Politics
Sussan Ley forgets that the Coalition is not in government
Ley’s intervention in the government’s recognition of Palestine illustrates the Coalition’s difficult relationship with reality.
When Sussan Ley wrote to United States Congressional Republicans to reassure them that a Coalition government would withdraw Australia’s recognition of a Palestinian state, the ABC’s Jake Evans described it as an “unorthodox step”.
In these roundups I don’t go into the substance of foreign relations: issues around Gaza and recognition of Palestine are well covered in Pearls and Irritations. But a formal communication between an opposition leader and selected parliamentarians of a foreign country is unusual, to put it mildly. Coalition MPs and Republican Congresspeople clearly have some common alignments, but the formality of this communication would be tying up several Foreign Affairs staff in Washington and Canberra in a task of damage control. Only three years out of office the Coalition seems to have forgotten how foreign communications work.
It's hard to see Ley’s action as anything other than an attempt to undermine the authority of the prime minister while he was in New York, dealing with other governments to represent Australia’s interests in a wide range of concerns.
The Coalition had a chance to explain Ley’s behaviour when Senator Dave Sharma appeared on Radio National Breakfast, where Patricia Karvelas asked him about the appropriateness of that intervention. Although he is not the opposition’s foreign affairs spokesperson (that role falls to the softly-spoken and diplomatically sensitive Michaelia Cash), Sharma was a career diplomat before he became a politician. He would know the conventions and unwritten rules that guide the way diplomacy is conducted.
But his response sounded as if he had forgotten everything he had learned about diplomacy. To quote his response to Karvelas:
It's perfectly appropriate. I'd say two things. Firstly, it's the Labor government that has overturned decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus on how a Palestinian state should come about. It's not the Liberals, it's Labor that's done that. And secondly its perfectly appropriate and normal for opposition politicians to have relationships with parliamentary counterparts in other parliaments around the world.
His first point, “it's the Labor government that has overturned decades of bipartisan foreign policy consensus”, reads as if the government we elected in 2022 and again this year is some interloper, or at best a caretaker, not to be taken seriously, and all will be well when the natural party of government is returned to office.
And his second point does not address the question of the formality of Ley’s communication.
If Pauline Hanson had written to a political soulmate in the US Congress expressing her view, that would be her perfect right. If Sussan Ley had written about her disagreement with the government’s policy on Palestine, signing herself as the Member for Farrer, that would also be her perfect right.
But it’s her use of the title as “opposition leader”, with the strong hint that they will soon be back in office as the legitimate government, that fails to pass the pub test and breaks the rules that govern diplomacy.
Why, in fact, do we assign to a group of parliamentarians the term “opposition”, and endow the representative of that group with the formality of public office and the title “Leader of the Opposition”? There is no such requirement in our Constitution.
The office and title are simply conventions that made some sense when there were only two significant party groupings in Parliament, but they make no sense now.
Cartel politics
If Labor and the Coalition were corporations in the private marketplace they’d be up before the ACCC for collusion.
We learn about cartels in economics, and recognize them when we experience them. Over the years, because of the political emphasis on competition policy, cartels are becoming less prominent. In markets where in times past every supplier had the same price for the same goods, we are now seeing more price dispersion.
Competition has worked tolerably well in private markets where we buy milk, sausages, wine, cars, socks, holidays, entertainment, gasoline and so on. But what happens in our political markets?
If we go back to Australia of 50 years ago, politics at the Commonwealth level was almost strictly a win-lose contest. What was of gain to the Coalition was to the detriment of Labor, and vice versa. The only points of cooperation were on a few matters of individual self-interest, such as parliamentary salaries, retirement benefits and travel allowances.
But as we have seen in recent elections, particularly Commonwealth elections, the two old party groupings are finding that some political issues can turn to lose-lose outcomes as other parties and independents gain representation. In campaign funding, the powers of the National Anti-Corruption Commission, and access to government documents, Labor and the Coalition are finding a common ground in protecting their party interests against independents and minor parties. Hence we are hearing much more reference to “bipartisan” arrangements – even though, with the two old parties now holding only two-thirds of the vote, the “bi” of “bipartisan” is becoming increasingly meaningless.
Some of the behaviour we call “bipartisan” in politics would be called “cartel behaviour” in private markets, a point made by William Partlett of the University of Melbourne Law School, in his Conversation article Why the rise of “cartel parties” in Australia threatens our democracy.
An endangered tribe of savages in the heart of Melbourne
An extreme all-male club makes the Melbourne Club look woke.
The Guardian’s Tory Shepherd describes the Savage Club’s latest challenge.