Aussie democracy: dumbed down and sold out
21 February 2012
Written by Leslie Cannold
Source
Leslie Cannold spells out what’s rotten in the state of Australian democracy, and the media wears some of the blame.
It’s become common to mourn the decline of “civility” in public debate. This follows a long period of anxiety about “values” and disgruntlement about “spin”, and – if I’m reading the tea leaves right – it will soon give way to sustained fretting about the “debasement” or “hyperpolarisation” of Australia’s political debate, or what our prime minister recently called the “Americanisation” of Australian politics.
I don’t think we’ve quite put our finger on the precise nature of the problem yet – something I’m going to try to do here. But we are not jumping at shadows. There is something rotten in the state of Australian democracy, something we have good reason to worry about.
What is at stake is far more momentous than a decline in the rules of etiquette or politesse, but goes to an erosion of critical ground rules that have long governed public debate and policy development in this country. Many such rules find their genesis in those enlightenment values of fairness, balance, reason, evidence, transparency, accountability and the most important of all, the public interest.
The result has been a mushrooming of lawlessness in the way corporate Australia and Australian political leaders conduct themselves. The rationale for such lawlessness seems to be that anything goes as long as it delivers the desired end, no matter how base, unworthy, despicable or contrary to the public interest that end might be. And the media is mostly going along for the ride.
It’s just not cricket.
The Australian media is implicated in the story of democratic decline. In part, this is because our economic and democratic institutions – among them the Fourth Estate – are so interconnected that unchecked rule breaking from one corner (especially if it puts you in a better position than those who follow the rules) will result in a retaliatory frenzy. The result is a race to the bottom because – let’s face it – no-one likes to feel like a chump in room full of prospering cheaters.
But while the media is part of the problem, it is certainly not the only democratic institution to blame. Indeed, it was Australia’s political class – and not the media – who took the first step on the slippery slope toward our democracy’s decline. It was they who, early in the 1990s, started tinkering with the process by which public policy is created.
In the 1980s, according to Crikey’s Bernard Keane, this process was very traditional:
Policy was the purview of senior officials and ministers (who usually had only limited personal staff) and was not contested. Key institutions like Treasury were unchallenged except by politicians themselves (think John Stone being overruled on floating the dollar). Opinion polling was rare. There were no private sector economic consultancies producing their own Budget forecasts, conducting economic modelling, constantly demanding media attention or claiming to be superior to Treasury.
But by the early 1990s, says the Australian Financial Review’s Laura Tingle, the policy-making process started to take a different approach to vested interests. Instead of being seen as “rent-seekers”, corporates came to be seen as “stakeholders”. Policy interventions proposed by corporate Australia started being judged not by whether they served the public interest or were supported by evidence, but by how they could be sold to voters. Tingle writes:
A lobbyist with long links to the Coalition observed to me that, in the Hawke/Keating days, you had to come to see ministers armed with microeconomic modelling to back your case… In the Howard era you had to come armed with focus group polling and research. It doesn’t mean the Howard government didn’t engage in significant reform, but the way it was measured had started to be seen in a different light.
Big business responded to the new lie of the land with alacrity. A new class of public policy professionals emerged, including lobbyists, spin doctors and public relations experts. Where lobbyists failed, public advertising campaigns of the sort used by the mining industry to defeat Rudd’s Resource Super Profits Tax (RSPT) added to the exclusive influence arsenal – one available only to the rich, well-connected or famous.
This is part of the “democracy for sale” problem recently condemned by the Occupy Movement, and long decried by authors such as Inside Spin’s Bob Burton and academics such as Joo-Cheong Tham. As Tham, the author of Money and Politics: The democracy we can’t afford (UNSW Press, $49.95) told ABC Radio’s Eleanor Hall:
Imagine if the homeless could, like the mining companies, issue the government an ultimatum – a deadline of a fortnight to reach a deal on public housing… with a threat to resume the ads if a deal is not reached… Those situations [are] so far from our political imagination… [They] speak volumes as to how we have normalised quite undemocratic practices.
Arguably, corporate Australian should not be condemned for its single-minded pursuit of its own economic interests. “It is what it is” as the saying goes. However, big business can certainly be taken to task for the range of purposefully opaque third-party endorsements and other influence strategies used to sway public opinion and decision-makers towards its preferred policy positions.
Such strategies include the creation, support and financing of “front” groups (such as Timber Communities Australia and the tobacco-funded Alliance of Australian Retailers) and “think tanks” (like the Institute of Public Affairs, The Sydney Institute and the Centre for Independent Studies) that get the corporate message coming out of what appear to be independent, even quasi-academic, mouths.
