There is little point having another election. The shifts in society that have been caused by the 2007-08 financial crisis are permanent, and need to be faced up to by politicians who have become used to the political stability that has accompanied relative economic stability over the past 30 years.
The fact is that although Australia, on average, escaped the GFC, much of it did not. The two-speed economy is producing a two-speed polity.
In any case, there’s really only one election policy that needs to survive the negotiations with independents: the NBN. And that was only part of the election because the opposition promised to cancel it; like all good reforms, the NBN was never voted for.
No other policy stands out as particularly crucial. Both sides issued a blizzard of announcements during the campaign designed to appeal to marginal electorates or specific interest groups. Many of these were perfectly good ideas, but if they hit the bin as a result of this week’s discussions, the nation won’t suffer.
Election policies are merely a product of Australia’s marketing-based two-party political system.
The electorate actually chooses a party because it is sick of the other one, but the managers of each party have evolved a slick, disciplined marketing procedure based around policies that express a desired image.
That there is now another election with an electorate of four men that can now subvert the usual order of things is alarming and exhilarating.
It’s alarming because these four men are what Paul Keating might call “unrepresentative swill”. They were elected by a small fraction of the Australian population yet they are the delegates at a private conference that will elect the next government of Australia.
But it’s also exhilarating because we might end up minus some of the worst aspects of two-party combat and a more transparent and functional Parliamentary system, although, Rob Oakeshott’s dream of MPs regarding themselves as Members of Parliament first and members of party second is the pipe variety.
Oakeshott, Tony Windsor, Bob Katter and Andrew Wilkie might not be the winners of a national ballot aimed at electing a four-man Commission of Democratic Purity, but they’re the ones we’ve got. And so far, apart from some understandable grandstanding, they haven’t disgraced themselves and seem unlikely to.
It may be that negotiating with them proves too complicated and we end up having another general election, but that would hardly be disastrous.
And even if they start chopping into the parties’ election platforms as well as adding some conditions of their own around Parliamentary processes, there would be no great loss: the only policy worth keeping is the NBN and in any case its only presence in the campaign was a negative one, in the form of the Coalition’s promise to stop it.
More significant, perhaps, is that Australia’s hung Parliament reflects the post-GFC divisions that are now haunting the world.
The Federal Reserve’s conference at Jackson Hole over the weekend exposed the deep fissures within central banking between those who want more intervention and those who want less.
The rally at the Lincoln Memorial reflected the wider divisions in US society that are being opened up by the failure of the recovery to reduce unemployment.
Europe is divided between the haves — mainly Germany, which is benefiting hugely from the devalued euro — and the have-nots on the periphery.
In Australia the divisions are complex. The warnings about a two-speed economy — resources winning and manufacturing losing — are coming to pass, but not in the way that was expected.
The resources state of Queensland is losing out because it is as much reliant on tourism and property development as resources, and in a post-GFC world the high dollar is hurting tourism and the credit squeeze is hurting development.
As a result, Queensland swung massively against the Labor government and cost it the election; likewise NSW, which has the added problem for Labor of an unpopular state government. Three of the four independents come from Queensland and NSW.
These divisions will not be resolved by another election. Political parties around the world need to come to terms with the new reality of a post-crisis world.
Today’s AFR summed up the Australian body politic nicely.
Taxpayers vote LNP or Greens, with the latter increasing its base.
Recipients of transfer payments vote Labor.
The next election should be fought between a fair go for the taxpayers versus a free ride for the parasites.
The Liberal Party can no longer afford to rely on “traditional” family values.
The electorate and your base have told you to be more broad-minded, tolerant and accepting.
It is also in your interest to fight the new paradigm election because many of the parasites also pay a small amount of tax and they fool themselves into believing they are nett tax-payers.
[the NBN was never voted for.]
Really Alan?
Then what the heck happened last weekend?
It seems to me, that the NBN was the one thing that kept the ALP in the hunt.
Indeed it might still pull it over the line with the support of the Indi’s.
Alan Kohler writes that the only policy that “needs to survive” is the NBN.
But each time he has written that, he has omitted to discuss who he thinks should pay for it. No doubt we would all like to drive a Rolls Royce, especially if the Government pays for it. The problem is that the nation simply cannot afford to splash that amount of money – and probably lots more – so that Alan can get his writings out a bit faster, and the idle few can download movies in 30 seconds.
There are so many holes in this plan that Conroy wrote on the back of an envelope at 30000 feet in a VIP jet. And not least of these is how much it will cost each household to hook into it. Thousands probably, and we won’t want to pay. Meantime the banks and big business will be the big winners, and the national Debt will have increased yet again exponentially by an amount that we still don’t know. $43billion is nothing more than a “first guess.”
“The resources state of Queensland is losing out because it is as much reliant on tourism and property development as resources, and in a post-GFC world the high dollar is hurting tourism and the credit squeeze is hurting development.”
Yes, and to a considerable extent the high dollar is a product of the mining boom that will only accelerate if the Coalition is elected to government. The RSPT or minerals rent tax would have dampened the high dollar and inflation but, of course, that would mean introduction of a “great big new tax” or the end of the world as we know it.
One conceivable division looming is between those who own real estate and those who merely rent it. As the former have access to capital and politicians, they are able to raise the “standard of living” for their own kind and incidentally deny it to the latter.
If the division comes to pervade our education we may revert to a more class-based polarisation. I for one hope that egalitarian issues become election issues before we lose our egalitarian self-image.