The Circus In Canberra

The Political Caste Is Forming

I've written a couple of times here that student politics from the early 80s has been casting a long shadow over real adult politics. Turns out this is a view that's being shared by journalists who watch these people a lot closer than mere mug punters like we can do. Mrs. Pleiades sent in this link by an article by Guy Rundle.

With the appointment of Smith – who was Melbourne University Liberal Club president in the 1980s, before being hired as press secretary and eerie doppelganger to Peter Costello – we have reached the point where all the key roles in both chambers are occupied by former student politicians. These are people who have had almost no job but politics, who went from university scuffles into back offices and then onto government or opposition benches.

Tony Abbott cut his teeth and punched near women’s heads in the cockpit of Sydney University’s late Cold War politics in the 1970s. Bill Shorten rose through the ranks of the Melbourne student Labor Right in the 1980s. Christopher Pyne and opposition leader in the senate Penny Wong tangled at Adelaide University in the same period, and George Brandis floated round Liberal student politics in Queensland. One could find another half-dozen figures in the front ranks who took the same path: a fee-free degree leaving plenty of time for student politics, all-involving clashes for the spoils of office, culminating in the annual National Union of Students conference where enmities and alliances, now of decades’ standing, were put in place.

Among the journalists reporting on them, analysing them, are more than a few who edited or wrote for student newspapers, including this correspondent. Political, personal and ideological battles fought in the confines of cramped student union buildings, fluoro lights and beige floor tiles, the chemical reek of the paper’s bromide camera, meetings run by 20-year-olds with their own copy of Robert’s Rules of Order. It never occurred to me at the time that it was the adult world in miniature, as prologue, but so it is. 

Parliament House, that great disaster, exacerbates this, a student union writ large, self-contained and too far from anything else to make leaving during the day worthwhile. For two decades, this new political situation has been under construction. Now it is here. We have been ruled by political professionals for decades, of course, but even those who started early, such as Paul Keating, went through an entirely different process, in a wider world that was also more testing. What we have now is the bonsai version. And it shows in our politics. 

So it is always amusing to see journalists from this milieu talk about “the political class” as if they weren’t part of it. Or as if there were a class at all. “Class” suggests a social category, a group too broad to know one another. The people we are now ruled by constitute a political caste, quite a different thing – a group small enough for all the principals to know one another, have associations, obligation and affinities stretching back decades, and hidden from wider view.

And that, in a nutshell is the origin story of how our politics got to be so - how to put this politely - fucked up. The worst irony (as I've written before) is that these very people got up on the back from free education offered up by Whitlam, and now that they've found the trough into which they've firmly affixed their snouts, they're busy pulling up the ladders by making university education prohibitively expensive. Think about that for a moment. These people reaped the benefits of a decision, got into a career in politics on the back of this decision, profited by it greatly, and are now busily removing the road that gothic there so there will be no competition.

As Guy Rundle properly points out, this is a caste; these people all know each other from a long way back. And what will become of this caste is that it will create whole families of people who will now run for office in the future, benefited by the ancestral decision to go into politics on tieback of a free education in the small window it existed in time. We will be seeing the beneficiaries of a hereditary political caste, and they will be running our democracy in ever diminishing effectiveness. Which is what we've seen in older countries like England and France but also in Japan and Taiwan.

The recent airing of 'the Killing Season' illustrated how Tony Burke had no particular policy agenda but was willing to throw his lot behind Julia Gillard in order to unseat Kevin Rudd. There was no political principle involved, it was a nudge and a wink and time to round up the backbenchers. The cabinet knew less of what was going on until the coup was fait accompli. Did they oust Rudd because he was genuinely some kind of party outsider? Then who are the insiders? The insiders, as it turns out are these apparatchiks borne of student politics, the career politicos who fined being policy wonks but headed to Canberra for their big payday. It only made sense to machinate against Rudd if it meant a higher pay under Gillard and so they did. Tony Burke didn't spell it out, but it was always a nudge-and-a-wink with these people; and even in being interviewed, he didn't deny it.

They're not in to it for the power anymore. They're into it for the money that comes with power. They might not even care about the impact of the power they throw about in the process of grabbing the money. It's simply not about the policy or ideas. Just look at Sophie Mirabella who is desperately trying to get back in. It's not like she has any policy ideas; she's never had any worth a camel's spit. She just wants to get back in for the money and the perks. In some ways being a Parliamentarian might be the next gold rush, which explains the recent Senate vote which ushered in a candidate from allied (read, preference-swapping) micro-parties.

How does this thing play out in the short to mid-term? An interesting observation made by some pundits in the property sector some months back was that negative gearing because most of these politicians were themselves property investors and so were net beneficiaries. You can bet your bottom dollar that when most of them have paid off their mortgages on there properties, they will magically come to the conclusion that it is time to wind back negative gearing. This would be just one area where the interests of the politicians will speed right ahead of the interest of the economy or for that matter, this nation. And we wouldn't be able to accuse them of corruption because it's not corruption if everybody accepts the practice - an attitude we're discovering is prevalent and entrenched when it comes to perks.

In the mid-term, we will find that the policy wreck created by their collective indifference - and let's not mistake the mock outrage your see in question time as some kind of passionate display of ideas - which will ultimately drive this nation into a ditch. It's not that far off, especially given how quickly Andrew Robb is trying to sell us out to other nations with all these unfavourable 'Free Trade Agreements' that abdicate the sovereignty of our state.

In the long term, they will sell us out so much there won't be any decisions future Parliaments will be able to make. At that point it will become glaringly obvious, un-contestable and fact, that politics is indeed the entertainment branch of whatever rent-seeking-lobby du jour is running this country. And so, this kind of crony capitalist idiocy isn't going to stop even if the Liberals get rid of Tony Abbott as Prime Minister or if the people vote out the Coalition. The ALP will get right back in and it will just continue being a circus. We're really going to have to all get more involved politics (not less) if we're going to stem this tide.