On the lawns outside Parliament House a delegation from the Aboriginal Tent Embassy had staked out a position alongside the mobile television units in a bid to capture some of the media attention. They didn’t seem to be having much success when I passed them on Monday morning, about an hour after the failed spill motion.
Rather, their presence served to accentuate the self-involvement of the commentators, whose raised platforms were like small territorial enclaves not to be encroached on. The women in front of the cameras were dressed in bright jackets and high heels, the men in suits. Those from the Tent Embassy wore t-shirts with slogans. I asked if they were interested in what was going on over the road.
“Nuh,” was the short answer.
The longer answer involved a reiteration of traditional grievances: dispossession, the stolen generation, deaths in custody, the intervention. Some of these are live concerns, fuelled by recent incidents. The proportion of Aboriginal children in care in New South Wales is so high, for instance, that we are effectively producing a second stolen generation. The protest was planned for the first 2015 sitting day of parliament long before the talk of a spill motion.
For those I spoke to, the historical and recent injustices are part of the same narrative, and no credit was given to anyone in the federal government for attempts at redress. The 2008 apology, said one elderly spokesman, was “crap.”
As I walked up towards the entrance of Parliament House I was thinking that the apology, now at its seventh anniversary, was surely the most significant event to have taken place in the life of this building. Aboriginal leaders were at the centre of the occasion, and were closely consulted over its substance and design. Prime minister Kevin Rudd and opposition leader Brendan Nelson shared the honour of welcoming them. This was a high point in Australian political leadership and, however briefly, a display of something one might genuinely call national unity, achieved in the face of acknowledged divisions.
Yet those leadership qualities didn’t prevent Kevin Rudd from running aground before he completed his first term, as irreconcilable divisions opened up between him and his ministers. The two groups on the lawn at the start of this week were testament to another rift that only seems to yawn wider as the years pass.
Closing the gap, and our failure to do so, did find its way into parliament with the tabling of a terrible report card on the wellbeing of Indigenous peoples on Wednesday, but it was patently not a story of any interest to the press on that Monday morning. The suited-up reporters on their platforms, with their backs to the Tent Embassy group, were focused on the main game: would or could Tony Abbott survive?
Parliamentary politics is a form of theatre, and I certainly expected to see it in the House. But the bifurcated scene outside was a strangely telling prologue. Watching through the subsequent days from the public gallery, I became increasingly aware of a radical cognitive divide in the way our political dramas are relayed through the media to a wider audience.
During the course of the week, a succession of critical issues came before the House of Representatives: the Closing the Gap report, the refugee crisis in Syria, the plight of Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran on death row in Indonesia, the Human Rights Commission report on children in detention. Certainly the press took up these issues – or some of them –and gave them some prominence, but there was no question that the leadership crisis remained the overriding story.
Members of the press gallery like to challenge politicians about their resort to “spin” but it is a game they play themselves, often with a whip hand, in ways that feed back into the priorities of parliament and the government. Perhaps inevitably, those who manage the round of daily news have become crisis junkies, and to an extent the rolling sequence of leadership spills is an ongoing melodrama of their own making. They have been calling for one against Tony Abbott for some weeks now, and the chorus reached a crescendo following the Queensland election a fortnight ago. Many commentators confidently predicted Abbott would be gone by the end of the week; now they are speculating about whether he will last till mid year.
It will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, as it was for Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard. With all the build-up, the leader’s overthrow is a climax that just has to be reached. My intention was to go and see for myself how Abbott, as the present candidate for assassination, was measuring up in live performance, but I found myself concerned with some wider questions about the focus and priorities of the proceedings themselves.
About an hour after the results of the spill were announced, Tony Abbott made his appearance in the house to offer condolences to the victims of the Martin Place siege and their families. Unity was his theme. He spoke of “the wholehearted support of the Australian people” for the hostages, thanked the other nations who had stood with Australia during this time and affirmed “the unity and resolve of this parliament to protect our citizens and our democratic freedoms.”
Facing his opposition, and with a split party on the benches behind him, Abbott had been given, by some irony of fate, this moment of consensus. And nothing serves unity like something to be united against. “The Martin Place siege, I regret to say, was inspired by that death cult now rampant in much of Syria and Iraq, which is a travesty of religion and governance, and which should never be dignified with the term ‘Islamic State.’” The association of Syrian terrorists with the Martin Place siege was a bit of a long shot. Did they really have to be brought into it, in the presence of recently traumatised hostages and their families?
