This week, events
called Australia's political leaders to grow up and get serious.
On Monday, the
Treasury laid bare the political system's betrayal of Australia's younger
generation. Successive governments have bungled the nation's longest boom. They
have delivered a big, intractable deficit. The legacy of a 23-year boom and a
once-in-a-century mining bonanza is a mounting debt.
In truth, Australia remains on a
trajectory of unending deficit and generational betrayal.
And the Treasury
midyear report on the budget showed that the problem is worsening. A change of
government was not enough to fix it.
On Tuesday, an act of
violent hatred in our biggest city imposed a test on our maturity and national
unity.
Terrorists have
killed and maimed Australians and Australia's interests abroad for a dozen
years now. But this week a terrorist penetrated the systems of homeland defence
to kill civilians at will in Australia's main commercial precinct.
These events
challenge national solvency and national security. In other words, they test
Australia's very sovereignty. Can we meet the challenge?
Not if we persist
with politics as it is now conducted. It has been an indulgence of petty
squabbles, ideological excesses, and straight-out betrayals of the national
interest in pursuit of political advantage. It has favoured stoushes over
solutions.
Both sides and all
parties are guilty. The central urge has been to "game" the system
for partisan advantage, not to use the system for national advance.
"China's rise gave Australia a lot of protection through the commodities
boom," the American political scientist Francis Fukuyama tells me.
A close student of
Australia for 15 years, the author best known for The End of History says:
"It made it easier for Australia to balance the budget and work in a more
consensual way."
More consensual? It
looked frantically fractious here, but Fukuyama means that it has been more
consensual than in the US. In his latest book, Political Order and Political
Decay, he argues that the US has entered a stage of political decay.
It is an object
warning for Australia and for other democracies too. Australian political
parties and leaders have mimicked US political tricks and trends for years. Are
we heading for the same outcome?
Symptoms of American
decay include the fact that Congress cannot pass budgets without a rolling
series of crises and near-shutdowns of government, a frantic partisanship, an
extreme concentration of wealth, and a paralysis of government that Fukuyama
calls "vetocracy".
It's not just that
one branch of government vetoes any action by the other but that rich lobby
groups have the power to exercise veto over the US government as well.
The
"capture" of government isn't limited to the success of rich lobbies
and powerful industries, says Fukuyama, but also capture by tribalism and
ideology. "It's an intellectual rigidity," he says, which prevents
adherents from clearly seeing reality. For instance, conservatives refuse to
see that deregulation of the financial sector was a key cause of the 2008-09
financial crisis.
The result: "The
financial sector is more concentrated than ever and we're just as vulnerable as
we were."
Politics and
governance, Fukuyama warns, "is an area where you do not want to emulate
us".
Australia's
institutions are designed differently to those of the US government is
inherently more manageable in a Westminster system. And compulsory voting gives
Australia a greater protection against the extreme fragmentation that the US
suffers, Fukuyama says.
But some parallels
seem clear. The Abbott government brought perhaps the most ideological approach
to the budget that Australia has seen. John Howard certainly didn't
attempt to deregulate universities or introduce a Medicare co-payment. The
attempt to repeal section 18C of the Racial Discrimination Act was a pure
ideological indulgence.
Each time it has
launched Australia onto an ideological course, it has got itself into trouble
as public opinion has pulled it up short through the mechanism of the
Senate.
If the Coalition is
"captured" by ideology, Labor is captured by its tribalism with the
trade union movement in an increasing grotesque dislocation from the mainstream
of the workforce. Gough Whitlam, much lauded in eulogy, first had to break the
union monopoly over Labor to make it electable before he could achieve
anything.
But Bill Shorten is
content to allow an ever-shrinking and publicly disgraced union movement to
retain its veto over the Labor Party.
And powerful special
interests have exercised veto over both Coalition and Labor alike. Regardless
of what you think of the policies involved, it's undeniable that the ACTU
campaign against Work Choices vetoed the Howard government and helped bring it
down.
And that the mining
campaign against the mining tax vetoed the Rudd government and helped bring it
down.
"The
Americanisation of politics around the world is something to worry about,"
says Fukuyama. In Australia's case, he foresees that "if now you have
declining government revenues and more painful choices" with the collapse
of the mining boom, "you are likely to have less consensual
politics". In other words, a risk of going from bad to worse.
