Once upon a time in Australia, the best and the brightest presented themselves for election. Now, it seems, Cabinet ministers are chosen on the basis of loyalty to whoever is sitting in the prime ministerial chair. And talent is in short supply.
Many had had glittering careers elsewhere and were ready to give something back to the Commonwealth. Some were from less elevated walks of life, but were filled with a fervour to ‘do good’.
Upon election, as a general rule, it usually took them some time to show what they were made of, and gradually those with the best minds, and the greatest capacity, worked their way up through the ranks. In political life that has always meant attaining ministerial appointment. If one were unfortunate enough to be seated on the ‘wrong’ side of the chamber, one gained shadow ministerial experience.
Often the Minister, and his or her shadow, continued in the same portfolio, over a period of years. Each became an expert in that area. For example, when the electorate voted for change, the Shadow Minister was able to step into the ministerial role almost seamlessly, and often with shared goals. That approach was known as bi-partisanship.
This illustrated the maxim that the Cabinet was there to serve the country, rather than the party. In the best of times, the Minister and his or her shadow were able to work together, with the goal of improvement the country as a whole. This came to an end with the Howard Government.
How did Howard change things?
To many Australians, John Howard was known as honest, earnest and relatively harmless. But that persona was carefully crafted. His Government was described as ‘mean and tricky’ in a report Howard commissioned, from the Liberals’ then party president, Shane Stone. Howard was on a mission in 1996 to re-make Australia into a faux Thatcherite society, and he used the oldest trick in the book – a ‘budget emergency’.
Serving as a beacon to Tony Abbott in 2013, Howard ‘manufactured’ a budget emergency, and embarked on a ruthless project to rid his government of debt by selling off the country’s silver and imposing strict savings on reluctant ministers.
Some of the more notable pieces of silver were Telstra, the Commonwealth Employment Service and the aged care sector. The damage these own goals have caused has cascaded throughout the years and continues to cause the country to bleed.
But it served Howard in two ways. First he engineered “cabinet solidarity” on solving the ’emergency’, thus mandating even unreasonable savings, and he isolated the so-called ‘wets’, many of whom fought for funding for their portfolios.
‘Wets’, another term for moderates, generally believed in a type of humanistic Conservatism, where they achieved economic goals while protecting the poor. Some of his best performers were either sidetracked or actively removed from the parliament, through selective targeting.
The party is of course now stacked with time-serving, narrow, ideologically motivated drones, whose life experience is usually having served as an ‘adviser’ to a parliamentarian hack, or as a lawyer. That does not deepen the gene pool, but it does provide malleable cattle with which to work.
What happened to bi-partisanship?
Cabinet ministers are now chosen on the basis of loyalty to whoever is sitting in the prime ministerial chair. Talent is in such short supply that someone like Michaelia Cash, a former lawyer, is now a cabinet minister. Her portfolio area is Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business. With her unreasoning loathing for all things union, who could she work with from across the aisle? And, working at a major law firm, as a taster for small business?
Angus Taylor, a former Rhodes Scholar, has worked as a management consultant for 20 years or so. He must know about risk management, or he would not have been employed in management consulting. And yet, in possibly the most important role he will ever be employed in, that of reducing Australia’s emissions in a pre-apocalyptic world, he adheres to the anti-science rhetoric and apparent obfuscations of a global heating denialist. The only possible explanation is that he is unable to read a risk profile, or he cannot escape the shackles of his denialism.
Melissa Price MP was Vice President of Legal and Business Development for Crosslands Resources, an iron ore miner, before she was appointed to the Environment Ministry. As Peter Fitzsimons asked on television, “If a million dead fish at Menindee doesn’t attract your attention as the environment minister, what does it take?”
She also approved the Adani Mine’s groundwater plan just days before the 2019 election, although the plan was riddled with errors. It puts her in line, along with Greg Hunt and Josh Frydenberg, to contest the Worst Environment Minister in History Award.
Was the Prime Minister joking with these appointments?
One theme runs through this tiny sample of ministerial misfits. It can be read as being the best we can do, with a shallow pool from which to pick, or did Morrison actually choose ministers who would so underperform that he could show his contempt for the very areas they represent.
Considering the IPA obsession for small to no government, could this be, like Trump’s, a new low in ministerial commitment, as we head to low-to-no regulation and really ugly capitalism?
Politics has been called, unkindly, show business for ugly people, but it should not be taken so lightly. Politics is a deadly serious undertaking because it has real, tangible consequences. That is why it constantly surprises me that politicians think they have some form of a pass – that they will not be judged for their actions. Because their decisions often have real-world consequences.
Mark Buckley is a writer based in regional Victoria. He has a particular interest in politics, history and ethics in public life. He blogs at www.askbucko.com
Comments
16 responses to “Australia’s political talent pool more like a puddle”
Reflects the overall lack of empowerment in our parliamentary party politics for MPs and parties to act on behalf of all Australians; followers not leaders.
Possibly it’s demographic, ideological and unique political communication culture; like the end of the white Australia policy was due to the declining pool of white talent in the UK especially, there is an ongoing decline in Anglo/Irish stock, to which our most significant influencers belong too.
These influencers include IPA, CIS and industry bodies promoting libertarian socio-economic policy (advantageous to them) but sold via non liberatarian media i.e. authoritarian and white nativist dog whistling of immigrants, population growth, Labor, unions, greens, universites, China etc.; deflecting attention away from the prime moving agents (often foreign or US/UK), supported and feared by too many MPs.
