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June 15, 2010
Another two weeks of parliament. The final one before an election? Will it be an August election or one in October or November? My guess is October.
No doubt I will watch Question Tim this week. No doubt I will become frustrated at how this part of the political process in liberal democracy works, even though I know that Question Time is just political theatre designed for the television cameras. Try as I might, I cannot shake off the feeling that something is badly wrong with the political process.
The political process needs reform. But what reforms? To answer that requires identifying the problem, and I'm not sure what the problem(s) is (are). For the mainstream media the core problem is that Rudd is on the nose. He promised a lot on the way to power and his government has failed to deliver. So he needs to cut a deal quick with the miners or be replaced by either by Julia Gillard or Tony Abbott depending on your political bias. Problem sorted.
You change the people in the seats but things continue on as before. The political governance is more or less the same (apart from questions of style) even though the personalities change. So the problem lies deeper than personalities or the 24 hour media cycle.
Over at the ABC's Unleashed site John Hewson, in his Politics is a game, and rotten to the core opinion piece, puts his finger on a core problem:
It is a very real question whether our governments can actually govern anymore, with the power of vested interests, the shrillness of minorities, short-termism, and the superficiality of much of the media. It is even more significant to ask whether those who are elected are actually capable of governing.So much of what we call "governing" today is more about winning and keeping government, than it is about actually governing, more about politics and the politics of governing, than "the idea of government".
He adds that politics today is little more than a "game" played out in a 24-hour media cycle. The players will now virtually say or do what they believe is required to win the media on the day, or influence next week's polls.
That description identifies the problem as one of governance. It's rotten. Hewson forgets to mention that Rudd + Co did a good job on preventing the global economic crisis from impacting heavily on Australia in the form of a savage economic recession. But then Rudd+ Co failed badly on addressing climate change and the shift to a carbon economy. They simply gave up under pressure from the Greenhouse mafia.
If our political governance is rotten, then what is the solution? Hewson doesn't say, other than add that we have a political system that is in desperate need of reform on so many fronts, but that, those in the political game have no incentive to really change. So where the push for the reform of political system change come from?
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Peter van Onselen says its Rudd's advisors that are the problem. They are out of their depth as they (Chief of staff Alister Jordan, 30, press secretary Lachlan Harris, 30, and senior economics adviser Andrew Charlton, 31,) are all relative political novices with no experience in the labour movement and next to none in industry or business.