While Abbott the statesman wanted to evoke a moment of “profound unity where our shared love of country prevails over everything else,” Abbott the political opportunist had an eye to the benefits of a terrorist jitter in the national nervous system. As George Bush and John Howard had demonstrated, it could do wonders for the leader’s approval rating, and was worth keeping in the public consciousness. Remember those fridge magnets?
After Bill Shorten had made his contribution to the condolences, enhanced by some stirring lines from Tennyson, both leaders, along with their frontbench colleagues and most of the backbenchers, left the house. A dozen or so members – some one-tenth of the assembly – were left behind, to resume debate on a motion introduced earlier in the morning while the main players on both sides had been busy among themselves, dealing with fallout from the attempted spill.
The motion, moved by the Labor member for Fremantle, Melissa Parke, was about Syria. Parke, who together with Tanya Plibersek and Sarah Hanson-Young was part of a UNICEF delegation to the region a year ago, offered some devastating statistics: 190,000 deaths from the conflict, some ten million civilians forced to abandon their homes in the past three and a half years, of whom three and a half million have fled across the borders into Jordan, Lebanon and Turkey. In December last year, the United Nations World Food Programme was forced to suspend its aid to Syrian refugees for lack of funds, leaving 1.7 million people to go hungry during winter. The UNHCR estimates the cost of meeting emergency needs at over US$8 billion.
Parke’s motion called on the Australian government to increase its humanitarian support to displaced people in Syria and to the border countries dealing with the main influx of refugees. So far we have contributed just over $130 million in aid. Last year the contribution was $35 million (with some additional funding for UN agencies and NGOs), roughly equivalent to the real estate value of a row of suburban houses in Sydney.
Philip Ruddock, for the government, responded with an eloquent speech about how Syria was the cradle of Arab civilisation. He expressed a special concern for the impact of the refugee tide on Lebanon, a country he has visited many times. He suggested that the motion underestimated levels of government support, but provided no figures to correct the picture. All this preceded the arrival of the front bench for the motion of condolence on Martin Place, and the stirring speeches from our leaders on its national impact. After they, and the press gallery journalists, had left the chamber the Syrian issue was resumed with a speech from Matt Thistlethwaite (Labor member for Kingsford Smith) seconding the motion for increased support.
There are well-established conventions about which sessions require the presence of the front bench and which may be watched on the monitors in MPs’ offices or attended to from the record in Hansard. But the impression conveyed is that it is not the government’s business to care about the Syrian people, it is the government’s business to care about the Australian people. All that nasty Syrian chaos is of concern to us only, it seems, if it finds its way into the Sydney CBD.
This is the kind of slippage in perspective that is a real test of national leadership. A good prime minister should have the vision and the talent as a communicator to break the shell of national self-interest, to make the country less inward-looking and encourage a mature public intelligence about its role in the world. Do we want to be citizens of the world or legends in our own lunchboxes?
The Closing the Gap report at least had a hearing on Wednesday morning from the full house – well, to begin with. Abbott welcomed what seemed to be a bipartisan overture from Shorten, but it wasn’t long before a fissure ran through, then gaped wide. Shorten began to blame funding cuts for some of the dire evidence of declining welfare, and seven Coalition members left the chamber in protest. Senator Nova Peris, who was present observing, gave a fiery response in the afternoon Senate proceedings, departing from her prepared speech:
[T]o sustain lives everybody needs to be at the table to give hope and to implement the right things that Aboriginal people need. That walkout showed a total disrespect not only for leaders of this country but for a race of people – the oldest collective race of people in this world whose lives we are trying to enhance and for whom we want to make things better. I just do not get that you have people walking out of the chamber.
By Friday morning, when a Senate health committee hearing was devoted to Indigenous health, there was no one left to walk out. A light scattering of Labor senators was there to ask questions of the invited experts, but the Coalition benches were empty.
The prime minister handled the Human Rights Commission report on children in detention, also tabled on Wednesday, as badly as any of his most severe detractors might have expected, throwing what amounted to a hissy fit. But on Thursday morning, foreign minister Julie Bishop and her opposition counterpart Tanya Plibersek made a deeply felt show of unity in pleading for clemency for Andrew Chan and Myuran Sukumaran.