Corporates also finance “research” and “independent modelling” (of the sort provided by Deloitte Access Economics among others) that says – and here I’m paraphrasing Keane – what they require to bolster their case.
The Fourth Estate, exercising its key role as defender of the public’s right to know, could have contested these new paradigms and exposed third-party influence techniques. Instead, and for a range of complex reasons, it has largely gone along for the ride.
The result is a news media congested with public relations material (Australian academic Jim Macnamara published a study in 2009 that found as much as 80 per cent of media content is derived from public relations material), and which regularly presents vested corporate interests or their paid mouthpieces as credible opinion-makers and public policy “experts”.
As well, analysis of the doing of politics, rather than of the substantive issues, is rife. On his recent trip to Melbourne, New York media academic Jay Rosen pointed to ABC TV’s Insiders as evidence of much that is rotten with Australian political coverage: “Promoting journalists as insiders in front of the outsiders, the viewers, the electorate, [shows] journalists are identifying with the wrong people.”
Most potently, we see a media happy to buy in to a definition of political leadership that not only disregards the public interest, but laughs in its face. Here’s Crikey! on its decision to anoint Tony Abbott the 2011 Politician of the Year:
“He has massively increased his party’s primary vote in the space of 12 months…[and] aggressively and effectively exploited voters’ perception that the prime minister misled them on a carbon price… He’s done it while shielding his own lack of a credible policy on virtually any issue you care to name. Abbott's own positions on any number of issues are all over the place – he's somehow able to hold virtually every position it is possible to hold on many issues. He has wrecked the Coalition's economic credentials… His fiscal strategy is completely incomprehensible… But Abbott is able to evade scrutiny on these weaknesses…”
The result of all this, says veteran political reporter Laurie Oakes, is that political journalists have lost both public trust and respect, calling into question their capacity to serve in the Fourth Estate role essential for a functioning democracy:
Those of us involved in journalism…[have] a big problem… it's been there for quite a while, slowly getting worse. I'm talking about a declining trust in what we do and the way we do it… I [recently] took heart from the fact that… the News of the World scandal was exposed largely as a result of brilliant investigative journalism by The Guardian's Nick Davies. So I read his book, Flat Earth News, only to find he'd written there: "I work in a corrupted profession.”
We are worried about our democracy for good reason. Lawlessness leads to more lawlessness, and the upholding of procedures and values such as transparency, reason, evidence and the public interest have been keys to the success of Australian democracy so far.
But we shouldn’t despair. This is not an omelette that can’t be unscrambled. Politicians – and the bureaucrats who serve them – could start turning things around tomorrow by returning to a policy creation process that puts the public interest first.
But this must be part of a much broader cultural about-face on what Tham says is the prevailing “sanguine acceptance of corrupt and unethical practices that undermine the public interest” in Canberra.
Among his key recommendations for change are regulatory interventions that ensure transparency about who is lobbying and being lobbied. These would help prevent corruption and misconduct and guard against unfair access and influence by the rich, famous or politically well connected. This would include enforcing employment restrictions on recently departed former parliamentarians and senior government employees.
Former MP Lindsay Tanner’s claim that Australian politicians cannot be blamed for “surrendering” to the “sideshow” demands of the Australian media is false. Australia’s elected officials are amongst the most powerful folk in the land – that’s why so much effort goes into influencing them. If they wanted to, they could institute tomorrow a political culture and corresponding legislative landscape that mitigates against forces corrosive of a healthy representative democracy. They should be held accountable for every moment they fail to act. They are the decision-makers – it’s time they started acting like it.
The media also has an important role to play. Political reporters must stop collaborating in the erroneous characterisation of sectional interests as authoritative spokespeople on what constitutes the public interest. The sophisticated third-party endorsement strategies that big money uses to make its message credible rely entirely on a supine media for their success. The moment we know that the Institute of Public Affairs is funded to be a mouthpiece for big business, or that “eminent” climate change deniers are funded by fossil fuel interests, the power of the endorsement falls away.
As US commentators such as Naomi Oreskes and Kerry Trueman have noted, the absence of transparency in the past has seen a decades-long campaign to mislead us about profitable but problematic substances from tobacco to DDT to fossil fuels.
The media can and should do better not because such a turnaround will stop big corporations from seeking influence to shape the world according to their interests, but because it will stop them being so successful.
We’re on the road to hell together on this one. The only way back to a healthy democracy is for all the key players – business, political decision-makers and the media – to take a collective step back.
