John Menadue

In a modern democracy like Australia, political parties are the main delivery mechanism of change. But recent events suggest these vehicles for change have become incapable of changing themselves.
For the ALP it is the rejection of internal democratic reform and the failure to modernise the relationship with the union movement. For the Liberal Party it is an entrenched and embarrassing under-representation of women in its senior ranks.
Recent attempts at internal reform by the major parties have been miserable flops, as they cling to the economic and social structures of a bygone century. And the Greens are no better.
As a result, Australia suffers from the lowest levels of political party membership in the advanced world. Yet the cartel-like structure of our party-based system means they continue as viable entities. The party is over but the music keeps playing, turning Australia into a democracy without the people.

In July, Labor’s national conference achieved significant policy success on several fronts and provided a political boost for Bill Shorten. But on the issue of internal democratic reform, the party once again came up short.
The conference adopted one significant change: ordinary members will now directly elect at least 150 delegates, the equivalent of one for every federal electorate, and a little more than one in three of all conference delegates.
The same conference also overwhelmingly voted down a motion to give local members at least 50 per cent of votes for Senate preselections. Another motion, to increase the vote of ordinary members in preselections for House of Representatives candidates, was put up then withdrawn.
With unions representing just 17 per cent of the workforce, Labor is trying to be the party of the future while shackled to the political economy of the 19th century.
Shorten in his campaign to become Labor leader promised party reform and gave commitments about setting a new standard for selecting ALP senators and giving members more say in preselections. Yet he was not even present on the conference floor when the matter was debated. It was a far cry from Gough Whitlam’s courageous “the impotent are pure” speech to the 1967 Victorian ALP conference.
Meanwhile the Liberal Party remains chained to 19th century social arrangements, with an outrageous under-representation of women in its senior ranks.
When Sir Robert Menzies founded the Liberal Party in 1944 he created a political party that was arguably the most progressive in the world in the representation of women. Menzies established quotas, with women to take a certain number of elected organisational party positions, and these quotas exist to this day in some state branches such as Victoria.
But with the exception of John Hewson, successive Liberal leaders have failed to give due attention to advancing women in their ranks through pre-selection and promotion. Now the Liberal Party finds itself with just 19 per cent of its federal parliamentary ranks filled by women and only two women in a federal cabinet of 19. That is half the number of women in the Cabinet of Afghanistan.
Again, the answer for the Liberal Party is obvious. But the party’s rejection of quotas is a triumph of school-boy debating rhetoric over evidence-based policy making. Quotas will help get more Liberal women into parliament. Quotas will help the Liberals with policy making in their party room. Quotas will help the Liberals win more votes at elections and form government more often.
But Tony Abbott is resisting calls for reform, is defiant on quotas, and will not admit to any institutional bias. In so doing he is proving to be part of the problem, not the solution. Menzies would be turning in his grave.
Finally, if you think the Greens Party are the standard bearers for internal democracy and modernity, then think again. The Greens’ system for electing their party leader is steeped in more mystery than the selection of the Pope. And their party conferences are closed affairs, with the media banned from attending debates.
In most democracies, about 5 per cent of voters are party members. In Australia, the figure has dropped sharply to less than 2 per cent.
If the Australian political parties operated in a competitive market like other organisations or companies, there is no way they would survive. So how do they get away with it? The short answer is that our party political system operates a lot like a cartel. A general lack of competitive pressure means they do not feel the heat to reform. Australia’s pathetic party funding and donation disclosure arrangements are further evidence of this cartel-like arrangement.
There is also an insularity to the Australian political system that means our parties often lag years behind developments in other parts of the world. In advanced democracies in Europe and North America there is a much higher awareness of what is happening in political parties in other jurisdictions, and this tends to drive reform towards best practice. The Australian political class seems unaware of Australia’s wooden-spoon status when it comes to party membership, or that most parties on both the left and right give their members a much bigger say in decision-making.

The paradox of power makes change hard: those with power simply won’t agree to a change in arrangements that will diminish their power. And there is no equivalent of the ACCC to demand change to the structure of this system.
The jungle drums for change are beating. But they will need to beat louder still – both internally among party members and externally with voters – if anything is going to change.
Liberal Party strategists know one reason they underperform with women voters is the lack of women in their parliamentary ranks. And Labor Party leaders know they need to cauterise the damage from the trade unions royal commission by modernising the linkages across the labour movement.
Just don’t hold your breath waiting for it to happen.
Nicholas Reece is a principal fellow at Melbourne University and a former Victorian secretary of the ALP and policy adviser to Julia Gillard, Steve Bracks and John Brumby. This article was first published in The Age on August 10, 2015

When does a political system become corrupt? When is the line crossed from garden variety rorting by a few members of parliament to institutionalised abuse of taxpayers’ money by the system?