Would Bishop – or Plibersek, in due course – make a better prime minister? The thought was surely crossing the minds of many in the chamber at that point, especially those in the press gallery. But when it comes to the overarching questions of leadership and direction in the government, political commentators have served only to keep the short circuits hotting up as they interview each other in an endless feedback loop of preconceptions.
Perhaps more of us should go and observe the proceedings for ourselves. Impressions change and sharpen when you see the show live. Tony Abbott is capable of spontaneous moments of geniality and humour. Bill Shorten has more fire and wit than he conveys on camera. Ultimately, though, it’s all noise and repartee and question time is a fiasco. A display of humbug, as Dickens would have called it.
How did we get to this? The leaders on both sides have failures to answer for, but the question of how our political leaders get chosen, embraced, rejected and overthrown is one for the public, and the commentators who influence public opinion. One of Tony Abbott’s favourite games in opposition was the censure motion. Time and again, he moved against Julia Gillard, calling her incompetent, deceitful, an embarrassment, the worst prime minister in Australian history. And, as she has commented, “those were some of the nicer things he said.”
Now the tables have turned. Tanya Plibersek, seconding a motion of no confidence in the prime minister, sought to draw the bigger picture. “Australia is taking its place in a world that is changing all the time,” she said. “We see changing power relations between the great powers. What is Australia’s future in this new world order?” Then she quoted Joshua Kurlantzick, the senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations: “Abbott’s policies have been all over the map, and the lack of coherence has often made the prime minister seem ill-informed and incapable of understanding complex policy issues.”
If this is so, why do we need a Washington journalist to tell us? Couldn’t one of our own have sounded the alarm bells quite a while back? Abbott’s interventions as opposition leader were not those of someone who had any real understanding of what government is or how it works, but whatever it was he was doing, the press gallery were almost unanimous in deeming him to be very good at it. “Brilliant” even. David Marr wrote recently that he did it “magnificently.” For Marr, the problem was that Abbott hadn’t been able to make the transition from attack dog to leader of the pack.
The problem is rather that political journalists are too fond of their own stories, and reluctant to let them go. Abbott the pit bull made a good story. The fact that he was utterly failing to engage with policy or focus on political process was something the press gallery didn’t care to notice.
As they try to grapple with it now, their views are framed according to preconceived narratives. Predictably, the weekend press was still dominated by reflections on the leadership issue. There was a sense of anti-climax, but still plenty of material to keep the crisis rolling. Lenore Taylor’s commentary in the Guardian was a story in a headline, “Tony Abbott’s authoritarian need to attack just leaves him looking weak.” In a website video, Taylor discusses the authoritarian personality problem with deputy political editor Katharine Murphy. It’s a case of identity confusion, they agree: bellicose Tony tried to give way to group hug Tony but by the end of the week he had become shrill and defensive again.
Laurie Oakes in the weekend Telegraph sees it the other way about. Abbott had started out a bit shaky but by the week’s end “seemed to be getting his confidence back” and “his parliamentary performance had improved markedly.” As far as Paul Kelly in the Australian is concerned, “the damage done this week is incalculable.” But he means damage to the country, because we deadheads in the electorate just can’t take the tough medicine we need to survive, and the Abbott government is all that stands between us and a group of “fraudulent politicians” who will saddle us with eternal debt. That’s his story and he’s sticking to it. For his colleague Dennis Shanahan the key questions facing the Coalition and the country are “Can Tony Abbott survive?” and if so, for how long?
Joe Hildebrand in Sydney’s Daily Telegraph blames the “plague of palace coups” on social media. As the “caravan of outrage” moves on, he says, vital reforms can’t be implemented. It’s an interesting point, though I’d see it rather differently. Social media users are replicating all the techniques of tabloid politics: the Photoshopped caricatures, the skewed sound-bites and vilifications. These are the propaganda weapons rightwing commentators are accustomed to using, but they are not used to seeing them cross the boundary to be fired against their own side.
So now we have a plague on both our houses. Sooner or later the next field day of Breaking News will come, with the next overthrow. The critical question is not, as Shanahan and the rest insist, whether Tony Abbott will survive. It is the question of what qualities are required for good political leadership in the contemporary environment. We need commentators who are prepared to focus on that, and to see the parliamentary battles in a much wider context. The serial killer problem with our political leadership is trashing not just the individuals, but the role itself. It is, as Francis Fukuyama suggested in a recent Radio National interview, a danger to democracy. •