Vested interests had to spend up big to get this government over the line. Like any product, the more advertising that is needed to sell it, the worse crap it is.
Pardon me! “Once upon a time in Australia, the best and the brightest presented themselves for election. Now, it seems, Cabinet ministers are chosen on the basis of loyalty to whoever is sitting in the prime ministerial chair. And talent is in short supply”.
Short term memory at work here I’m afraid. It was ever thus.
On both sides we now have arguably the best qualified ministers (collectively) in 50 years.
It’s not their abilities that we should question, it’s the abandonment of accountability…
https://publish.pearlsandirritations.com/laurie-patton-catch-22-0-we-wouldnt-need-inquiries-if-public-administration-wasnt-so-broken-updated/
It depends on how you define “best qualified”. Perhaps I should have included desire to excel, accepting the challenge of mastering a brief, life skills. Too many Law degrees if you ask me.
Mark, if you have not already found it, you might enjoy Evan Whitton’s “Our Corrupt Legal System”. It is a history of English Law, warts and all. Free, here:
http://netk.net.au/whitton/ocls.pdf
Thanks Simon. I will read it.
And those “best qualified ministers” have selected, and continue to support a leadership that abandons accountability?
Anyone else spot the contradiction here?
Ultimately responsibility fall back on the voters. We can continue supporting the party political system into whose DNA this inexporable decline is encoded, or we can chose to take another path. I suggest voting for independent representative candidates, supporting good ones and canning the inevitable failures. Perhaps if a small committed group set about spreading that message it might prompt a change for the better, over time. Could it be that much worse than the idiocracy we are currently subjected to?
I came from the Whitlam era. We believed in the aspirations of both our people and those charged with managing our nation’s affairs of state. Early on the Sunday after that glorious night in 1972, every member of our branch came into work. Each of us got to prepare a draft of the proclamation Gough had promised to make within 48 hours of his election, bringing our troops home from Vietnam. We each prepared a portion of the document in our own handwriting as our small but important witness and contribution to history. As the boss had told us, once typed and proof read, the document would go direct to the PM and from there to Yarralumla. It duly did but prior to that day and that extraordinary night, we had served, inter alia Jim Killen faithfully. Indeed, he was fond of our briefs because they gave him sprinkles of legal arguments he could use in Cabinet in order to progress the then government’s goals. And he loved that frisson of style in our submissions. After the election, we worked 7 days per week for two years, assisting Lance’s agenda. My point is, who in their right mind would walk across the road to work for anyone in the parliament today, let alone work 18 hours per day to advance the government’s policies on behalf of either of them. There is nothing of moment, no towering policy aspirations, no opportunity to help guide the fate of the nation among the shoals of hype and untruths. And dumb. Plain dumb.
Perhaps Bucko. Perhaps.
Or maybe it is the requirement to conflict interests that deters our best and brightest from offering themselve for service in the first place?
As always we will get the .gov we deserve.
Mr Buckley, shouldn’t there be at least some kind of gatekeeping before people are allowed to represent us in Parliament? If there are members of Parliament who still support Trump and think that he had his Presidency stolen from him, we are in real trouble. Even the lowest ranking public servants are subject to testing of literacy and numeracy before they are allowed to serve. Why shouldn’t there be one for the most consequential positions in the country. At the least they should be subject to psychological assessments to ensure that we are not represented by psychopaths or sociopaths. There must be something not quite right with people who would go around with the Americans putting their boots into weaker nations that the US does not approve of. Before we went to war with Iraq, they were actually a very good customer for our wheat. Please explain?
The mystery is why all Western governments should be equally incompetent while, at the same time, Russia and China have the best leadership teams in their (and possibly the world’s) history.
No mystery, Godfree.
Selection based on intellect, experience and recorded performance, choosing from the upper 5% of university graduates, and nurturing and extending their capacity throughout their careers, versus selection base first on ideological soundness, then on loyalty, then on their ability to attract funding by prostituting public goods to sponsor the next round of deceiving the electorate. Hardly a contest is it.
As an electorate it is us, the voters, that own the current debacle. We can change it by not supporting party politics and making it very clear that we want something better.
Or, we can do nothing and watch the wheels fall off. That might be fairly ugly, given our current leaderships propensity for siding with the global bully.
Our Roman system has lasted 2200 years because it has served murderous oligarchies so well. I suspect that only a cataclysm can create sufficient space to change it, though I hope to be proven wrong…
My theory is that many Australian conservatives actually WANT to be deceived by their reactionary, even stupid leaders, exactly like how ancient tribes prefer to see the world- in black and white. They want to defer to those who can express best their innermost fears and loathing for the ‘other’. (And the best ‘other’ is of course, the always useful bogeyman, the Chinese!)
Hence Dutton, Abetz, Morrison et al are able to channel the maximum fear and loathing, and win in Australian elections.
Stupid leaders beget stupid results, like losing billions and billions of dollars for nothing!
Godfree, you make a compelling case re China. But Russia? A KGB strongman and a group of kleptocrats? And a populace with a declining life expectancy?
You excoriate ALL Western govts. NZ under Ardern?
Tom McDonald’s fabulous tale of how policy was developed under EGW shows that, even here, good government was once possible.
There is no doubt that the current crop of government ministers appear to be the most incompetent, slip-shod bunch of muppets that have ever graced the seats of government in Australia. The problem is that the party machines will go on and put forward apparatchiks from their own ranks, be it the IPA or the unions, regardless of talent and accomplishments. Australia is the poorer for this chicanery.