The latest scandal over politicians’ entitlements has been like lifting the proverbial rock to discover a deeply, ethically challenged netherworld. One flagrant folly scuttled out, only to be followed by a horde of others.

Individual politicians have responded by pointing the finger at everyone and everything except themselves. This includes blaming their transgressions on a “system” of entitlements they created.

The public has reacted with disgust. And rightly so. This is our money being used for gratuitous chopper rides and flying the family business class to outback resorts.

It’s also compounded a growing view that our democratic system has become largely unaccountable and insensitive to citizens and, as a result, is reaching breaking point.

In this hothouse environment of outraged public opinion, it can be easy to exaggerate current events into claims of a full-blown crisis. After all, politicians have been up to these sorts of shenanigans since forever.

So how do we run a ruler over recent transgressions to see if they represent a superficial problem, or something more deeply embedded? Fortunately we have guidelines in the form of an article by American philosopher Amelie Rorty on how and why corruption begins and spreads.

Rorty is concerned with “the gradual corruption of an individual”. But her observations have important implications for the institutions and systems that individuals inhabit.
Her article, “How to Harden Your Heart: Six Easy Ways to Become Corrupt”, says the slippery slide to corruption is rarely obvious or defined by a single event. Instead, it happens by nuance and degrees.

It usually starts as the result of small errors of judgment. Individuals might rationalise their behaviour as minor infractions and even admit wrongdoing. But no real steps are taken to stamp out these behaviours. As acceptance of small errors compounds, hardens and spreads, self-deception leads to denial. The occasional individual ethical lapse becomes habitual corruption.

Applying Rorty’s thinking to our national political system provides a disturbing insight into where it is, and where it might be heading. The conclusion is unthinkable in a country that prides itself and its democratic system as being largely “clean”.

Rorty points to six warning signs that indicate if an individual is moving into the danger zone. The cues are eerily similar to what many in the community now consider to be broader weaknesses of our political system.

The first danger signal is what Rorty calls “attention to the present”. In the context of our political system it’s the overweening obsession with the short term and is potentially dangerous in fostering corruption because it allows wrongdoers to disconnect their present actions from future consequences. Obsessive reliance by MPs on fortnightly opinion polls is but one example of this corrosive impact.

Another warning sign is what Rorty calls “groupie attraction” or “gravitating to the company of like-minded” – a succinct way of describing the Canberra political bubble.
This is dangerous because the groupthink it creates provides both protection and support for wrongdoing (what is upheld as the “standard” in Canberra won’t often pass the pub test in Castlemaine).

Another red flag, “imitating the leader”, is self-explanatory in a political world where parties and Parliaments are increasingly organised around the dictates of their leaders.
“Captain’s calls” are increasingly the norm. The result is political subordinates who struggle to think for themselves. Rorty describes this warning sign as when “newcomers and initiates gravitate to powerful figures. Without realising it, novices emulate the behaviour of those who model ‘how things are done’.”

One final sign is “papering over the cracks”, which Rorty highlights as an attempt to distance the problem from the cause. We have seen this in Canberra via claims the problem lies with the “system” and not the ethical lapses of individuals.

In short, Rorty requires us to face up to the cause, not the symptom.

The entitlements scandal is a sign of alarming and unprecedented corrosion of Australia’s political culture. It has emerged from a succession of suspect individual moral judgments contributing to what is becoming a debased political system. That’s why far-reaching measures are needed to stamp out the rot before more damaging behaviours take hold.
Measures offered by politicians that are likely to tinker with the present expenses system will be insufficient. As Rorty warns, “when corruption is widespread, home-grown prevention can at best provide only some resistance”.

Full, immediate and independent transparency on entitlement use is but the first step on the long road to democratic renewal.

Dr Mark Triffitt is a lecturer in public policy at the University of Melbourne. Dr Travers McLeod is the chief executive officer of the Centre for Policy Development.
This article first appeared in the Melbourne Age on August 13, 2015.

The loss of Bronwyn Bishop from the role of Speaker in the Federal Parliament is a blow to the Abbott Government.

Bishop was not the least talented in a Government which – despite the supposed neutrality of the office – she seemed never to cease to be a part.

