Politics
A year on – Albanese reveals Labor’s political strategy
In an interview with David Crowe, published in The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, Albanese states Labor’s political plans. Albanese tells Crowe:
I believe that Labor should be the natural party of government – that our values sit with a majority of Australians, the values of a fair go and not leaving people behind, but also of not holding people back. Those are values of aspiration for a better life. And in order to do that, you have to have a program that takes people with you on the journey of change.
Crowe’s article – “You can’t simply wish things to happen”: PM’s message for progressives – summarizes the Albanese government’s achievements so far and its plans for the future. In Crowe’s assessment “Albanese is trying to establish a narrative with voters that locks in their support for the long term even if they disagree with some decisions along the way.”
It’s in contrast to Whitlam’s crash or crash through approach, and it’s certainly less exciting.
This incremental approach, with its emphasis on competent if unadventurous government, is safe. It leaves little ground for a nominally “conservative” opposition to claim when the government itself is operating in line with the Burkean conservative tradition.
The Coalition’s Burkean conservatism credentials took a battering when Prime Minister Howard commenced his purge of political moderates and when Prime Minister Abbott used his short term as prime minister to take the Liberal Party on a trip towards the political order of pre-Reformation England.
Labor has seen that the conservative ground had been vacated, and has occupied it.
One may ask if, in its gradualism, the Albanese government is not sufficiently engaging the people in the structural problems we all face. These problems will require us to go through some difficult adaptations, particularly the need to pay more taxation if our economy is to restore its productivity and to distribute its benefits carefully, and the need for many of us to change the industries in which we work, the skills we bring to the employment market, and the places we invest our money.
Our weakened public service
Perhaps the government should engage Deloitte, KPMG or Ernst & Young to advise on whether the public service has relied too heavily on the use of consultants.
Just kidding.
The government is already well aware that the previous Coalition government spent $21 billion outsourcing public service operations, confirmed by an audit of the way 112 government agencies who employ public servants have used external labour – contractors, consultants, outsourced service providers and labour hire companies. Of this $21 billion $16 billion was spent by the Defence Department: The Australian Government’s report on the Audit of Employment.
Even after considering all the employment-related costs incurred by public servants – superannuation, payroll administration, long-service leave and so on – external workers have been much more expensive to hire than public servants. This absurdity was forced on many departments by the Coalition’s imposition of staff ceilings on public service agencies.
Such administrative waste is only one aspect of the problem. The other, as former senior public servant Andrew Podger points out in his Conversation contribution, is that public servants and employees of consulting firms have different loyalties and different motivations. He writes:
In managing consultants, it’s essential the public service appreciates that the motives and values of the consultants are quite different from those of public servants. Their loyalty is to their employers and, while delivering what the contract for services requires, their interest is in their company’s profits.
What they deliver may be in the public interest, but the public interest isn’t their primary motivation.
His article – Consultants like PwC are loyal to profit, not the public. Governments should cut back on using them – is about the public service as a whole, and not just the PWC scandal (which couldn’t have come to light at a worse time for the big four consulting firms). This over-dependence on consultants has been “undermining critical capabilities in the public service”.
The Coalition may have believed that in imposing staff ceilings and hiring consultants instead it was on a political winner, but a survey commissioned by the Australia Institute – Government use of consultants – finds that 72 percent of Australians think too much is being spent on external consultants. Most respondents believe money would be better spent in hiring and training public servants.
How will public servants shape up in the budget estimates?
A guide for the frank & fearless (reproduced with permission from TAI)
After the budget, ministers and senior public servants are called upon to appear before one of eight Senate legislation committees, generally known as the “estimates” process. One committee covers Health and Aged Care and Social Services, another covers Industry, Science and Resources and Treasury, and so on. This process gives Parliament a key role in scrutinizing the performance of executive government.
The process puts public servants on the spot: will they provide “frank and fearless” answers, will they repeat the minister’s spin, or will they obfuscate with sophistry and half- truths?
In fact for the most part their responses could serve as lines for an episode of Yes Minister.
That’s not how it should be. It’s Parliament that authorises these public servants’ salaries and running costs. They are being called to account by the land’s ultimate authority, to which, constitutionally, executive government and ministers are subservient.
But for the most part public servants’ behaviour before these committees is shaped by loyalty to their minister and to the party of executive government.
As a reminder to public servants of their duty to their employers, the Australia Institute has placed a full-page advertisement in the Canberra Times, reproduced alongside.
The Voice: if you don’t know, here’s how to find out
Unless someone has something entirely new to say or write on the Voice, I won’t be linking anything other than clarifications. This link – voice.gov.au – says everything people need to allow them to make up their own minds, with links to other sources of information for those who want further details of what is really a very simple question.
Nor will I be providing any links to discussions on what happens next, such as those around the detail in Marcia Langton’s and Tom Calma’s 2021 Indigenous Voice Co-Design Process report. These are matters to be argued and discussed once the referendum is passed, and the detail is to be decided by Parliament.
