How can you run a country if you've never lived in the real world?

THIS is getting embarrassing. If we need reminders of what happens when politicians lack real life experience, we need only tune into Canberra on a regular basis.

The debacle last week surrounding the appointment of the new chairman to the Future Fund is in keeping with the growing list of policy stuff-ups, implementation disasters and astonishing failures to follow sound process by the federal government. The cause of each blunder is as simple as it is consistent: those who are running the country are political careerists who have never run a business. They haven't a clue about what the 4.5 million Australians whowork in the two million small businesses in this country do. Nor do our politicians know anything about running a big business. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find in federal parliament a former tradie, a train driver, or a member of the working class who toils on the shop floor. The people's representatives are not representative of the people anymore.

This is a most curious state of affairs. The modern clarion call from progressives is that all sorts of institutions, from the High Court of Australia to boardrooms across the nation, must be more representative of the broader community. We are told that legitimacy, good decisions, not to mention sound processes, depend on a body reflecting an authentic slice of Australia.

Now look inside the big house on the hill, the home of Australian democracy. Look particularly at the side where the government sits. The biographies of Gillard ministers read like carbon copies of each other: former unionists, political staffers, lawyers with union law firms, party apparatchiks, a few teachers, more union organisers, more political staffers, the odd academic. The one closest to being self-employed is a former musician with Midnight Oil. Disconnected from the life experiences of most Australians, these ministers seem to stumble from one mess to the next, not comprehending the nature of their mistakes.

Observations about the present political disconnect are not new. Trying to explain Labor's malaise in the polls, plenty of senior Labor people have mulled over the narrow gene pool in Canberra. Last year former NSW Labor premier Neville Wran, whose first cabinet included a pharmacist, a car salesman and a bricklayer, to name just a few of the occupations of his ministry, said that Labor no longer represents its traditional base. Last November former federal senator Stephen Loosley called for the apparatchiki to be "dramatically reduced at the next round of ALP preselections". Paul Keating has said the problem with Labor is it doesn't like the working class much anymore.

As academic Nick Dyrenfurth, author of several books about the ALP, has told us, Labor has moved far from its roots. The party's raison d'etre was that only a party of the workers could truly represent workers. As Dyrenfurth wrote last year, "it beggars belief that federal Labor's ranks contain no self-employed tradies". Contrast the Hawke ministry, which included a "doctor, shearer, farmer, policeman, teachers, lawyers, two businessmen, a priest and an accountant" with the Gillard ministry, chock full of political careerists. "These folks aren't bad people," wrote Dyrenfurth, "but their narrow life experiences have arguably contributed to the party's inability to sell its policies to the electorate".

There is nothing arguable about it. And lack of life experience doesn't just inhibit the Labor Party selling its policies. This state of affairs encourages poor processes that invariably produce poor policies. Little wonder then that Labor has problems selling its policies. By their own mouths, Labor ministers admit to the dysfunction in government. Health Minister Nicola Roxon recently revealed that former PM Kevin Rudd gave four days' notice of his intention to take over the entire health system. There was no legal advice, not even a cabinet submission. Rudd's pink batts policy was a disaster from start to finish. Implementation of Labor's school stimulus policy was another costly mess. Communications minister Stephen Conroy has pursued the $36 billion National Broadband Network, which was conceived on board a VIP flight with Rudd, without so much as a cost-benefit analysis. Wayne Swan pushed ahead with an ill-conceived resources super-profits tax without bothering to consult the states or the mining industry.

Now take Rudd out of the equation. Julia Gillard's half-baked East Timor solution and her equally ill-considered Malaysia solution suggest policy naivete of the highest order. The Gillard government's sudden halt to beef exports revealed an amateurish level of fickleness. Gillard's overpriced carbon tax is detached from reality. The government twice ignored the recommendations of the panel overseeing the tender of the Australia Network. Now, after having 12 months to appoint a new chairman to the $73 billion Future Fund, the Labor government has ignored the suggestion of its own consultant David Gonski to appoint Peter Costello as Future Fund chairman. Appointing Gonski as chairman, the government conflicted the Sydney businessman and again displayed a deplorable lack of real-world smarts. But then, why on earth would the federal Labor government understand good corporate governance when its own processes and policies lack sound judgment?

Last year, Conroy famously laughed off and indeed swore at the notion of Australia attracting a new level of sovereign risk after so many policy switches and blunders. He may be right that "sovereign risk" is the wrong phrase.

So let's try this: Labor's history of policy capriciousness and implementation disasters is a nightmare for business and investors searching for certainty. Laughing off his government's history of ineptitude simply points to his own gold-class membership of a clueless political class.

As a first step, it is constructive that senior Labor thinkers have written intellectual pieces about the problematic rise of a narrow class of political insiders within the ALP. Now let's hear these same people admit the real price of having political careerists running the country. Let these wise men 'fess up to the policy stuff-ups, the bungled implementation of policies and the appalling lack of process.

A more effective wake-up to the ALP and the future of Australian politics depends on making that intellectually honest link. And the Liberal Party can ill afford to gloat about Labor's incompetence. At a dinner in Melbourne a few weeks back, former Liberal prime minister John Howard lamented the rise of an insular, inexperienced political class within his own beloved party. It may be that the only difference between the two parties on this front is that right now Labor's political careerists are running the country. The same problems may well emerge when the Coalition is in the driver's seat.