All over the Western world we lament the death of bipartisanship, unlike the good old days. As with most chattering-class orthodox doctrines, this claim is bereft of history or fact. It vastly overstates the bipartisanism of the past.
Remember the seraphic bipartisanship of the Vietnam War, the Whitlam dismissal or, earlier, the referendum to ban the Communist Party, or the World War I conscription debates?
As a nation, in recent years we’ve made some of our worst, most destructive, costly, maddening mistakes in the name of bipartisanism, typically not the bipartisan commitments of statesmanship but of cowardice, where one party wants to avoid an argument it thinks could damage it.
Bipartisanism is constantly urged, but in support of bad policy it can lead to deep structural disasters that can take decades to escape because of the lack of scrutiny bad policy receives under the protection of bipartisanism.
Consider the colossal structural mistakes, or near mistakes, caused by bipartisan agreement. Here are five cases where bipartisanism has given us bad results.
Peter Dutton was criticised for not being bipartisan on the voice. The referendum is not decided and the Yes case could still win, so vast are its financial resources. If the No vote wins, the Opposition Leader and David Littleproud will be demonised all over again for not being bipartisan.
But to argue that is to mock democracy. Today, the polls suggest 55 or 60 per cent of the electorate could vote No after months of debate and scrutiny. If Dutton had observed bipartisanship Australians would never have got a proper public discussion of this issue. In a democracy, if the people consider an issue and vote against you, it’s pretty crook to deride the people as stupid dolts who couldn’t make a wise decision or as bigoted dolts who only had to have their prejudices appealed to. It’s the false defamation of the electorate in these ways that often leads to cowardly bipartisanship.
However, the Liberals, before the arrival of Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, have been guilty of wretchedly counter-productive bipartisanship on Indigenous issues. When they were in government they never had the intestinal fortitude to say an outright no to the Aboriginal activist political leaders. Thus, when these leaders were trying to talk me into supporting the voice, they argued that the Liberals really wanted to support it but were prevented by their intolerant right wing.
In fact the Coalition was extremely unlikely ever to support a constitutional voice or a treaty but they were too scared to have an argument about it in government. As a result, while never making a commitment they later breached, they effectively misled Aboriginal leaders by allowing them to think they would accept much more constitutional change than ever before.
As much as anything, these mealy-mouthed bipartisan equivocations from the Coalition led us into the mess we’re in today.
The whole edifice of Indigenous policy bipartisanship has really been uniquely challenged, intellectually and politically, by Price. She holds a huge political lesson for Australian politics.
If you really believe something, such as that the Constitution should not be changed to enshrine racial division, and a constituency is against you on the issue, you must make a sustained effort to win them over not by disguising your position but by having the argument and trying to win it.
Thirty years ago the great EJ Dionne wrote the seminal book Why Americans Hate Politics. In it he argued that both sides of politics avoid real policy disagreements and try to present voters with “false choices”.
Thus the Yes case frequently argues that voters should virtually ignore the constitutional and political change the voice entails, and vote simply on the basis of morality, as though defining citizenship by racial categories is not itself a moral issue. This is a false choice if ever there was one.
But there is one important player in federal politics that is seldom bullied by cowardly bipartisanship, and that’s the Australian people. As Robert Manne once quipped, the best chance for any referendum to succeed might well be if it faced official bipartisan opposition. For the Coalition to rabbit on about another referendum is an insult to our intelligence and wrong in principle.
If this referendum is defeated there probably won’t be another one on anything for 25 years. The Australian people are like that. They don’t want to change the Constitution. If the Liberals agree with the Australian people, they should argue the case in principle, not look for a phony, place-holding, rhetorical compromise.
Example No. 2 of dreadful bipartisan consensus is defence policy. The Albanese government is pursuing almost the identical defence policy to that of the Morrison government. This holds that Australia is committed to acquiring nuclear-powered submarines under the AUKUS agreement.
However, we won’t get our fleet of eight subs for several decades. And as we plan to build most of them in Adelaide the cost will be astronomical. In the meantime, unlike every other nation that has ever acquired nuclear-powered submarines, we won’t significantly increase our defence budget. Therefore, far from increasing our defence preparedness, we will radically run down almost the entirety of our defence force.
The two sides of politics will ritualistically abuse each other on the margins of defence policy but each will stick to this fantastically counter-productive bipartisan settlement. The symbolism of the never-never AUKUS subs means neither side need do anything substantial on defence capability. Defence bipartisanism of this kind directly harms our national security.
Consider the national education calamity. Our teachers unions and education departments are captured by the worst woke weirdness. Tendentious history, gender fluidity, national self-loathing – yep, they all hold sway.
Yet absolutely undeniable international surveys, one after another, show our school educational attainments on literacy and maths, those old-fashioned fripperies, going backwards as we slide further down international league tables. Yet none of the recent state Liberal governments, nor the federal Coalition over a decade in office, did anything meaningful to challenge any of this. They prefer the quiet life in which the only debate is over how many more billions of dollars can be spent on unsuccessful policies.
The legislated ban on nuclear energy in Australia was introduced by John Howard (whom this column otherwise greatly admires) to bipartisan acclaim.
It was essentially a Senate negotiating tactic but it achieved strong bipartisan support. It was utterly disastrous, cutting Australia off from an essential modern technology.
Then there is the National Disability Insurance Scheme, surely the single worst design in the history of government on this continent – an uncapped program of limitless demand and no definition, where the states decide the level of expenditure and the commonwealth pays the bill.
It was acclaimed as a magnificent bipartisan reform. Politicians were so scared of mouthing any hesitation that the most elementary design principles were ignored.
The worst feature of modern politics is not excessive partisanship but pusillanimous bipartisan surrender. Both sides of politics place tactics over strategy at every turn. They want to manage public discussion down to a couple of issues that favour them and where they can present the electorate with a false choice, which means only they can win.
This is rank cowardice and betrays the principles of democratic politics.
Arguing a case, sometimes for years, and winning the argument – say Howard with the GST – is what democratic politics demands.
In the US, Republicans were told they could never again be competitive because Hispanics were against them. They went out with great activism to woo Hispanics, not by changing their policies but by showing how approaches that stressed being tough on crime, pro family, pro small business, pro patriotic served Hispanic voters.
The worst sin in politics is cowardice. It often travels under the alias of bipartisanism.
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