This may be my 18th election as a journalist, but I confess I find the thought of a six-week campaign a bit daunting. Six weeks of unrelenting political argy-bargy?
Still, it does afford the luxury of one column discussing how we approach elections, before we get down to the many economic challenges the new government will face: climate change, wage stagnation, unaffordable home ownership and wasteful spending on infrastructure, not to mention integrity in government.
In elections, it’s always tempting to vote for the devil you know – a line pushed by all governments. But when you think about it, you see this notion is biased completely in favour of the incumbent. It seeks to shift the voter’s attention away from the government’s performance and play on our timidity.
What do you know about the other lot? Not much. How do you know they won’t be worse? You don’t. But, then again, they could be better.
If we always stuck to the devil-you-know rule, one side of politics would stay in power for ever. The other side would never get a go, and so would become more unknown – more unelectable – as each election passed.
Does that sound like the path to better government? Not to me, it doesn’t. In my experience, the longer governments stay in power, the worse they get. They get lazy and complacent. They worry more about helping their friends and less about keeping the rest of us happy.
They develop a sense of entitlement. They think they own the place and it’s their own money they’re spending. They get more and more reluctant to be held accountable by nosy outsiders and more inclined to keep their failures buried deep.
And that’s just the deterioration in government. The side kept out of power for year after year also goes off. Fewer and fewer of their leading lights have ever been a minister. They lose their corporate knowledge of how to run the country.
I’m old enough to remember the election of the Whitlam government in 1972, after 23 years in opposition. Wow, didn’t it show. And it wasn’t just their inexperience. They wanted to cram 23 years of “reform” into their first three years. Which, of course, is all they were given.
It wouldn’t be good for our governance if government changed hands every three or four years. But I long ago formed the view that no government – Labor or Liberal, federal or state, whether you voted for ’em or whether you didn’t – should be left in office for more than about 10 years.
With their ever-declining standards of behaviour, it’s tempting to give up on our politicians. “They’re all liars.” Actually, they rarely tell outright lies, though some do seem to have very bad memories.
What’s true is that they’re always saying things that are true from some limited perspective, but are calculated to mislead. “Record spending on health”, for instance, means provided you ignore inflation.
But when we give up on our politicians, it means they’ve won. They still get to run the place, but we’ve forfeited our right to a say in how it’s run. We’re happy for other people – including the pollies – to decide our fate. You want to make decisions that benefit your mates at my expense? Be my guest.
The trickier our politicians are, the more closely we should watch them. Whenever I speak to young people about politics, I warn them that the groups the politicians are most likely to screw are the ones that aren’t watching.
Another dangerous attitude is that there’s little difference between the two main parties. It’s true that both sides can be badly behaved, and that many policies are bipartisan. But there are differences between the parties’ approaches and, though the casual observer may find them hard to see, over time they do make a difference.
Paul Keating’s claim that when you change the government, you change the country, is right. Who we vote for in this election will change where we end up in 10 years’ time.
But the more the two major parties seem the same, the more people chose to vote for minor parties or independents – a trend likely to grow in this election. I regard this as a healthy development that will force the duopolists to lift their game.
As the number of independents grows, the possibility of a “hung” parliament increases. Both sides want us to believe this would be a bad thing, leading to instability. That’s the reverse of the truth. Minority governments are so common at state level that their presence goes unremarked.
And independents have a record of using their bargaining power to achieve reforms neither of the big parties fancy – fixed four-year terms in NSW, for instance – and moves towards greater transparency and accountability, such as freedom of information laws, and more resources for ombudsmen and auditors-general.
The way we vote in this election will make a difference. We should be using our votes to impose better quality governance on our wayward and self-serving political servants.
