Parliamentary question time has lost its original purpose and should be abolished, the former Labor leader Mark Latham argues in a new book, while calling for the establishment of Reserve Bank-style bodies to defuse politically toxic policy areas.
Latham said disillusionment with major party politics had given way to contempt, and leaders must adapt to a new reality: a more self-reliant, affluent and educated community that was less trusting of institutions, sick of old-style politics, and more attuned to the scourge of “spin”.
In the book, released on Tuesday and titled The Political Bubble: Why Australians Don’t Trust Politics, Latham says governments across the western world are struggling to deliver improvements for their people, with technological change and globalisation neutering traditional policy areas. In Australia the delegation of utility pricing to independent regulatory bodies and the advent of national competition policy has further reduced the role of government in economic settings.
Inflated or broken promises by both sides of politics have contributed to greater voter disillusionment, he writes, while parties have become less representative as a result of shrinking membership numbers.
“We are witnessing a major disruption in democratic practice,” Latham writes. “The formal structures of politics still function by their traditional rules and conventions, while the people they supposedly represent have moved on to a new world of self-reliance and institutional distrust.”
His 10 proposals for change include the introduction of voluntary voting in Australia, on the basis it could force parties to develop policy ideas that captured public imagination, along with with caps on election spending, transparency measures to expose meetings between lobbyists and ministers, and expansion of community ballots to widen input into the selection of candidates.
Latham’s prescription for arresting voter apathy – “the cycle of apathocracy” – is based on the belief that Australia “will never return to an era of mass membership politics and democratic participation”. Instead, party politics should be brought into line with public expectations: “less obtrusive, less grandiose, less pretentious”.
He says the public increasingly sees through party politics “characterised by chronic exaggerations: the wild hyperbole of the spin cycle and the partisan bickering of manufactured outrage”. Parliamentarians and the media are “viewed as play-actors in a pantomime far removed from the national interest”. The system must respond by becoming more “genuine” and “realistic” about what it can do for people, Latham writes.
Light-touch government
The first of his proposed solutions is a shift towards “light-touch government” based on an honest conversation with voters about what the public sector can and cannot do. This includes the abandonment of interventionism in economic policy and the ditching of attempts to suggest there is a “magic wand MPs can wave to overcome so-called cost-of-living pressures”. In social policy, middle-class welfare entitlements should be wound back.
“Instead of trying to be all things to all people, the major parties need to concentrate on doing a limited number of things well,” Latham writes.
“Logically, for the Coalition, this means pursuing labour market deregulation and taxation reform … Instead of a Rudd-style flurry of activity across all areas of administration, the next Labor government should restrict itself to three policy disciplines: education reform, poverty alleviation and climate change action.”
Latham also suggests a downsizing of the bureaucracy in general but advocates a push towards “independent policy-making” in several key areas. He credits the Reserve Bank of Australia’s management of monetary policy as a major part of the nation’s economic success, saying there is a strong argument for extending this model to other areas of economic debate, such as fiscal policy and climate change.
“These tend to be difficult, contentious issues ripe for scare campaigns and political opportunism,” he writes.
“Bodies similar to the Reserve Bank could be established to frame an independent climate change strategy and determine the major features of the federal budget (such as outlay and revenue targets, appropriate deficit/surplus levels and debt management policies). In its annual budgeting, the role of executive government would be to develop services and taxation measures compatible with these fiscal parameters.”
The Abbott government is seeking to abolish the existing Climate Change Authority, which was established in 2012 to provide independent advice on Australia’s climate change mitigation initiatives including emissions reduction targets.
Latham also argued for the abandonment of question time in federal parliament in a bid to limit opportunities for media “infotainment”. Ministers no longer genuinely answered questions or provided useful information, biased presiding officers had turned proceedings into a “farce”, and question time had degenerated into a forum for personal point-scoring and media ridicule, he writes.
Entitlements reform
Latham has also called for a major overhaul of the entitlements system, including an independent monitoring body with the power to fine and in extreme cases expel rorting MPs.
The current range of entitlements should be bundled into a single amount that each MP could transparently manage according to local priorities, Latham said. He said the MP would have to decide how many staff to employ out of this one pool of money and what were priority areas for spending. There would be “strict guidelines” in place and the public would be informed about how the MP had chosen to divide the entitlement.
Media ‘narrowcasting’
Latham’s book does not spare the media from attention: he takes aim at the promotion of an “alternative universe of denialism” on climate science and he documents errors in the pursuit of Julia Gillard over the Australian Workers Union slush fund allegations. He suggests a rise in “hyper partisanship” and says publishers increasingly “narrowcast” to a particular audience – trying to cash in on the interests of a tribal minority of politically obsessed consumers.
Latham writes that it is widely accepted that most ABC reporters are left of centre, while no one looking objectively at News Corp’s coverage of the last election campaign “could see the company as anything but a Coalition barracker”.
He says the Coalition ran “the most spurious disinformation campaign in Australian political history” on the economic impacts of the carbon tax but was “rewarded with strong editorial endorsements from the Murdoch press and favourable radio and television coverage”. Latham cites a source at a meeting of News Corp’s Australian editors in 2011 as saying Rupert Murdoch had opened the discussion by asking: “Now, how do we get rid of this Labor government?”
In a section on “the freedom wars”, Latham accuses News Corp commentators of hypocrisy for professing their belief in freedom of speech while criticising Guardian Australia and the ABC for reporting Australia’s past spying on the Indonesian government.
Latham says the “charade of supporting freedom of speech” was abandoned in favour of a “government-sanctioned approach to news and current affairs.”
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