So, it seems that Scott Morrison is our new Prime Minister, less than a year out from the latest possible date from our next election. This is hardly strange. Each of our last four Prime Ministers has ascended to the post in exactly the same circumstances, unceremoniously booting their rival mid-term only to be booted just as unceremoniously some three years later. The last PM not to lose their job this way, unless you count Kevin Rudd's mercifully brief second attempt at the role, was John Howard way back in 2007. Old fashioned type that he is, he lost his job in the time-honoured manner by leading his party to a crushing election defeat and then retiring gracefully.
In an immediate sense, each of these internal coups has been fuelled by dramas with opinion polls. In each case, consistent polling over a number of months has shown that the government will lose power if it faces an election. Mostly (especially with the switches to Rudd and Turnbull) they switched because the alternative leader was popular and would immediately boost the government's chances of survival. However, the coup itself immediately damaged this popularity and the government only just survived - both Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull, after deposing their predecessors, led their governments to the narrowest of victories and three years of tenuous governing.
What's different this time around is that far from being more popular than Turnbull (who still remains preferred PM against all comers from his own party or his opponents), Morrison attracts single figures in any 'preferred PM' survey. So why is the Liberal Party turning to him rather than sticking with their current relatively popular figurehead, or switching to someone like Julie Bishop or Tony Abbott who most Australians could at least pick out of a police line-up?
I think the answer points to a number of worrying things about our increasingly diverse and divided political landscape.
1. We are becoming increasingly tribalised.
When I started writing this, it looked like Peter Dutton would become PM. Mainstream Australia might only know Dutton, if at all, as the unprepossessing political hard-head who says provocative things about immigrants as Home Affairs Minster. However, for those in the tribe Dutton is a hero. People on the right of the Liberal Party have been touting him as their preferred PM for a a couple of years now, flaying Turnbull at every opportunity and begging their great white hope to step up and replace him.
In the end, they got part of what they wanted. They got rid of Turnbull, and although their hero didn't end up winning the job he forced a shift to the right. Morrison is just as right-wing as Dutton and when he was Minister Against Immigration he was just as inflammatory, but recently he's been treading softly and running interference for Turnbull in the name of stability. This means that for the right he is a sell-out and we can expect the sniping to continue, but the liberal 'moderates' could at least stomach him as leader and he won with a slender majority.
Of course we get the leaders we deserve. Other tribes are just as compartmentalised. The Labor Left and Right have barely papered over their cracks since the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd serial fiasco. Even the Greens are starting to fray, splitting into their own tribes of inner urban environmentalists and old-style left activists. As for the far right, it's hard to keep up with the constant warfare that is One Nation, the bizarre alternative worlds of the likes of those who were briefly caught up in Clive Palmer's substantial orbit, the progress of the merger between Family First and Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives, or who exactly it is that supports David Leyonhelm.
But we shouldn't blame this entirely on our politicians. Neo-liberal economic and social policies have driven us further apart. There is an increasing divide between rich and poor, between urban and regional, between inner and outer suburbs, between recent migrants and earlier ones, between Aboriginal people and those who displaced them. We have fewer and fewer opportunities and venues to get to know people in other tribes. So we increasingly look for politicians who represent our tribe, not who will look after us and our mates in other tribes.
2. Our major parties are pretty much done converging.
With Kevin Rudd as Labor leader and Malcolm Turnbull leading the Liberals back in 2008-09, there was a moment when you honestly couldn't tell who was leading which party. They seemed in lock step on so many issues - wobbling about on same sex marriage, implementing a bold and expensive National Broadband Network, demonising people smugglers and their customers, continuing to intervene in Aboriginal communities in a way popular with everyone but the Aboriginal people themselves, and most importantly tackling climate change via an ETS.
Of course the last of these was a bridge too far for the Liberal right and they replaced Turnbull with Abbott. This signalled the fracturing not only of the consensus on climate change but of the idea of consensus politics in general. For Abbott, attacking the Labor Party was priority number 1, and he pursued it relentlessly. Many people thought this made him a great opposition leader even though he turned out to be a hopeless Prime Minster. I beg to differ.
