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It was predictable that Andrew Bragg’s freewheeling speech to the National Press Club last Wednesday would annoy some of his colleagues. Ranging far beyond his portfolio, Bragg opined on a range of important issues, expressing personal views that had not been adopted by shadow cabinet.
His critics lamented his lack of message discipline – although nothing he said was nearly so off-message as Tony Abbott’s recent attacks on multiculturalism and his romanticisation of the primacy of “Australia’s Anglo-Celtic core culture”. (Tell that to the one in four Australians who have no British or Irish antecedents, or the millions more of Anglo-Celtic ancestry – like me – who see ourselves simply as Australians.)
More importantly, Bragg said nothing that should not be part of a serious discussion about policy options for the years ahead, at a time when the public has seldom been more pessimistic about the future, and Australia’s economic performance – most alarmingly reflected by the accelerating decline in productivity – has seen us fall from high on the OECD league table to towards the bottom. If now isn’t the time to challenge status-quo thinking, it’s hard to think when is.
More revealing than the discomfort of some of Bragg’s colleagues was the reaction of ministers. Rather than engage with his arguments, or respond to his criticisms of the government’s economic performance, they simply dismissed them with fear-mongering and hyperbole. Responding to Bragg’s reminder that the Hawke-Keating Labor government reduced the debt-to-GDP ratio from 27 per cent to 22 per cent in just five years, Jim Chalmers did not bother to explain his plans to get public debt under control – perhaps because he has none – but lambasted any plan to cut government spending as just another Liberal attack on Medicare.
The only response of Bragg’s opposite number, Clare O’Neil, was merely to dial up the language to extreme. The speech was a “crazed, almost manic, ideological fever dream”, she said. “It was genuinely unhinged.” No counter-argument, no policy response, no critique. Just a thesaurus-full of ridicule.
In both cases – and there were more – the government’s response was entirely rhetorical. Certainly, some senior ministers know how to deliver a killer line. Jim Chalmers is particularly good at it. But rhetoric is not argument. When is the last time a Labor minister tried to engage intellectually with the opposition? Already, relatively early in the electoral cycle, it has produced a number of specific, well-defined policies, such as the indexation of income tax thresholds. They have been met with denunciation but no argument.
That dismissiveness is no doubt a reflection of Labor’s sense of its political invincibility. Despite the fact its primary vote has fallen yet further from its historical low at last year’s election, ministers still project a sense that they feel little electoral vulnerability. The disarray among the parties of the right and centre-right reinforces their confidence.
The government is remarkably stable. Anthony Albanese’s personal control of the Labor machine is unparalleled, evident in the vaguely North Korean vibe at its national conference last month. Even Albanese himself – who, in my experience, is not a particularly arrogant person (at least by comparison with some recent prime ministers) – is beginning to act as if he thought he were bulletproof. When, last week, his social media gaffe concerning the Japanese prime minister became the talk of the nation, he was utterly unapologetic, while embarrassed female colleagues were sent out to clean up the mess on breakfast television. Tanya Plibersek looked like she was in a hostage video – the only thing missing was the orange jumpsuit.
It can no longer be said that the Albanese government lacks a nation-changing policy agenda: this year’s most ideological of budgets will long be celebrated by Labor activists as a “true Labor” manifesto. But the manner in which that agenda is being delivered is telling.
The last two Australian governments that earned reputations as serious reformers – the Hawke-Keating partnership, which internationalised the economy, and that of Howard and Costello, who re-based the tax system – accomplished their reforms with painstaking care, as well as political courage. Hawke laid the foundations for so much he and Keating would achieve with the Accord, through which he sought to build a national consensus for fundamental change. Howard risked all, by taking his GST to an election. Both negotiated their reforms through a hostile Senate.
At every level – within their own parties, among key stakeholders, with the commentariat, the parliament and ultimately the general public – what Hawke, Keating, Howard and Costello did was an exercise in persuasion. They made their argument, answered their critics, built public acceptance, and were ultimately rewarded with success.
The Albanese government, in pursuing its reform agenda, displays none of those attributes. At last year’s election it was not transparent with the public about its intentions; it adopts an imperious attitude to the parliament (well knowing that the left majority in the Senate will always fall into line); relies on sharp-tongued rhetoric rather than serious argument to advocate its measures; refuses to engage on policy with a politically weakened opposition; and exhibits utter unconcern in building a public consensus for its changes.
In his recently published history of the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison years, The Twilight of Exceptionalism, Paul Kelly laments that the instability of those governments (and of the Rudd and Gillard governments before them) meant the abandonment of bold policy reform. But the ambitious agenda of a stable government in a strong political position may also lead to bad outcomes: policy which, while bold in conception, is neither tested by argument nor legitimised by persuasion.
George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.
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George Brandis is a former high commissioner to the UK, and a former Liberal senator and federal attorney-general. He is now a professor at the ANU’s National Security College.From our partners
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