This is my first cut at a meditation on what’s wrong with Australia’s governance today, motivated by last week’s Prime Ministerial address to the nation. I don’t suppose anyone’s going to read it, because it doesn’t look extreme enough, but I need to make the effort anyhow.
I worry about Albo, really I do. Last week’s deeply anodyne and uninspiring oration only consolidated my view that he is looking less and less like a statesman and more like a feather in the wind of conservative outrage. Often he starts out with a sensible idea, but goes to water the moment the bullies start to look sideways, and ends up with a policy that neither works nor embodies the values on which he was elected.
So in the case of the Bondi massacre, he started out defending the reasonable position that the only policy with any realistic prospect of staving off a recurrence of this kind of one-off outrage (the work of a couple of nutters working alone without any visible political or organisational support) would be to tighten up the gun laws. Within a couple of days, mobbed by Murdoch, the Opposition and the ever-friendly Zionist lobby, he shifted ground to redefine the problem in terms of a non-existent tide of public prejudice and the nonsequitur that anyone who objects to a mass murder elsewhere in the world must ipso facto be more inclined to commit one at home.
Thus we ended up with a knee-jerk response that punished the innocent and effectively traded off Australia’s civil liberties against the self-interest of a foreign terror state. Meanwhile the gun-law proposal, or anything else that might decrease public access to instruments of deadly violence, wasn’t explicitly disowned, just left to fester as one State after the other found excuses not to implement it. Result: a copycat crime, equally individualistic but serving a starkly different political agenda, happens barely a fortnight later, and fails only because the perpetrator appears to have used the same dodgy online bomb recipe as the Bondi shooters.
Or take online gambling. In that case the PM can’t claim to have been poorly briefed, as a parliamentary inquiry called by his own party produced a rare bipartisan consensus that the only effective means to contain Australia’s appalling collective gambling debt would be a phased crackdown, starting immediately, on all broadcast and online betting ads. That was getting on three years ago, and only now, after a lot of urging, do we get to see the product. The good bits first: limit of three ads per hour on telly in what are still wishfully regarded as children’s viewing hours or while a match is actually on, a ban on radio advertising in school pickup hours, no advertising on teams’ uniforms or around the stadium. Then the backdown: no new restrictions on broadcast or online advertising at other times, no new restrictions on other forms of advertising, no controls on other forms of inducement (e.g. free bets, influencers), a regulatory framework through which the industry can and doubtless will continue to drive the entire field of a Roman chariot race. And remember this is still not a bill, not even a legislative proposal, but just a “response” that will predictably have been watered right down in the customary selective “stakeholder consultation” process by the time it becomes law, if it ever does.
Or returning to the substance of last Wednesday’s address: once again, strong beginnings leading into flaccid policy. Brownie points to the PM for publicly acknowledging, despite the Coalition’s squawks, that nobody at the time had the slightest idea when this crisis is going to end, or how, and we still don’t – given that it’s all happening at the whim of the least predictable despot since Mad King Ferdinand of the Two Sicilies. Brownie points to him for damping down panic that won’t do any practical good. Big brownie points to the responsible minister for getting quietly to work in the background through diplomatic channels to secure such short-term fuel supplies as we can from friendly nations, even if you might think that’s a job the oil companies ought to be doing for themselves.
No brownie points for all the things that weren’t in the speech:
• no transparent benchmarks to determine when panic, and hence stronger measures, will become necessary.
• no foreshadowing of what those measures might be.
• no action to make sure the extra costs imposed by the crisis are paid by the fossil fuel interests who have spent decades of actively sabotaging the decarbonisation agenda, leaving us a good ten years behind where we could have been in reducing our dependence on foreign energy sources when the pinch came;
• not even the superprofits tax on the gas industry which now has the support not only of the electorate but even of some Coalition members.
Instead, a very short-term fix, already negated by the underlying inflation, which subsidises prices at the pump by cutting back consolidated revenue just when we most need it – effectively, by robbing ourselves – and provides an incentive, however marginal, to use more fuel, and hence a further demand subsidy to the industry that was to blame in the first place.