The accepted wisdom in Australian politics past was that to win government, you needed to capture the centre. Left voters would vote Labor, right voters would vote Liberal or National, those in the centre would swing one way or another and decide elections. So each party fought fiercely over this centre.
In the process, however, they left their flanks unguarded, and others attacked. For Labor, they now face a well-organised Green party on their left, eroding their base in the inner cities and taking valuable Senate seats from them. The Liberals have the same problem on the right, with assorted right wing movements led by the likes of Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter and Clive Palmer taking their air away, especially in the regions. This sees the parties swinging like a pendulum, trying to capture the centre in moments when they feel confident, then swinging back to the right or left when they feel under siege. The divisions within each party widen under the strain.
3. No-one really wants the job anyway.
Membership of all our major political parties is declining, and their pool of available candidates is shrinking. Maybe I'm just looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but there doesn't seem to be a Whitlam, a Fraser, a Hawke, a Keating or even a Howard among our current group of politicians - someone who can drive an agenda and take people with them, who can unite people around a program, who can forge the necessary compromises to get a reform program implemented and entrenched.
Instead, we are left with B-grade leaders and tribal warriors. This is not just the party leaders - their ministers and backbenchers are busy jockeying for position, promoting their factional interests within the party, playing to their 'base' and shoring up their own positions. This means that leaders with vision and ideas, like Rudd or Turnbull, have to spend so much time herding cats that they get lost and are replaced by factional warriors like Abbott, Morrison, Gillard and Shorten. Our followers get the leaders they deserve, leadership (and politics in general) becomes a poisoned chalice. People who lack the temperament for vicious factional warfare stay away.
4. Scapegoating is a thing.
We have seen the rise of scapegoating in our politics in recent years. Mostly, the scapegoats are the usual powerless outsiders - Aboriginal people, Muslims, 'African gangs', 'dole bludgers'. This scapegoating plays into our increasing fragmentation, mentioned above. Peter Dutton is a master of the art and Morrison is a dab hand at it too although a little out of practice lately.
Yet we also see leaders themselves scapegoated for the failings of their parties. Abbott was called a great leader, but the party dropped in the polls and the people who put him there dropped him like a hot potato. Then, under his bitter influence, the right of the party systematically undermined Turnbull for three years (despite his efforts to appease them) then blamed him for the party's plunge in the polls. The problem in the Liberal Party is not poor leadership, it is poor followers. A new leader won't change this, even if Menzies himself were to rise from the dead.
As I have often said, we have a Westminster system, not a Presidential one. It only works if the government, as a collective, works together in the interests, if not of all people (that would be nice, but perhaps too much to expect) at least of those who elected them. It's been a decade since we've had a national government do that.
So what sort of Prime Minister will Scott Morrison be? I find it hard to care. The only realistic answer is that he will be a short-lived one. There has to be an election by May next year, but his party is imploding so his chances of lasting that long are slim. It only takes one person to cross the floor in the House of Representatives and he will be gone. I don't think he'll wait for that to happen. He'll call an election, and we'll have a Labor government. So the real question is, will we then have Rudd/Gillard/Rudd all over again with new names in the old seats? Or will the Labor Party give us a pleasant surprise and get on with fixing some of the mess they will inherit?
I think it's probably extreme to say our political system is 'broken'. To me Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria define broken - countries so fragmented that rival factions are literally at war. We should celebrate the fact that despite the rhetoric all our major players, even the outliers like Hanson, still accept the need to play by the rules, we live at peace and the basics of government still operate.
However, there are clearly some problems and our revolving door of leaders is a visible symptom of these. As Parker J Palmer writes, public spaces (town squares) are replaced with private spaces (shopping malls). Voluntary organisations (churches, trade unions, sports clubs, service clubs, etc - including political parties) have declining membership. Schools and universities are refocused onto performance and vocational training instead of broad education. In each case, our opportunities for democratic engagement outside our 'tribes' are reduced. All this makes us very vulnerable to manipulation by the wealthy people and companies who control our mass communications, or to the conspiratorial type of thinking that does the rounds on social media.
