Lib leadership shambles: How Aussie voters are to blame for ‘Messiah Complex’
ANALYSIS: Australian politics is suffering from a misguided belief in finding the perfect leader. And to some extent, experts say, voters are to blame for the latest shambles in Canberra.
National
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AUSTRALIAN politics is suffering from a misguided “Messiah Complex” search for the perfect leader and to some extent the public is to blame, leading political scientists have declared.
And you would have to go back to the history books and the early 19th century days of the colonies to find such dramatic leadership turnover a generation of cynicism that created.
University of NSW School of Social Sciences researcher Dr Mark Rolfe said the revolving door of leadership at the Lodge was now almost a permanent feature of Western democracies.
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“The last 10 years of revolving door leadership has created a situation where people are fed up with the machinations of the parties and now we have a situation at the moment where the government is desperately looking for more feet to shoot,” Dr Rolfe said.
“We do have a Messiah Complex thinking that thinks that if we only had the right man or right woman to get to the top job who can fix everything about our country and society then we can all come together. This is politically potent in our populist world, and I speak both populism both left and right, and is something endemic to democracy since the 19th century.”
Dr Rolfe said there had been a populist uprising on issues including immigration, poverty, equality, trade free market, conservatism and social democracy that would see further internal political leadership knifings.
He added Australia had a history of it going back before Federation to the early NSW colony where in 35 years between 1865 and 1891 there was 25 governments.
Australian National University political analyst Dr Norman Abjorensen said a search for a Messiah was very much an inherent issue for the Liberal Party.
He said the current crisis was aligned to the tribal ritual of opinion polls, news cycles which were now hourly on social media, populist demands and fragmentation of the vote moving away from just Labor and Liberal that led to a notion that no government would ever control a Senate which created an incumbency and the requirement to negotiate with unpredictables.
He said there was more “jumpiness” in society and people feeling uncertain and wanting politicians to come up with immediate solutions.
“There are no instant solutions and you create a vicious circle making populist promises that can’t be met, can’t be implemented so you move onto the next lot,” he said.
“Brexit, Donald Trump, it’s all tied in people are voting against what they see as the old political establishment going in for something that is new, dangerous and probably going to ultimately be counterproductive.
“The Liberal Party has always had that Messiah Complex to some extent more than any other party.”
University of Melbourne political lecturer Dr Mark Trifitt said once there was a precedence of leadership change it became “a pathway of first resort” and parties no longer attracted block support from fractious constituencies.
“The nature of politics in this second decade of the 21st Century makes it increasingly hard for political leaders to steer the ship of state in a coherent way and that’s reflected in volatility in the electorate and that gets reflected back into the party room,” he said.
He said the public increasingly expected presidential style governments where “captain’s picks” decisions were made quickly but that was not the Westminster way of party consensus
Originally published as Lib leadership shambles: How Aussie voters are to blame for ‘Messiah Complex’