In her chaotic 22 month reign as Speaker of the House of Representatives she was, in the eyes of long-time parliamentary watchers, the least competent, least impartial and most disruptive person ever to hold that office.

Yet, given the ministerial performance of some from Tony Abbott’s front line, Abbetz, Brandis, Dutton, Andrews, Hockey and the PM himself come to mind, Bishop’s inadequacies hardly made her singular. Some actually made her performance look normal. Tony at least seemed to think so.

Bishop’s departure is a personal loss for the PM whose judgement on her future was once again letting himself and his Government down.

It was in fact a double failure in the political judgement of the PM who had already attracted notice for his seeming lack of familiarity with even the most basic tenets of Australian politics.

Bishop’s appointment in the first place was an Abbott’s Captain’s pick – there was no chance she could ever be elected to the post – and when, what was widely foreseen from the start eventually happened, it took him nearly three weeks to appreciate what was apparent to most of his backbench in a matter of days – to the Australian public Bishop and her outrageous excesses were electoral poison.

Abbott has a deep personal commitment to Bishop whom he once described as his political mother. This supposed relationship perhaps explains his own repeated hopeless lapses in political judgement – lapses which almost cost his job back in February.

Like a real Mum Bishop returned the favour of her ‘off the wall’ appointment, day after day in parliament setting out to protect her boy from the buffeting of awkward questions and criticisms, often at the cost of abandoning any semblance of independence or impartiality. Isn’t that what good mums do?

Anyway, the loss of an independent or impartial facade hardly mattered. Statistics alone demonstrate that these qualities, the hallmarks of competent occupancy of the Speaker’s Chair, had long since been abandoned. 400 dismissals – a   record for barely half a term with more than 390 Opposition victims and barely a half dozen from her own side quite adequately told that story.

Way back, Labor’s then Senate Leader Gareth Evans remarked of Bishop, then a relatively new Liberal Senator, that the reason people often took an instant dislike to her was that it saved them time.

The Australian Electorate was only slightly more tardy than the prescient Evans.

However, they needed only minimal exposure to the egregious manner to which she approached an exalted office to make Gareth look prophetic.

But Tony’s latest misjudgement was that together they could successfully ride out the crisis, keeping his protector in the Chair.

Even as the rising heat forced him out of the public eye, where, to his considerable discomfort, there was only one question his interrogators wanted answered, he judged that time would provide a cure. Repeated statements from him and the Speaker herself that she had done nothing wrong, hardly surprisingly, did not assist in making what was a major scandal vanish.

In fact, the passage of time only revealed more serious lapses by the beleaguered speaker.

Finally, backbench protests and warnings, threats from his own side to abstain in any no confidence vote and the refusal of a succession of senior Ministers – some of them Abbott supporters – to defend her publicly led to what from the outside had seemed an inevitable end. Tony alone had not seen this.

In her very last act as Speaker, her resignation, she continued to demonstrate her appalling lack of independence.

Most Speakers are aware that they are Officers of, and therefore responsible to, the Federal Parliament – not to the political party from which they come. Bishop failed here too. As an Officer of the Federal Parliament the resignation should have been made to the Parliament not through the Party of which she was supposedly independent. But it was in fact made not by Bishop to the Parliament as would have been proper but by Abbott as Leader of the political party which she had never ceased to serve.

Bishop came to the office of Speaker promising to be exceptional – she was – not in the way she foreshadowed. She would, she said, on taking office,” restore dignity and order to the Parliament”.

She has in fact left behind some benchmarks.

Inside the Parliament she is widely seen as the most obviously biassed and disruptive occupant of the Chair in memory. Outside the Parliament her arrogant extravagances are also on a scale not seen before.

In two theatres therefore her activities have registered extremely poorly. For pure paucity of performance in both areas she has indeed set a very high bar.

Half a mile from Parliament House senior officers of the Foreign Affairs Department are nervously waiting on what they believe – probably correctly – an instruction to find a diplomatic post for this political failure. They fear – again correctly – that with her girlish charm and coquettish smile she might have the same effect diplomatically as she has had on the Australia electorate – in three dramatic weeks becoming the single biggest issue in her nation’s politics.

Tony who has once again demonstrated that he is at best a meagre politician has said that no plum job is planned for Bishop post-resignation.

But Tony also said there would be no cuts to Health or Education – there were. He said there would be no cuts to the ABC or SBS – there were. He said a referendum recognizing Aborigines in the Constitution would take place in the first twelve months of his Government – it did not.

Foreign Affairs, therefore, remains on red alert.