Is our current political model, the accepted way of governing in Australia, capable of dealing with the challenges of the 21st century?

Let’s try a hypothesis.

The four major reforming governments of recent decades have been the Hawke-Keating Government, the Howard Government in relation to the GST and WorkChoices and the Greiner and Kennett Governments.

The Hawke-Keating Government had Keating, a once-in-a-lifetime figure who lived and breathed the logic that good policy could be good politics. But he needed Hawke, a man apparently in mystic communion with Australia, to balance him. It is telling that Keating as Prime Minister achieved much less than his predecessor — with the important exception of industrial relations, where he employed “Dangerman” Laurie Brereton, a man of similar political mentality to Keating.

Greiner and Kennett were less successful at combining good politics and major reform. But they demonstrated the same political model, which centred on the expenditure of political capital in the cause of major reform that created short-term losers, but which would eventually yield significant, community-wide benefits from which one could renew one’s stock of support. The model may not have always been implemented successfully, or could be undone by political mismanagement, but in theory it was sound, as Labor demonstrated.

That model has now been junked by both sides. The defeats of Greiner and Kennett prompted their Labor replacements to develop a model in which any reform that created significant numbers of losers was avoided, and major constituencies (in state Labor’s case, public sector unions) were kept onside with funding. Critical to this model was intensive media management, in which the issue was always not what was happening but how the Government’s response was spun. Management of the media cycle replaced proactive policy initiatives.

After the GST and its early fiscal discipline, the Howard Government adapted the model for its own use. It, too, aggressively managed the media, via advertising and spin. It too used taxpayer funding to keep key constituencies on side. And after the GST it avoided major reforms, except where the losers — asylum seekers, work-for-the-dole recipients, alleged terrorists, indigenous communities — were too powerless to pose a threat or could be demonised. Only when Howard, driven by his obsession with crushing unions, abandoned the model and implemented WorkChoices, did he fail.

So let’s name the model after its two most successful exponents, Bob Carr and John Howard.

So far, it seems, the Rudd Government is operating on a similar model — not least because there is a strong influence from the many former NSW Government staffers that run ministerial offices. The Budget suggested there was more substance there than might’ve been expected, but its day-to-day management looks awfully familiar.

If the experience of defeat of Liberal reformers has played a major role in its genesis, Australia’s media also bears responsibility. It is the 24/7 news cycle that makes politicians itch to manage it, to provide something new each day, even before yesterday’s announcement has been digested. And it is the media’s insistence on the adversarial nature of politics that drives an emphasis on the short-term, the tactical, on concentrating on who loses from policy, when the whole community might benefit.

And the size and structure of Australia’s media doesn’t help. We have the disadvantages of oligopolies with none of the advantages. We’re too small to support a diverse media. Our electronic and print media are heavily concentrated, and dominate debate and disproportionately influence policy. Our media also compete for the same mainstream audiences, encouraging sameness and conformity of analysis. And we lack both the size and sheer level of online engagement to have a US-style influential blogatariat.

The Carr-Howard model operated effectively while the biggest policy issue perceived to be facing the country was what to do with all that extra money flowing in from China. Far more serious problems like climate change existed, but they were denied or the parameters of the problem — the acceleration of global demand by China and India, the death of the Murray-Darling basin — had not become fully apparent.

Alas, these problems become fully apparent now. And the mechanisms to deal with these problems will create a lot of losers. The Carr-Howard model can’t handle this. But the model may not even be sustainable in the absence of reform. If there will be plenty of losers as a consequence of reform, there’ll be even more without any.

In the absence of a new model for the way we conduct and report politics, Australian democracy risks becoming dysfunctional in the face of the historic reform challenges that we now face.

This week (maybe even for longer) Crikey will explore key policy challenges from alternate perspectives that break them out of the business-as-usual political model. Today, it’s oil and carbon pricing, and we promise not to mention FuelWatch once.