Unfortunately the ABC and some other media, in search of stories, are giving vent to people sewing confusion – not necessarily to defeat the referendum, but to express their dissenting opinions while adding nothing to help the public understand what they will be voting for. In so doing the ABC, inadvertently perhaps, is lending partisan support to the “no” campaign whose campaign message so far has been “if you don’t know, vote ‘no’”.
Writing in The Conversation Denis Muller of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne warns that journalists reporting on the Voice to Parliament do voters a disservice with “he said, she said” approach. He calls for journalists to be impartial, but impartiality is not necessarily achieved by “reporting what someone says and then finding someone else to oppose it”. He goes on to write:
The result is that absurd or far-fetched propositions go unchallenged other than by an opposing political voice. When this happens, journalism’s evaluative element goes missing, leaving the audience to figure out the rights and wrongs for themselves.
Maintaining impartiality does not require the media to publish nonsense, and certainly does not require them to publish nonsense without drawing attention to the facts or contrary evidence.
Stan Grant’s ordeal
In his 1993 Reith Lectures Edward Said said that the life of the public intellectual is a lonely life.
Stan Grant’s revelation of his experiences as a prominent public intellectual at the ABC remind us of that loneliness.
He summarizes his ordeal in his departing message to the Q&A audience. And in a statement on the ABC website: For years I've been a media target for racism and paid a heavy price. For now, I want no part of it – I'm stepping away.
Grant’s departure, and the lack of support he has had from the ABC, has raised a great deal of comment. Authors of the Media Diversity Report, writing in The Conversation, see the issue in terms of racial discrimination against indigenous journalists.
Denis Muller of the Centre for Advancing Journalism at the University of Melbourne, writes in The Conversation that Stan Grant’s treatment is a failure of ABC’s leadership, mass media, and debate in this country.
The ABC managing director, David Anderson, has apologized to Grant and has promised to review its response to racism affecting staff. Staff have shown their support in rallies around the ABC’s many offices.
It’s notable that the event that seems to have had most impact on Grant was a torrent of particularly vile responses to his comments when he was on a panel discussing the coronation of England’s King Charles. He has said:
Since the King’s coronation, I have seen people in the media lie and distort my words. They have tried to depict me as hate-filled. They have accused me of maligning Australia.
That people whose loyalty is to a foreign monarch can accuse Grant of maligning Australia is a manifestation of extraordinary hypocrisy. Grant is one of the four percent who have the strongest claim to call themselves “Australian”.
The ABC must take some responsibility for the grovelling and mawkish way it has treated the death of England’s queen and the ascension of her successor, with no respect to the half of Australians who do not support the foreign monarchy, and to those who rightly see the events of 1788 as an unprovoked invasion – in the same way as Ukrainians see the events of 2022. In doing so it has energized the worst of the monarchist movement.
In its response to this matter the ABC could do well if it were to shift its European office from London to another capital from where it could get a more detached perspective on British events.
Grant’s message has many layers besides those to do with offensive and threatening language from racists and monarchists, and the lack of support shown by ABC management. It is also about his intense discomfort with journalism as it has developed in Australia:
We in the media must ask if we are truly honouring a world worth living in. Too often we are the poison in the bloodstream of our society. I fear the media does not have the love or the language to speak to the gentle spirit of our land
Julian Assange’s incarceration
Stella Assange, Julian Assange’s wife, has been in Australia campaigning for his release and raising awareness of the serious legal and political issues around the US charges against him. To quote from her address to the National Press Club:
There is now near universal recognition of the enormous implication that this case has for press freedom and the future of democracy.
If you can spare 27 minutes it’s worth listening to her address. It’s a clear, well-informed and authoritative statement by a well-qualified lawyer about the charges that have been brought against Julian Assange, in terms of his human rights, of an assault on freedom of speech and of the press (supposed to be enshrined in the First Amendment to the US Constitution), of the damage the case is doing to the US-Australia relationship, and of her sufferings as a spouse and mother.
If you can spare a further 30 minutes you can hear the question-and-answer session, in which Assange is joined by another lawyer, Australia’s Jennifer Robinson, as they go into details of the case back to its beginnings, when Wikileaks exposed US war crimes in Iraq.
Assange’s treatment has been used by US authorities as a deterrent to bully other journalists into fear of publishing what they know should be exposed to the public. This issue goes well beyond the US, as authoritarian states increasingly are prosecuting and jailing journalists, and as other countries, including Australia, enact laws curtailing the public’s right to know what their governments are doing.
You may have seen Stella Assange interviewed on the ABC’s 730 Report on Monday night. Unfortunately, because of poorly-prepared and at times gauche questioning by the program’s host, she was not able to present herself in her role as a committed and professional human rights lawyer. If you want to hear Stella Assange as a human rights lawyer, it’s in the twelve minutes of her Press Club address from 15 to 27 minutes. There is also a short (8 minutes), session on ABC Breakfast where she is introduced as a “lawyer and human rights defender”. She goes into the political aspects of the case from both US and Australian perspectives, thanks the Australian press for keeping the issue alive, and urges the Australian public to sustain pressure on their political representatives.
As she says in her Press Club address, “Julian’s life is in the hands of the Australian government”.