This means I don't think the problem can be solved long term by a change of government, much less a change of leader. We've tried that a couple of times now, and it hasn't worked. It needs to begin in our local communities with processes of engagement and debate, respectful listening and creative compromise. This type of process needs to then be taken into our political parties, wresting control from the factional warriors, and then it will flow up from there to our leadership. Things won't change overnight, but change is possible. Let's make it so!
In an immediate sense, each of these internal coups has been fuelled by dramas with opinion polls. In each case, consistent polling over a number of months has shown that the government will lose power if it faces an election. Mostly (especially with the switches to Rudd and Turnbull) they switched because the alternative leader was popular and would immediately boost the government's chances of survival. However, the coup itself immediately damaged this popularity and the government only just survived - both Julia Gillard and Malcolm Turnbull, after deposing their predecessors, led their governments to the narrowest of victories and three years of tenuous governing.
What's different this time around is that far from being more popular than Turnbull (who still remains preferred PM against all comers from his own party or his opponents), Morrison attracts single figures in any 'preferred PM' survey. So why is the Liberal Party turning to him rather than sticking with their current relatively popular figurehead, or switching to someone like Julie Bishop or Tony Abbott who most Australians could at least pick out of a police line-up?
I think the answer points to a number of worrying things about our increasingly diverse and divided political landscape.
1. We are becoming increasingly tribalised.
When I started writing this, it looked like Peter Dutton would become PM. Mainstream Australia might only know Dutton, if at all, as the unprepossessing political hard-head who says provocative things about immigrants as Home Affairs Minster. However, for those in the tribe Dutton is a hero. People on the right of the Liberal Party have been touting him as their preferred PM for a a couple of years now, flaying Turnbull at every opportunity and begging their great white hope to step up and replace him.
In the end, they got part of what they wanted. They got rid of Turnbull, and although their hero didn't end up winning the job he forced a shift to the right. Morrison is just as right-wing as Dutton and when he was Minister Against Immigration he was just as inflammatory, but recently he's been treading softly and running interference for Turnbull in the name of stability. This means that for the right he is a sell-out and we can expect the sniping to continue, but the liberal 'moderates' could at least stomach him as leader and he won with a slender majority.
Of course we get the leaders we deserve. Other tribes are just as compartmentalised. The Labor Left and Right have barely papered over their cracks since the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd serial fiasco. Even the Greens are starting to fray, splitting into their own tribes of inner urban environmentalists and old-style left activists. As for the far right, it's hard to keep up with the constant warfare that is One Nation, the bizarre alternative worlds of the likes of those who were briefly caught up in Clive Palmer's substantial orbit, the progress of the merger between Family First and Cory Bernardi's Australian Conservatives, or who exactly it is that supports David Leyonhelm.
But we shouldn't blame this entirely on our politicians. Neo-liberal economic and social policies have driven us further apart. There is an increasing divide between rich and poor, between urban and regional, between inner and outer suburbs, between recent migrants and earlier ones, between Aboriginal people and those who displaced them. We have fewer and fewer opportunities and venues to get to know people in other tribes. So we increasingly look for politicians who represent our tribe, not who will look after us and our mates in other tribes.
2. Our major parties are pretty much done converging.
With Kevin Rudd as Labor leader and Malcolm Turnbull leading the Liberals back in 2008-09, there was a moment when you honestly couldn't tell who was leading which party. They seemed in lock step on so many issues - wobbling about on same sex marriage, implementing a bold and expensive National Broadband Network, demonising people smugglers and their customers, continuing to intervene in Aboriginal communities in a way popular with everyone but the Aboriginal people themselves, and most importantly tackling climate change via an ETS.
Of course the last of these was a bridge too far for the Liberal right and they replaced Turnbull with Abbott. This signalled the fracturing not only of the consensus on climate change but of the idea of consensus politics in general. For Abbott, attacking the Labor Party was priority number 1, and he pursued it relentlessly. Many people thought this made him a great opposition leader even though he turned out to be a hopeless Prime Minster. I beg to differ.
The accepted wisdom in Australian politics past was that to win government, you needed to capture the centre. Left voters would vote Labor, right voters would vote Liberal or National, those in the centre would swing one way or another and decide elections. So each party fought fiercely over this centre.
