by Erin Maclean

Thanks to a so-called ‘revolving door’ of prime ministers in recent years, questions about the stability and integrity of Australia’s political system have been raised again and again.

In the past three years, Australia has had four different prime ministers — the same number we had in the 32 years after Gough Whitlam’s removal from office in 1975. What is more worrying, however, is that an Australian prime minister has not served a full term since John Howard’s 2004 re-election.

With opinion polls plateauing for the current Coalition government, it seems the voters’ wrath — or perhaps broader disenfranchisement — may be swelling once again after the ousting of former Prime Minister Tony Abbott at the end of 2015.

To address these mounting concerns about political turmoil, Griffith Review themed its 51st edition ‘Fixing the System’, and earlier this month held a discussion panel at Avid Reader Bookshop in Brisbane.

And, as The Courier-Mail’s national affairs editor Dennis Atkins explained, “there has never been a more exciting time to wonder how we can fix the system”.

Fixing a broken political system

Throughout the panel discussion, Griffith University’s Professor Anne Tiernan, co-editor of ‘Fixing the System’ edition of Griffith Review, argued the recent leadership chaos in federal politics is a sign of institutional failure.

According to Professor Tiernan, this Griffith Review theme came about in 2014, amid talk about federation and tax reform. At the time, Tony Abbott was prime minister and voters were generally unhappy with his performance — especially after the controversial budget and his threats to ‘shirtfront’ Russian President Vladimir Putin.

But by the end of 2015, Professor Tiernan was worried Griffith Review had ‘missed its moment’ now that Malcolm Turnbull had taken over the prime ministership. Yet, she argued the same structural issues soon emerged.

While it is hard to pinpoint where exactly the system breaks down, Atkins quoted Tiernan’s introductory essay at length to suggest political centralisation has certainly not helped.

“There has been significant centralisation around political leaders … but though often interpreted as augmenting and strengthening the capacity of leaders, these developments reveal leader dependency. They reflect and reinforce their constant preoccupation with coping and surviving the daily slings and arrows, rather than longer-term, more substantive policy concerns,” Professor Tiernan wrote in Griffith Review.

This was, as Niki Savva’s timely book explained, a key problem with Abbott’s leadership — the power and decision-making was centralised under Abbott and his chief of staff, Peta Credlin.

With this centralisation of powers to the Prime Minister’s Office, institutional memory — that is, a sense of how things were done before — was arguably lost. Because of this, it was argued, Australia is seeing shorter tenures of prime ministers, with less parliamentary experience and a greater reliance on outside sources to fix problems.

This uncertainty only serves to strengthen the constant campaign. By not learning from mistakes, by not tapping into institutional memory and by being preoccupied with day-to-day opinion polling, our prime ministers — and even state premiers — are finding themselves in a never ending cycle of campaigning, rather than governing.

Even Tony Abbott, after losing the prime ministership, has continued to campaign. Earlier this month, he responded to Niki Savva’s The Road to Ruin book with campaign-style spin.

“The best response to this book is the objective record of the Abbott government,” Abbott said in a press release. “The boats were stopped. The carbon tax and the mining tax were repealed. Three free trade agreements that had languished for years were finalised. Infrastructure got underway, including the western Sydney airport that had been talked about for 50 years. Our country was kept safe. And a strong start was made to the vital task of budget repair.”

It is worth noting, however, this constant campaign can also be attributed to technological change, which has made political reporting very different from years past.

Even so, Professor Tiernan asserted the problem of unfit leaders, the constant campaign and the ‘conga line’ of prime ministers goes beyond digital disruption — it speaks to an inability to learn at the institutional, structural levels of politics and government.

But what if the system isn’t broken?

As compelling as Atkins and Professor Tiernan’s arguments were during the panel, Griffith University’s Professor Patrick Weller told a different story of the political system.

In his contribution to Griffith Review, Professor Weller argued that, like with cricket, politics has not gotten worse over time and, instead, ‘nostalgic nonsense’ is clouding our view of history. Thus, the system is not broken — at least, not any more than it has been.

“We’ve got a pretty awful system at the moment, but it’s business as usual,” Professor Weller said on the night.

While a gloomy sentiment, Professor Weller cited a number of convincing examples to support his claims — first, that Gough Whitlam’s end to politics was hardly a functional ending and, second, that Billy Hughes was known for his ‘captain’s calls’, just like Abbott.

Certainly, the timeline of prime ministers shows that, while we have been used to long-serving prime ministers in recent years, periods of leadership chaos are not new. Early on in our political history, the prime ministership changed hands repeatedly — 10 times from federation until 1915, when Billy Hughes became prime minister. There was some stability after that, but the six years between Joseph Lyons and Ben Chifley during World War II saw another five prime ministers.

Overall, Australia — with its short political history of only 29 prime ministers — has seen seven prime ministers (including Malcolm Turnbull thus far) who served less than a year in office and another four who never made it to their two-year anniversary. This chaotic history was not lost on Professor Weller.

“Is the instability since 2007, with five prime ministers in eight years, so very different from those earlier circumstances that it cannot recover? We do not know, but past experience suggests we should not attribute to the present a uniqueness, an irreconcilability that has never existed before,” Professor Weller wrote.

Where to from here?

There is, of course, no way to know whether the system is truly broken, as Atkins and Professor Tiernan suggested, or whether we are looking back on history with the rose-coloured glasses Professor Weller described. Though change is clearly needed to resolve the chaos and ‘conga line’ of leaders, this change may or may not happen as part of the normal political cycle.

So, while we are currently experiencing a period of political turmoil, there is no reason (yet) to think the system is irretrievably or irrevocably broken — as it has in the past, this instability and recurring leadership failure too may pass.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ERIN MACLEAN

Erin is a freelance journalist and PhD student at Griffith University.

Erin specialises in news media depictions of popular culture, but is particularly interested in the way media framing affects public perception and politics.

In her spare time, she runs her own video gaming blog for women at LadyGameBug.