Italy and Guatemala seem like exemplars of stability in contrast to Australia.

John Howard and Bob Hawke both presided over golden periods of Australian leadership, the likes of which we haven’t seen since. (Pic: Supplied)

When we interviewed Christopher Pyne on the radio this week, he tried to deflect further questions about his speech last Friday and the subsequent furore by saying that average people aren’t interested in factional intrigues. He is of course 100 per cent correct. They’re not.

The problem is, people like Christopher Pyne are really interested in factional intrigues, otherwise they wouldn’t make speeches like the one he did last week at a Sydney bar where he spruiked the successes of his Liberal moderate faction, and hinted (darkly, in the eyes of conservatives) at more wins for his faction on same sex marriage.

Now, I have got a lot of time for Chris Pyne. I think that as South Australians, regardless of our political allegiance, we owe the man both gratitude and respect for being a powerful advocate for our state on the key issue of defence infrastructure.

But there is no point sugar-coating the week he has had. He’s had a shocker.

I don’t see how you can make a speech that was exclusively about factionalism, one that starts an all-out factional war that leaves the government of the day looking completely paralysed, and then pretend that it’s somehow a figment of journalistic imagination to regard it as a story.

To quote Frank Drebbin from The Naked Gun, standing in front of an exploding fireworks factory that had just been hit by a ballistic missile: “Move along, folks, nothing to see here.”

With his apology on Wednesday night, it seemed that Pyne had either realised the folly of his actions, or been instructed to realise it. Whatever the case, the sum total of all this will be a further erosion of respect not just for the Libs, yet no direct gains for the ALP, as what we are witnessing is merely a depressing re-run of the same crap Labor served up during the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd era.

The big winners out of this week will be the Xenophons, Bernardis and Hansons. It’s the kind of thing that drives people away from the major parties in droves. The number of Australians rejecting Labor and the Liberals is at the highest level at any time in our history. A 1999 research paper by Scott Bennett of the Parliamentary Library tells us that in the 1950s, 94 per cent of Australians voted either Labor or Liberal, with most seats being so safely held that just one in 10 was decided on preferences.

By the 1980s the major party primary vote had fallen to 84 per cent. In last year’s election the Libs polled 42.1 per cent of the primary vote and Labor 34.7 per cent, a combined primary vote of 76.8 per cent.

In this week’s Newspoll, the primary vote for both Labor and the Coalition stood at 36 per cent apiece, a combined total of 72 per cent. If things continue at this rate Labor and the Coalition will soon be lucky to crack 70 per cent support. All this makes the country less governable, it makes parties and leaders less brave and more compromised. Worst of all, it is all their own work.

Originally published as David Penberthy: Stop brawling and start governing