In the process, however, they left their flanks unguarded, and others attacked. For Labor, they now face a well-organised Green party on their left, eroding their base in the inner cities and taking valuable Senate seats from them. The Liberals have the same problem on the right, with assorted right wing movements led by the likes of Pauline Hanson, Bob Katter and Clive Palmer taking their air away, especially in the regions. This sees the parties swinging like a pendulum, trying to capture the centre in moments when they feel confident, then swinging back to the right or left when they feel under siege. The divisions within each party widen under the strain.
3. No-one really wants the job anyway.
Membership of all our major political parties is declining, and their pool of available candidates is shrinking. Maybe I'm just looking back with rose-tinted glasses, but there doesn't seem to be a Whitlam, a Fraser, a Hawke, a Keating or even a Howard among our current group of politicians - someone who can drive an agenda and take people with them, who can unite people around a program, who can forge the necessary compromises to get a reform program implemented and entrenched.
Instead, we are left with B-grade leaders and tribal warriors. This is not just the party leaders - their ministers and backbenchers are busy jockeying for position, promoting their factional interests within the party, playing to their 'base' and shoring up their own positions. This means that leaders with vision and ideas, like Rudd or Turnbull, have to spend so much time herding cats that they get lost and are replaced by factional warriors like Abbott, Morrison, Gillard and Shorten. Our followers get the leaders they deserve, leadership (and politics in general) becomes a poisoned chalice. People who lack the temperament for vicious factional warfare stay away.
4. Scapegoating is a thing.
We have seen the rise of scapegoating in our politics in recent years. Mostly, the scapegoats are the usual powerless outsiders - Aboriginal people, Muslims, 'African gangs', 'dole bludgers'. This scapegoating plays into our increasing fragmentation, mentioned above. Peter Dutton is a master of the art and Morrison is a dab hand at it too although a little out of practice lately.
Yet we also see leaders themselves scapegoated for the failings of their parties. Abbott was called a great leader, but the party dropped in the polls and the people who put him there dropped him like a hot potato. Then, under his bitter influence, the right of the party systematically undermined Turnbull for three years (despite his efforts to appease them) then blamed him for the party's plunge in the polls. The problem in the Liberal Party is not poor leadership, it is poor followers. A new leader won't change this, even if Menzies himself were to rise from the dead.
As I have often said, we have a Westminster system, not a Presidential one. It only works if the government, as a collective, works together in the interests, if not of all people (that would be nice, but perhaps too much to expect) at least of those who elected them. It's been a decade since we've had a national government do that.
*
So what sort of Prime Minister will Scott Morrison be? I find it hard to care. The only realistic answer is that he will be a short-lived one. There has to be an election by May next year, but his party is imploding so his chances of lasting that long are slim. It only takes one person to cross the floor in the House of Representatives and he will be gone. I don't think he'll wait for that to happen. He'll call an election, and we'll have a Labor government. So the real question is, will we then have Rudd/Gillard/Rudd all over again with new names in the old seats? Or will the Labor Party give us a pleasant surprise and get on with fixing some of the mess they will inherit?
I think it's probably extreme to say our political system is 'broken'. To me Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria define broken - countries so fragmented that rival factions are literally at war. We should celebrate the fact that despite the rhetoric all our major players, even the outliers like Hanson, still accept the need to play by the rules, we live at peace and the basics of government still operate.
However, there are clearly some problems and our revolving door of leaders is a visible symptom of these. As Parker J Palmer writes, public spaces (town squares) are replaced with private spaces (shopping malls). Voluntary organisations (churches, trade unions, sports clubs, service clubs, etc - including political parties) have declining membership. Schools and universities are refocused onto performance and vocational training instead of broad education. In each case, our opportunities for democratic engagement outside our 'tribes' are reduced. All this makes us very vulnerable to manipulation by the wealthy people and companies who control our mass communications, or to the conspiratorial type of thinking that does the rounds on social media.
This means I don't think the problem can be solved long term by a change of government, much less a change of leader. We've tried that a couple of times now, and it hasn't worked. It needs to begin in our local communities with processes of engagement and debate, respectful listening and creative compromise. This type of process needs to then be taken into our political parties, wresting control from the factional warriors, and then it will flow up from there to our leadership. Things won't change overnight, but change is possible. Let's make it so!
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