This is no time for wreckers

Friday, July 8, 2016

Australia is emerging from this federal election not so much divided as ambivalent. The parliament is almost evenly split, the Senate chaotic, Labor triumphant in defeat, Malcolm Turnbull much weakened after a political near-death experience.

What the nation now desperately needs is leadership. Not the petulant, partisan and myopic leadership that has characterised so much of Australian politics of the past decade, but something that aspires to the common good, that creates instead of tearing down, that encourages rather than demoralises, that  is based on generosity rather than selfishness.

When Turnbull eventually said some of the things he should have said on election night, this included the acknowledgement that Australians are feeling “a level of disillusionment with politics, with government, and with the major parties. We note that. We respect it. Now, we need to listen very carefully to the concerns of the Australian people expressed through this election.”

He did not entirely prostrate himself, as Tony Abbott’s supporters would have had him do, but he did take responsibility for the train wreck.

There will need to be more of this from Turnbull, whose leadership abilities, if he survives, will be sorely tested. How he must rue his decision not to go to the polls quickly after deposing Abbott. Such decisiveness might have given him a strong mandate to lead the country and his party. Instead, he waited, often seeming to be leading with his hands tied. Now Abbott’s supporters are emboldened and plotting his demise. Again.

After 24 years in which Australian politics was dominated by Bob Hawke, Paul Keating and John Howard, from 1983 to 2007, the past nine have been a constant churn of political leaders who have ignited public imagination only briefly.

Labor after Keating and the Coalition after Howard have embraced their leaders with diminishing confidence and the nation has been led with diminishing certainty.

It has been sobering to read the post-election thoughts of the former head of Treasury, Ken Henry, who delivered three landmark reports, 2002-2012, for the Howard, Rudd and Gillard Governments. Each of these reports ought to have been agenda setting, projecting a deteriorating budget bottom line, making recommendations for the development of policies that would meet the challenges, and make the most of the opportunities, of the 21^st century.

But while the Hawke and Keating Governments accepted the economic narrative of the burning platform, the need for decisive action, those who followed them did not. “Our political leaders, from their vantage point, appear confident that the platform is not on fire. But it is, and most Australians know it,” Henry warned.

Where did we lose our way? So much points back to two elections, 2001 and 2007. In the first, Howard defeated Labor’s Kim Beazley in the shadow of terrorism and the MV Tampa’s payload of 438 sick and terrified Afghani who had fled the Taliban, but could not land in Australia.

Beazley’s failure 15 years ago was drenched with the regret that he failed to take a stand and provide an alternative to John Howard’s dog-whistling declaration, “We will decide who comes to this country”,  which has ensnared Australia’s refugee policy ever since.

In his concession speech on election night, Beazley lamented that he should have appealed to the best in Australian society not the worst, to what would unite us instead of what divides. He spoke of looking down through the fog of war to the hopes and dreams of average Australians sitting around their kitchen table and the natural coming together of the Australian people after a great political contest, “to think about the things which unify all of us and the gratitude we ought to have for being able to share in the prosperity of this lovely land”.

It ached of the leader he might have been, had he had the courage.

Six years later, in 2007, Howard brought his party and himself to ruin, by hanging on to power after his day has passed, ushering in the internecine Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments from which Labor is only now gradually recovering.

Lost along the way has been some measure of compassion. We have closed our borders, incarcerated asylum-seekers, and at the same time reduced Australian aid to the lowest level in our history. Aid has been our whipping boy.

The present weakness in political leadership is not confined to Australia. Brexit and the rise of Donald Trump both betray even greater disenchantment with the political process in Britain and the US. In Australia, it is a less virulent strain of the same disenchantment that has resulted in unprecedented numbers of voters turning away from the major parties in the past two elections and which now sees Pauline Hanson return to the national stage.

As the nation watches a painstakingly thin line drawn between victor and vanquished in this election, the question for our leaders now becomes one of character rather than power. For it is our leaders that Australians turn to for a vision that can unite us in support of those things that ought to be our common purpose. This is no time for wreckers.

Tim Costello is the Chief Executive of World Vision Australia

 First published in The Age

Opinion Pieces, Tim Costello

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