On top of that, no reference to the man who single-handedly landed us all in the crisis. Not even a mention of his name, let alone speaking ill of him. From various media interviews I get the impression that the same restraints have been imposed on the Ministry from above, and some are clearly chafing under them.
So what about the voting public, most of whom have recognised Trump for what he is since he first came back into office? Surely the more sceptically inclined must view this as evidence that Albo is putting one over them and withholding information they should know. Add to this that so much of the speech was written in Blokespeak (“the Australian way”; “the bush”), presumably done by the speechwriter to make Albo come across like a Man of the People but sounding a note of falsity to even a moderately critical listener, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find the address left many of its listeners feeling less confident that the Government had the situation under control than they would have been without it.
To be fair, it was a hard situation to talk your way out of, as Australia got ambushed by the crisis just as every other government in the world was. It was sprung on us literally overnight, and even the most on-the-ball government would have been at a loss to find an adequate response in the immediate term. Seen in that light, Australia’s initial response doesn’t look that bad. The problem lies in the absence of medium-term, strategic options to tide us over until such time as a full shift to a renewable economy has neutralised the dependence – and what matters more, the apparent absence of any capacity to develop them.
On the other hand, the immediate impact would have been less if there had been even six months’ notice. Given that, we might have been able to develop a more tangible emergency response - build out the charging infrastructure across the nation’s roads, accelerate renewable energy developments currently stalled by malicious obstruction under the guise of community involvement, defer very energy-intensive sporting events, maybe electrify a few more of the major railway lines; increase incentives for commercial users to change to EVs (the market seems to be doing the job for private owners), bring ethanol and biodiesel plants back into production, but also build up a reserve of liquid fossil fuels to the level required by the IEA, held on Australian soil and preferably in refined form.
Equally, it might have been a reasonable expectation 25 years ago that government experts would have wargamed this kind of crisis and had more robust responses ready to implement in an emergency. For all I know the wargaming may have happened somewhere out of public sight, but the responses plainly didn’t eventuate or have since fallen off the agenda.
It comes down ultimately to the poisonous logic of Mean Government which has steadily corrupted public policy in Australia since the 1990s, creating a belief among insiders that the first responsibility of public administration is to reduce the cost of public administration. Any attempt to provide in advance for contingencies that are less than 100% certain to happen within the current term of office is automatically seen as a lesser priority than the next tax holiday; so Australia remains, as a never-ending sequence of floods, cyclones and fires has shown, a nation that can sometimes manage crises quite well, but is hopeless at preventing them.
And it’s precisely because this mindset appears to be baked into both major parties, plus what’s left of the senior ranks of the public service, that we’re unlikely as a nation to learn from this shock, any more than we’ve learned from the predictably frequent climate-driven disasters, each of them predictably unprecedented. The urge to get back to business as usual is so dominant that we put off any move towards more permanent solutions lest they disturb the complacency of those who currently benefit most from business as usual. The result is a cognitive dissonance which builds up until the overload gets too much and a trigger event, often not too drastic in its own right, leads to a sudden outbreak of irrational overreaction, like the attack on freedom of inquiry in the arts and the universities that the Bondi massacre triggered.
Apart from Albo’s limited skills of public persuasion, the cases I’ve outlined illustrate two phenomena of current policy which I think deserve to be more widely recognised:
1. Avoidance-driven policymaking, where the problem is grudgingly acknowledged, but the response is shaped less by finding the optimal path to a solution than by the urge to address it (or be seen to address it) without acting on its broader implications or the context that brought it about, lest powerful interests should take offence;
2. The NQE (Not Quite Enough) model: doing enough to be seen to be addressing the problem, including an impressive-looking amount of public spending that can be cited whenever someone accuses the government of ignoring it, but stop well short of making the kind of potentially disruptive structural change without which the same problem will continue recurring.
Both these terms need to be explored further, and I hope to do so if this blog ever takes off. They key into my earlier work on perverse policy, which I should edit and repos, since it remains as relevant as it was 25 years ago when I first wrote it.