Morrison’s overreach part of wider malaise

What keeps a democracy healthy is the source of endless debate. As it should be for any project whose success or demise depends solely on how committed we are to it.

One area that deserves more focus, and agreement, is the need for boundaries. Not just legal boundaries but those informal boundaries that help to bind us together, that allow us to live well, in a cohesive society, even when we disagree.

We can’t enforce boundaries, except by enforcing our own behaviour. They help guard against the misuse of power. Boundaries between public and private lives protect us, and our families, and help to keep us sane. In complex human societies, boundaries help to reduce cultural and political conflict, too. When enough of us impose boundaries on ourselves then our democracies will likely be healthier.

But when boundaries around distinct spheres of human activity start to collapse, as the American Enterprise Institute’s Yuval Levin wrote earlier this year, we risk greater political instability and societal distrust and, ultimately, political collapse.

Last week was a fast-paced lesson in how ignoring boundaries is bad for us. By snubbing boundaries, in this case political conventions, Scott Morrison gave mutual trust a kick in the guts. Here was a prime minister using a national health crisis to grab hold of five ministerial portfolios for himself, all in secret, for no sensible reason. Covid-19 does not cause instant death; it’s not like a heart attack. Morrison, or anyone else, could have been appointed in less than an hour, in public, to deal with a minister struck down by the virus.

Many factors led to this breakdown in boundaries, among them Morrison’s own weird psychology, his obsession with secrecy and his distrust of others.

Another factor was the weakness of his cabinet, from Josh Frydenberg down. John Howard’s cabinet table had more strong ministers than weak ones – think Peter Costello, Alexander Downer, Peter Reith, Richard Alston, John Fahey. It was the same in Howard’s office.

Morrison’s cabinet table was, by contrast, a mindless rubber stamp. Regardless of whether Morrison was a political bully – and bullies are, by definition, less respectful of boundaries – a weak cabinet and an equally spineless prime minister’s office can only have emboldened the former PM to think that secretly grabbing five ministries was no big deal.

It was, and remains, a big deal. That said, the Albanese government has lost sight of the difference between conventions and laws. If Morrison has broken no law, Labor needs to settle down. We have a written Constitution and should not make customs, conventions and practices de facto laws because, by definition, we have decided not to make them laws.

Morrison’s penalty is shame, his legacy tainted by his power grab and his flagrant distrust of voters, and the knowledge that he has contributed to tanking distrust among voters. When even a few politicians don’t trust us with the truth, we end up assuming the worst about most of them.

Witness how Finnish Prime Minister Sanna Marin was forced to take a drug test after footage leaked of her dancing with some girlfriends in someone’s home. The 30-something PM was happy; perhaps she’d had a few drinks, too. But such is the distrust in modern democracies, the small nation was forced to await the results of her drug test. Marin’s word was not enough.

A trivial example, perhaps. But it points to how dancing at home with a group of friends can become a public scandal because too few people pay heed to the boundary between a private life and a public one.

Yet this boundary is important if we want to attract normal people into politics, not colourless drones whose every waking hour is spent living through a miserable political lens. That said, boundaries between the public and private lives are easier to maintain when people don’t film their private lives.

While some may have sympathised with Morrison scolding journalists last week for waiting outside his home with cameras, invading the privacy of his wife and children, it hardly packs a moral punch to wag your finger about boundaries when you have so comprehensively snubbed them too.

Many in the media class have been in a frenzy bordering on nutty about Morrison ignoring convention. But how many can say, hand on heart, that they are doing their bit to maintain the health of our democracy by maintaining boundaries?

Many are so subsumed by, and dependent on, social media outrage for their careers that platforms such as Twitter have become incentivised outrage structures. Professional boundaries around balance and proportion have been tossed aside for daily performative outrage. Every hour they can showcase their theatrical anger to attract new followers, scoring likes and retweets. Their social media dopamine hits entrench political polarisation and blind tribal loyalty.

These journalists rarely step outside their political sandbox or display a sense of proportion. Morrison broke convention, to be sure. It was appalling. But no one was immediately hurt by his demented power grab. During Covid, far, far worse was done to the Australian people, real harm was caused by politicians who have never been marked down by these partisan and performative journalists.

When the boundary between morality and politics collapses, elevating every issue into a moral battle between good and evil, other boundaries that bind us together are inevitably dismantled too. As Levin wrote, “every realm of our lives has become one of its battlefields”. From inside schools and universities, in companies and workplaces, inside places of worship, and in our private lives, “there is often no getting away from that intense, divisive and rigidly partisan struggle”.

Peter Turchin, an emeritus professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Connecticut, has researched the trends and cycles of past societies causing them to unravel. One trend of past political instability is what he calls “elite overproduction” – as ranks of the highly educated increase, it “generally leads to more intra-elite compet­ition that gradually undermines the spirit of co-operation, which is followed by ideological polarisation and fragmentation of the political class”, he wrote in 2013.

Turchin’s thesis is even more powerful in 2022. Elite overproduction is here to stay. So are those incentivised social media structures; like genies it is hard to see how Twitter can be put back in the bottle. Given these realities, maintaining boundaries between different spheres of activity becomes even more crucial if we are to live well together. By throwing stones at those who dismantle boundaries without looking at our own behaviour, we risk tearing our societies apart.