Tanner sideshow misses the plot

IT is always disappointing when you pick up a book with high expectations but on completion are left under-whelmed.

That was how I felt after reading Lindsay Tanner's Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. (Read extracts here.)

Even the title is a draw card. However, instead of readers being exposed to an insider's account of our political system, or a quality scholarly account of its democratic shortcomings by a politician widely regarded as a person of substance, this book fails on both counts.

Tanner laments the relationship between the media and politicians: gotcha journalism buttressing up against political spin, lazy reporting and low-level analysis of policy. All observations are fair enough, but sadly we don't get much by way of serious analysis of each in this book.

In fact, Tanner falls into the same trap he claims to be exposing when justifying his argument. He uses an example from an interview he did with ABC Lateline as the exception that proves the rule about just how bad the media is. Tanner was asked to sum up Kevin Rudd and John Howard in one word but mistakenly thought that the question was "a bit ambiguous" and answered on Howard only, calling him "nasty". He praises then Lateline host Leigh Sales as "enlightened" for choosing to edit that misunderstanding out of the pre-recorded interview.

This exchange, and Tanner's view of it, is emblematic of why this book doesn't do its job.

Surely asking a minister to sum up a complex individual (or individuals) in one word is part of the dumbing down phenomenon by the media Tanner's book should condemn, not the "enlightened" alternative this example is held up to be? And wouldn't part of the problem of the sideshow also be Tanner's willingness to participate by answering the simplistic question in the first place? Doing so when he thought it only pertained to Howard, with a comment like "nasty", is shallow partisanship. And most would recall Tanner as the master of the one-liner, which made him a master of the dumbing down of democracy.

Sideshow only provides passing self-assessments of Tanner's failure to live up to what he would like politics to be. Such introspection might have been enlightening, if preserving his own legacy in a contaminated system wasn't Tanner's chief purpose.

Instead, the media gets the blame for the system's failings far more so than the politicians, even though political leadership should start in parliament. Tanner thinks he has solved the age-old question of "which comes first: the chicken or the egg?", by determining that the media, not politicians' spin, is to blame for the sideshow. A better analysis would have concluded that apportioning blame is an exercise in futility only worthy of sideshow status.

Perhaps the most interesting area of debate Tanner opens up is whether compulsory voting contributes to popular endorsement being dictated by entertainment. However, that line of inquiry only pops up late.

Tanner spent 18 years in parliament, most of it as a partisan operative railing against a goods and services tax, which as an economist he must have known was an important and necessary reform. After years in the political wilderness Tanner finally achieved power as finance minister and a member of the so-called gang of four. But then he retired, either because he was afraid the Greens would win his seat or was frustrated by the deferral of the ETS (or both).

Behind that, what really drove Tanner out of parliament, and more importantly a detailed analysis of why, is what this book should have been about. If it in fact was a belief that the media (which he implies is largely homogenous) is to blame for superficial debate, that says as much about Tanner's (over-stated) ability to analyse as about the system's problems.

Peter van Onselen is a Winthrop professor at the University of Western Australia.