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May 13, 2007
Is there a crisis of legitimacy facing Australian politics? A crisis in terms of there being a democratic deficit say? A democratic deficit in a neo-liberal world? Yes, is my response. Here are some of my reasons.
Firstly, Australia is becoming increasingly centralised. The commonwealth Government has become locked in a vicious circle of centralising power in an effort to improve public services, only to find this leads to increased dissatisfaction. The quango state - unelected and unaccountable bodies which have a direct impact on ordinary people’s lives - has become a common feature of our political life.
Secondly, a simple majority in the House of Representatives with government control of the Senate can curtail our rights and freedoms by changing our unwritten constitution. At a time of heightened security and fear of terrorism how do we citizens in Australia Britain ensure that our basic rights and freedoms are entrenched?
Thirdly, elections - whether central or state - carry no mandate; there is no accountability for ‘promises’ implied in the leaflets that drop through your door; policy is devised and implemented behind closed doors, public opinion is of little consequence. After the election the promises are dropped and policies change.The nearest thing to accountability is the Senate.
Fourthly, the fourth estate has steadily gone downhill in terms of it being the watchdog for Australian democracy, despite the increasing corruption in the government.
These are the reasons for my yes. This kind of approach is not even on the radar of the rethinking of social democracy amongst the federal ALP.
So what do we mean by democratic deficit? Murray Goot argues in his paper Public Opinion and the Democratic Deficit: Australia and the War Against Iraq in the Australian Humanities Review that:
A ‘democratic deficit’ might be defined as the gap between the democratic ideal and the daily reality of democratic life. While the underlying idea is as old as democratic government itself, this way of expressing it is new. The origin of the phrase lies within the European Community; specifically, in debates about the relationship between economic and political integration in general and the legitimacy of non-majoritarian institutions in particular triggered by the establishment of the European Council and the European Parliament...
...Beyond the European Community and international organisations more generally ... the application of the phrase has been quite circumscribed. Barry Hindess relays ‘a widespread perception that the problem of the democratic deficit is getting worse’.... But ‘democratic deficit’ is not a phrase that finds much place in the burgeoning literature on deliberative democracy, among contemporary writings on direct democracy or in reports from those involved in democratic audits, where the performance of actually existing democracies are measured against a number of democratic criteria.
Goot says that to call a gap between democratic theory and democratic practice a ‘democratic deficit’ begs a key question: against what yardsticks are democratic practices to be measured? He says that standards of democracy are contested. In the theoretical literature the range of possible democratic arrangements – and therefore of possible democratic deficits – is wide:
At one extreme lies the democratic ideal famously articulated by the political economist Joseph Schumpeter: ‘that institutional arrangement for arriving at political decisions in which individuals acquire the power to decide by means of a competitive struggle for the people’s vote’ (1943: 269). At the other lies the ideal of direct democracy, defined by Ian Budge, in a recent defence, as ‘a regime in which adult citizens as a whole debate and vote on the most important political decisions, and where their vote determines the action to be taken’.
I reckon that representative liberal government provides the predominant modern understanding of democracy i9n Australia, and so the democratic deficit is an integral part of its design. as it blocks any substantive participation by citizens other than voting in elections. If citizens don't like John Howard's Government, then they can vote in out in an election. So the democratic deficit can be measured in terms of a genuine democracy public policy reflecting citizens’ policy preferences.
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Well what do they bloody expect!
The qangos are all constituted to rout out debate, discourse and dissent. People no longer have an input into their own lives and things like IR prevent a person from defending herself from the deemed beneficaries of the system.
The classic example has been the axing of the staff representative at the ABC!
If you are devalued and humiliated as a person and denied inputs into the running of your own life, of course you are going to get pissed off.
This very day, the latest opinion polls demostrate that the public, despite a mightily-boostered budget, has Rudd still in front for an election win.
Not that they are to be trusted either, but bad behaviour should not be condoned into its second decade and the country needs a rest from Howard's control- freaks.