Save articles for later
Add articles to your saved list and come back to them any time.
We have a distrustful and disillusioned electorate, a professionalised political system that, however, frequently alienates the sort of people we should be attracting into parliament, a public service that has been found wanting, an excessively secretive approach to information and accountability, media that are too often driven by clicks and ratings, and social media that debase political discourse more often than elevate it. All this invites the questions: is our democracy failing us and how can it do better?
Today’s voters don’t think much of the political system as it is operating, or its participants. Trust in politicians and institutions is low.
The politics of question time has seen many Australians tune out. Credit: Alex Ellinghausen
Many young people feel they’ve got the worst of the generational stick, with expensive education bills and homeownership frequently out of reach. Time-poor, cost-and-debt-burdened families are impatient with the gamesmanship that often dominates politics, while older voters look back with what may be a false memory of the way things were.
The electorate is changing as the baby boomers retire and die. So are attitudes and values. In the next two federal parliamentary terms, millennials and generation Z combined will become the biggest voting group.
Trust is central to the rest of the system – to whether people think it’s worth being involved, their faith in governments and their decisions, in parliament and in the public service, and their confidence in what they see and read in the media.
For a well-functioning democracy, we need people to have a fundamental belief in the system, the integrity of its component parts, and how those who operate it behave. On the other hand, people should be sceptical enough to question the system, advocate for reforms, and call out faults or dysfunction in it. It’s a balance.
Two notable features of the 2022 election were the extremely low votes of Labor and the Coalition, and the record number of crossbenchers elected to the House of Representatives.
The major parties struggle to appeal. Their grip on voters has loosened with the decline of the old class-based, ideological political divide. The voting pattern has realigned, with many wealthier, highly educated voters shifting to the progressive side of politics, and the Liberals pitching to the lower-income, outer suburban voters (“Howard’s battlers”, “Tony’s tradies”).
A crossbench of people willing to speak out on many issues refreshes the system. On the other hand, the hollowing out of the major parties is a seriously retrograde development.
Parliament was always a bear pit, but now, thanks to televising, we see its inglorious detail. Visitors who watch from the public gallery are often totally disillusioned by the spectacle. I recall a few years ago talking to a group visiting Canberra who’d observed question time earlier in the day: they were outraged. “What can we do?” they asked. I could only suggest they contact their local MP.
After one fracas this year, teal MP Kylea Tink called out the bad behaviour, saying an opposition MP had aggressively challenged her voting. Tink told the house: “I do not feel proud of the way my workplace was represented yesterday. And, quite frankly, I did not feel safe.”
The Albanese government came to power promising to revitalise the public service. Maybe it will, though it’ll be years before we can judge. But it wasn’t just the attitude of the former government that dragged the public service down. It’s a much longer-term, complicated story.
The advisory process has become more competitive over the decades, and there has also been the rise of a plethora of advocacy groups and the emergence of many specialist well-resourced think tanks.
This year, three scandals have cast the public service in a bad light. The Robodebt royal commission, revelations about how the public service has become enmeshed with the big consultancies, and the emergence in the media of the texts sent by the secretary of the Home Affairs Department, Mike Pezzullo.
Governments preach the virtues of transparency and accountability but practise the habits of information control and secrecy.
Freedom-of-information legislation is supposed to further accountability. But the former FOI commissioner, Leo Hardiman, has recited a litany of issues with how that system operates.
On other fronts, routinely governments baulk at giving information that might embarrass them.
Traditional media have also become leaner and the squeeze on journalist numbers has hit, in particular, some of the specialist reporters. So you have fewer eyes on some crucial policy areas, especially eyes that have been on them for quite a long time.
Women’s interest in news is at a record low. News avoidance is high, driven largely by a sense of being overwhelmed by information overload and the amount of conflict and negativity in the coverage.
The parliamentary press gallery has a special place when we are assessing how well political participants are held to account, and thus our democracy served. We’re looking at something of a battleground – governments, and the other political players, doing their best to control messages and optics; the media trying to push through the gate.
The Voice referendum this year put our democratic system through its paces, and different judgements will be made about how it performed. It showed many people are unfamiliar with some basics of the political system, especially the Constitution.
So we come back to the question: is the political system letting the public down? The answer, I think, is yes, on many fronts, although we should acknowledge the picture is never black or white. We do have a robust democracy, a “clean” voting system, strong institutions, freedom of expression, various checks and balances, vigorous media. Our compulsory voting system, while flawed in theory by denying people the right to opt out, is a gem in practice.
But it’s clear the system needs renovations.
Michelle Grattan is professorial fellow at the University of Canberra. This is an edited version of the Speaker’s Lecture 2023, delivered by Michelle Grattan at Parliament House on October 30.
This article first appeared on The Conversation.
The Opinion newsletter is a weekly wrap of views that will challenge, champion and inform your own. Sign up here.
Most Viewed in Politics
From our partners
Source: Read Full Article
