Calling on Western Sydney
Feb 26: Sen. Doug Cameron supports the PM's decision to spend a week in Western Sydney amid more poor poll tidings for the embattled Labor government.
- Autoplay OnOff
- Video feedback
- Video settings
In the midst of the latest spike of speculation about the fate of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, veteran minister Simon Crean declared that his party couldn't afford to perpetuate its recent history of revolving-door leadership. Like nearly everything government members utter in this charged climate, Crean's warning was reported not for its substance but as another sally in the Gillard-Rudd rivalry. Was he or wasn't he still firmly behind the PM?
But let's pause and recall Labor's leadership merry-go-round since Paul Keating resigned following his government's defeat in 1996. In less than a decade-and-a-half, Labor changed leaders six times. First it elected Kim Beazley jnr, who was then deposed by Crean, only for Crean to be cast aside for Mark Latham. When Latham self-combusted, Labor returned to Beazley, who was then superseded by Kevin Rudd and, finally, Gillard toppled Rudd in 2010. By way of comparison, Labor had as many leadership transitions in the period between Ben Chifley's death in the early postwar era and Keating's prime ministership.
At least some of the recent spate of changes was made against the party's better instincts. Latham was widely recognised as volatile, while Rudd, for all his formidable intelligence and work ethic, had been chiefly distinguished since entering caucus by his relentless self-promotion and impatience for the leadership.
Illustration: Andrew Dyson.
How did a party historically suspicious of leaders, as was consistent with its collectivist ethic, become so consumed by a messiah complex?
It is a phenomenon that has been driven by powerful overlapping forces, which have been developing for several decades. One of those forces is the media-generated personalisation of politics in which there has been a heightened focus on leaders as message bearers for their parties and a preoccupation with their personal appeal. But the decline of parties has also played a role. As they have been hollowed out and abandoned distinctive philosophies, leaders have become their surrogates and agents of product differentiation.
Paradoxically, while this paradigm of leader-centred politics and personalised mandates has encouraged leadership predominance it has also increased the disposability of leaders who are vulnerable the moment their electoral popularity flags.
Gillard's incumbency has highlighted how acute this phenomenon has become. Her entire prime ministership has dangled under a Sword of Damocles of leadership speculation. More has been said and written about when she will be dumped from office than about what she has done in office.
The fixation on the leadership blood sport had not only been destructive for Gillard and Labor, it also is damaging governance in this country. Should we be surprised that leaders who feel continually at risk of overthrow calculate decisions to shore up their position? And the impatience to burn leaders disregards the historical lesson that successful prime ministers require time to mature in office.
What is to be done? In the case of the Labor Party perhaps it should emulate what its British counterpart did in the 1980s, which was to give the power to select and remove the leader to an electoral college in which parliamentarians, party branches and affiliated trade unions all have a say. The effect is that leadership security no longer hangs by the single hair trigger of a party-room vote.
Giving greater security of tenure to leaders is not alone an answer. Such a reform would need to be balanced by measures to constrain centralisation of power and combat the dangerous fallacy that a leader is omniscient. Measures, for example, that promote adherence to the principle of (collective) cabinet decision-making, empower the party room so that backbenchers aren't reduced to ciphers, and reinvigorate extra-parliamentary activity to reconnect politicians to the grassroots.
Yet responsibility for the contemporary dysfunction doesn't merely lie with politicians and parties. The media must also shoulder blame. To contextualise this we should remember that the media are under great strain. Indeed, while newspaper journalists detail with relish Labor's declining poll numbers and ministry departures, they are working for organisations that are losing circulation and shedding senior colleagues at a more alarming rate than anything besetting the government. They are also operating within an accelerated news cycle and a culture of instant gratification.
These pressures are fuelling unhealthy practices when it comes to political coverage. The fetish with and debased use of opinion polls to foment leadership instability is an illustration.
Polls are expensive to commission, providing an imperative for newspapers to get the biggest bang for the buck from them. It's hardly surprising then that polls are excessively magnified with poor numbers portrayed as tantamount to doom for government and leader.
Readers are rarely cautioned that single polls are relatively meaningless - it's the longer-term trend that matters - or that there is not a strong correlation between leader ratings and election outcomes.
And newspapers do not merely emblazon polls across their front pages. Their results become fodder for inflammatory columns with authors arguing over who should or shouldn't be voted off the leadership island. Meanwhile, other important issues are subsumed and the national conversation diminished.
Indeed, what we're reduced to is a kind of reality TV Survivor series masquerading as political debate.
Paul Strangio is an associate professor in politics at Monash University.
Follow the National Times on Twitter
No comments:
Post a Comment