Ben Eltham
The dust is settling. New polls are out, and Labor is ahead.
The ruthless logic of Labor's Parliamentary plotters appears vindicated, at least in the short term, which is apparently all that counts. For the new Prime Minister, the honeymoon is on.
In months or even weeks, Julia Gillard will call an election, seeking a mandate as Prime Minister for the next term of Parliament. But what now will that "mandate" mean?
The events of last Wednesday night reveal serious flaws in Australia's democracy, flaws that may in time erode further the electorate's confidence in the two-party system - indeed, in aspects of our representative constitution itself.
While the polls this week have shown that Julia Gillard is well-regarded, they have also shown that many voters are dissatisfied with the way she became Prime Minister. So far, this dissatisfaction has been masked by Julia Gillard's considerable popularity. What criticisms there have been have concentrated on the internecine brutality of Labor's factional politics.
Consider what occurred last week. A sitting Prime Minister was removed - not by the popular vote of the electorate, but by essentially unknown power brokers in his own party. Canberra insiders and politics junkies may well know exactly who
Bill Shorten, Mark Arbib, David Farrell and David Feeney are, but how many ordinary voters would have?
Our new Prime Minister has thrown open the door to mining corporations. She has said she will seek to build a consensus on introducing a price on carbon. But when it comes to the small matter of changing Australia's head of government, there was no public consultation, and the only consensus that mattered was amongst the Parliamentary representatives of the Australian Labor Party.
I watched last Wednesday night's coup channel flipping back and forth between the ABC and Sky News. On both outlets, the excitement of the political journalists was obvious. Ordinarily, I enjoy media professionals who are passionate about their work, but there was something strangely distasteful about the glee with which many greeted the leadership spill.
The disconnect between the Australian political classes and ordinary voters was never so evident as on Thursday morning, when many Australians awoke to find their elected Prime Minister had been swapped overnight. While the talking heads enthusiastically explained the details of our Westminster system and the nitty-gritty of Labor's factional balance of power, ordinary voters scratched their heads and wondered why they didn't get a say in the decision.
As Mark Bahnisch pointed out here last week,
"Australians don't pay anything like the constant attention to politics that suffuses the world of the journosphere, the political tragics, the commentariat." But the media all too often forget this, which is why you can so often read or listen to a political journalist explaining a complex piece of public policy like the Resource Super Profits Tax in terms of
"doing a deal" with mining companies.
Bahnisch is not the only one to point out that the cycle of spin is now impoverishing not just our understanding of politics, but politics itself. He observes that "Alastair Campbell, Tony Blair's reformed spinmeister, has written persuasively of the propensity of the press to devour politicians. The charge that spin takes precedence over governing is an ironic one when made by those with a never satiated appetite for yet another event, a yearning for an always renewed narrative." The parasitic and unhealthy relationship between the media and politics is no better shown than by Campbell's official job description while working for Blair: Director of Media and Strategy.
If you need a snapshot of where politics is at in Australia in 2010, consider this: while top mining executives have the phone numbers of senior government ministers, ordinary voters don't even get to vote on who the Prime Minister is.
You can of course quibble with my analysis by pointing to Australia's Westminster tradition, in which the convention holds that Prime Minister must enjoy the support of a majority of the Parliament. On this measure, Julia Gillard clearly has a constitutional right to hold office.
But this ignores the fact that Australian election campaigns get more presidential every term. Political parties might reserve the right to change leaders at their whim, but when it comes around to election time, they campaign hard on the leadership qualities of their key figurehead. In 2007, it was the Australian Labor Party that created and championed "Kevin07", and it was Labor who made much of the ambiguity created by John Howard's announcement he would step down for Peter Costello sometime before 2010. Hypocrisy is often taken for granted in politics, but we should remember that every lie and every deception subtracts a little more trust in our democracy.
It's a point made well recently by Jeff Sparrow, when he writes that
"ordinary people are more disenfranchised from the political process than in any time in a generation. The institutions and structures that once allowed Joe and Jane Sixpack a degree of policy engagement beyond a few minutes in a ballot box have been atrophying for years." While the grassroots of political parties wither, the vested institutional and corporate interests within them continue to flourish. The Constitutional role of the Senate, for instance, was originally framed as a chamber of state's rights and executive review. Nowadays it is the easiest path to power for machine politicians from the major parties, who can scheme their way to an unassailable spot on a Senate ticket, thus giving a Nick Minchin or a Mark Arbib a six-year seat in Parliament without the tedium of representing a district in the House.
If last week's events show anything, they show the need for renewed efforts towards constitutional and electoral reform in Australia, particularly the need for primary elections for political candidates and more opportunities for direct democracy. Whatever the other flaws of US democracy, at least there voters have the right to directly choose their head of state. Registered voters can also participate in primaries to select their party political candidate for a particular election. It's a far cry from the branch stacking and backroom machinations so favoured by the New South Wales Labor Party.
Kevin Rudd certainly faced challenges. He had suffered serious policy setbacks in a mixed first-term that featured both successes and failures. He was also becoming unpopular in parts of the electorate. His government had encountered significant public opposition on certain important policies.
But he was also a first-term Prime Minister who had delivered many of his election promises, who retained considerable (if not overwhelming) personal support in the electorate, who had committed no obvious
"high crimes and misdemeanors", and whose party
would have been favoured to win an election held last Saturday.
Australian voters may yet confirm Julia Gillard's Prime Ministership in a general election. After all, her policies seem almost identical to those of her predecessor. Until then, her ascension to power is a reminder of the increasingly oligopolistic nature of Australian democracy.
Ben Eltham is a writer, journalist, researcher and creative producer from Melbourne, Australia.
