The next great reform will be of politics itself

By ABC's Jonathan Green Thursday 19 March 2015

Photo: There are awkward questions for governments still defining themselves as the reform successors of Hawke and Keating. (William West: AFP)

Australia's next great reforms will be of this stagnant polity itself, hopefully delivering politics that frees ideas from the camouflage of endless deflecting rhetoric. But who do we have to lead this change? Jonathan Green writes.

History repeats itself: the first time as tragedy, the second as television.

Which is handy enough. Sometimes you need to see your moment represented for it to become recognisable and clear.

The TV adaptation of George Megalogenis's excellent book The Australian Moment began screening this week on ABC TV. The first episode of Making Australia Great traces our slow path from the well-clipped bliss of the long Menzian torpor, to that celebrated era of Hawke-Keating reform, the moment in which the "closed" post-colonial Australian economy was rebuilt with iconoclastic violence.

Subsequent Australian politics has struggled to match the generational drama of that transformation. The governments of Howard, Rudd, Gillard, Rudd and Abbott have played a strange and almost purposeless coda to what was, from 1983, an urgent process of formative, fundamental and comprehensive change. But it's a coda with popular appeal, one still ringing with hints of that fondly recalled Hawke-Keating melody.

Trained by that example, we now assume that our Governments will "reform" as almost their first order of business, even if we - and they - seem at a loss for what might be done. We are stuck with the theme so elegantly essayed in the '80s and '90s, of open economies and liberated markets. And next?

Times have changed. Where then the task of remaking our economy was serious, urgent and substantial, we now have an economy working in fundamental accord with accepted best practice. The liberation of an open market economy is pretty much a one-time reform: that job is done, unless some future fashion or orthodoxy should decide that renewed central intervention makes more sense.

Failing that we basically need to let our free and open system fend for itself, which raises awkward questions for governments still defining themselves - 30 years on - as the reform successors of Hawke and Keating. The best they can do is fuss around the detail of an economy now making its way in the world.

One of the most interesting thoughts from this week's Making Australia Great came from former Reserve Bank governor Ian Macfarlane, who wondered, despite welcoming the reform agenda of Hawk-Keating, whether it was a job that really ought to have been done a decade earlier. The pity was that our politics was caught somewhere between inertia and timidity.

We had just watched what oil shocks and an almost entrepreneurial incompetence did for Gough Whitlam, and as the strange menace of stagflation confounded Malcolm Fraser and treasurer John Howard. Both were signs of a changing world, and a world no longer held at bay by Australia's closed economy.

That sequence, the disorder of Whitlam ... the hesitation of Fraser ... then the tempest of Hawke and Keating ... it had a familiar ring.

Are we in that moment now, waiting on the next sweep of reform? Enduring governments in the meantime that are welded down by the trusted orthodoxies of a worn politics that might deliver a sense of comfort and stability but fail the most important test of meeting the needs of our shared future?

For Whitlam read Rudd and Gillard, for Fraser read Abbott.

The challenges that confront us now, in this late twilight of the Hawkian torpor, are deep and perplexing. They are challenges not met by endless rhetorical skirmishes that place a budget surplus as some hallowed cornerstone of policy and politics. It's a debate that seems to be a thing of purely political convenience, something almost phantasmagorical, with no impact in the real world.

A real world, it needs to be said, that confronts galloping change: a reordering of social connection, a tumultuous demographic transformation, the collapse of ageing and increasingly ineffective infrastructure, the slow but disturbing growth of urban and regional underclasses, of escalating family violence and murder, cities growing like topsy, the decline in educational standards, the strangulation of health care through a perplexing combination of over-service and unavailability, of appalling and endemic indigenous disadvantage and never mind the subtleties of, you know, climate change.

To base our political conversation around someone else's "debt and deficit disasters" and the faint, almost intergenerational, promise of a surplus, rather sells the moment short.

And so here we are in the depths of this new Fraser Government, a Government having apparently exhausted its political imagination in the brute act of seizing power, a Government deflecting the constant press of evidence on what needs desperately to be done in the hope that various political sleights of hand will be enough to see it through.

We could do with change. Sadly Hawke seems a little too time worn to be drafted at the last moment to substitute for Bill Shorten, another Bill Hayden of the soul.

Which leaves us waiting in distracted anticipation of the next moment of reform, one that will be as substantial as the task seen through by Hawke and Keating ... and might even fall to some political presence outside the seemingly exhausted and hollowly unrepresentative calculus of Liberal versus Labor.

The next reform will be of this stagnant polity itself. It will be reform that recognises that the current practice of politics is as relevant to the challenges of our moment as the Menzian conservative orthodoxy was in 1983.

It will deliver a new politics that will have the audacity to argue for deficit in times like these, of need and low interest.

A politics that might at last free ideas from the camouflage of endless deflecting rhetoric. One that might concede that the Australian public will give points for broad, meaningful and sometimes uncomfortable objectives that lie outside the narrow realm of political self interest ... apparently the exclusive concern of our new Frasers.

We need some kind of Hawke. Or even a Menzies. Some new set of ideas.

Maybe in episode two.

Jonathan Green hosts Sunday Extra on Radio National and is the former editor of The Drum.

The next great reform will be of politics itself - The Drum (Australian Broadcasting Corporation)