Last week, there were signs of just how little Australians are engaged with the technical details of how they are governed.
As Shane Wright wrote in these pages, 59 per cent of Australians have an entirely mistaken understanding of the relationship between interest rates and inflation. As well, almost half of us either get wrong or don’t grasp the relationship between interest rates and economic activity.
Meanwhile, Governor-General Sam Mostyn told The Guardian that there is a “woeful lack of understanding … of the tenets of our democracy”. “We’ve got a growing catastrophe, I think, in a failure to understand and engage with and feel proud of the very civic underpinnings of our democracy.”
I’m unsure about whether to find these facts concerning. Have Australians – or any peoples, really – ever had a detailed understanding of how their institutions work? Wright points out, though, that a lack of understanding can interact dangerously with a lack of trust. Each can amplify the other.
Not a problem, if our institutions retain trust. Alas, we already know that trust in our democracy has been declining. The Reserve Bank of Australia has an average score of 5.5 out of 10 for trust – not awful but not great.
Which feels – let’s be honest – entirely logical. When push comes to shove, I suspect most experts would say neither Australian governments nor the RBA have done a bang-up job in recent years. So what reason would most people have to trust either?
The only answer, it seems to me, is something like “this is the way things have always worked” (well, since the 1980s). Or “trust us – we know what we’re doing”.
Which brings us to something ordinary people understand very clearly about the way governments and institutions operate: a group of powerful people telling everyone else they know how things should work, despite growing evidence they don’t. Events of the past fortnight have reminded Australians of that understanding.
One involved federal Labor, and it was really two combined: a national conference at which factions ensured everything operated like clockwork – and a series of fundraisers, including one just before a conference hosted by the son of a Chinese billionaire. (The billionaire has faced questions over movements of money from China to Australia.)
A second involved Victorian Labor: a premier slowly destroyed by her own failure to adequately deal with alleged corruption linked to powerful union influence. A third involved the NSW Liberals: an ICAC investigation into donations, factions, business and power.
There are common elements to these stories. One, widely remarked, is money: the way that those desperate to make money find a way to influence, or attempt to influence, our politicians. Those forces might be individuals, criminals or ordinary businesses.
This has always been the case; it will always be the case. But this is why our laws, processes and institutions need to guard against it so strongly. As is obvious, they don’t. And they never will so long as the prevailing attitude remains that, in the end, there’s only so much we can do about it.
Which is, sadly, the case. Our politicians take it for granted that somebody can pay their political party $10,000 to have dinner with them. That bears repeating: you can pay $10,000 for a meeting with the most powerful people in the country.
It is insane that we treat this as a normal part of politics. There’s been much focus (understandably) on Anthony Albanese’s dinner with Felix Lee, but perhaps the greater problem is that these types of stories – a hint of alleged murkiness, a hint of glamour (Phillip Dong Fang Lee, Felix’s father, allegedly bought over $2 billion worth of gambling chips at Star Casino) are the only ones that register now. Everything else is just the way things are.
A second common element is the operation of factions. Much like money, there will always be factions in politics: at their simplest, they are groupings of people who combine for common purpose. The problem is that, with time, most have stagnated: they are rarely about principles and very often about guaranteeing loyalty. They were always vectors of power; that’s what they’re supposed to be. The problem arises when that power is not wielded to obvious purpose – and when they operate in ways invisible to most people.
These are tired criticisms. I feel tired writing them. But they have to be made, again and again, because together they are destroying politics, dragging it away from a contest over principles to a self-sustaining system in which a small number of people work together to shore up either power or wealth.
And so, every time one of these stories pops up, there are two problems. The first is one of perceptions. Such interactions cement the impression that our parties are exactly what ordinary people don’t want them to be: operations in which power and money secretly work to control outcomes in ways most of us will never grasp.
The larger problem goes beyond impressions. At some point in recent decades, many voters formed the view that society was being run to advantage those who already had advantages. That’s because it was. All that interaction with moneyed elites actually did stop governments from governing well. Their purpose became muddied. And secrecy meant that even where governments acted for the right reasons, there were good reasons for ordinary people to doubt that was the case – and enough occasions where that hadn’t been true to give them good reason.
Money will always play some role in politics because our world is made of money. And factions will always play a role because that is how change is achieved: by marshalling groups of people. The great challenge for our politicians is making clear to ordinary voters two things: first, that our democracy is a public affair, not a private one; second, that there are overarching principles driving their behaviour in government – if not to the exclusion of other factors, at least to an overwhelming extent.
If Australians can be convinced that their institutions are operating in their favour – if their institutions are, in fact, operating in their favour – then grasping the precise details of their operation becomes far less important. But we are a long way from that.
Sean Kelly is a regular columnist and was an adviser to Labor prime ministers Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.
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Sean Kelly is author of The Game: A Portrait of Scott Morrison, a regular columnist and a former adviser to Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd.Connect via X.From our partners
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