In one of the
conclusions of the second of his two-volume treatise on political order since
prehuman times, he writes: "No one living in an established liberal
democracy should therefore be complacent about the inevitability of its
survival.
"There is no automatic
historical mechanism that makes progress inevitable, or that prevents decay and
backsliding. Democracies exist and survive only because people want and are
willing to fight for them; leadership, organisational ability, and oftentimes
sheer good luck are needed for them to prevail."
If the tendency to
follow the US towards political decay has been the direction in Australian
politics, the sobering news this week give our country a chance to arrest it.
Events are calling
Australia to end its era of indulgence. We have entered an era of consequences.
We can't say we
hadn't been warned. It was four years ago that the Counter-Terrorism
White Paper said that the terrorist threat had become a "persistent and
permanent feature of Australia's security environment".
Even before the
so-called Islamic State existed, the white paper it warned that an attack
"could occur at any time".
Of course, the
attacks and the plots have been under way continuously. Terrorists of Jemaah
Islamiah bombed nightclubs in Bali in 2002. They killed 202 people including 88
Australians. The Australians were not an incidental target but a central
one.
JI bombed the
Australian embassy in Jakarta in 2004. They killed 11 people including four
embassy staff.
In the interim,
Australian courts have jailed 26 locals for terrorism-related crimes in the
last decade. They include Melbourne's Benbrika ring for plotting to attack an
AFL grand final and to assassinate a prime minister.
This year a gang of
Sunni barbarians has sought to strike back at a gang of Shiite thugs in Iraq.
It calls itself Islamic State. Its sudden success in this extremist civil war
has roiled Muslim communities worldwide, including in Australia.
It's estimated that
between 70 and 250 Australians have travelled to Iraq to join the killing. ASIO
says that about 20 have died there, and another 20 or so have returned. The
domestic spy agency says that it has advised the government to cancel some 100
passports to prevent more Australians joining the bloodletting.
The Australian people
understood the danger. In the Lowy poll this year, 65 per cent of respondents
saw international terrorism as the foremost threat to Australia's vital
interests in the next 10 years, with 65 per cent seeing it as a critical
threat.
In September the federal
government raised the threat level warning from medium to high. This signalled
that a terrorist attack was "likely". Yet the country still seemed
unprepared for the success of an attack at home. The enemies of Australia
and the enemies of civilisation can take some satisfaction from the
hyperventilation over the event and divisive recrimination over its causes.
Similarly, we had
been extensively warned by experts for a decade that the federal budget,
temporarily boosted by the mining boom, was in structural disrepair and that
economic reform was fatally sclerotic.
The Reserve Bank
governor, Glenn Stevens, had pointed out that the boom was temporary yet
Australia was behaving as if it were permanent. The eminent economist Ross
Garnaut had warned in his book Dog Days: Australia After the Boom that
political dysfunction and policy sclerosis was leading inevitably to many years
of painful falls in national income.
Any number of fiscal
experts, notably Saul Eslake and Stephen Anthony, have been warning from as far
back as the Howard years that the government was spending recklessly the fruits
of a temporary boom.
These warnings have
now become our reality. When Kevin Rudd helped ward off recession with
Australia's big fiscal stimulus, he promised that net government debt would
peak at 7 per cent of GDP then taper off. This week Treasury's midyear report
projected that net debt would peak at 17 per cent of GDP before tapering off.
In truth, Australia remains on a trajectory of unending deficit and generational
betrayal.
Can Australia's
political leadership grow up and confront an era of consequences?
The Abbott government
so far is failing to adjust to the budget realities. It needs a more fairly
based program to address deficits. And Labor is being plain irresponsible.
But the terrorist
attack has brought forth a better side of Australian political character from
the leadership.
A few months ago
Abbott was playing pathetic political games of division, singling out women
wearing burqas as some sort of social ill. But after the Martin Place terrorist
murders, Abbott has grown up. Playing divisiveness no more, he defended Islam
as a religion of peace and stood as a leader of national unity This is a
hopeful development in Abbott, prime minister. Shorten, too, has acted for
national unity and not sought advantage.
If this is the
template for Australian politics from now on, our country can dare to
hope.
Peter Hartcher is the political editor
for SMH
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