In theory the media should diversify a nation’s democracy, serving as a channel through which many different groups can participate in national debate. Yet with the high levels of media concentration in Australia, are we hearing the voices of the many or simply the few?

CPD Researcher & intern Rob Harding-Smith submitted this report as part of research commissioned for Avaaz who are using this in their submission to the independent media inquiry being conducted by  the Department of Broadband, Communications and Digital Economy.

Main Points in the Discussion Paper:

• Australia’s print media ownership is much more highly concentrated than that of most other Western countries
• The ownership of Australian TV and radio is following the international trend towards increasing concentration
• Changes to Australia’s media ownership laws have tended to increase this concentration over time
• The emergence of new media does not remove the need for regulation to prevent too much media power from becoming concentrated in too few hands – all but one of the 12 news sites in Australia’s top 100 most visited sites are owned by major existing media outlets
• Audience and reader complaints about the media are increasing:
• Complaints to the government regulator of broadcasting, the Australian Communications and Media Authority, have risen 57% in 5 years, and complaints to the newspaper industry self-regulator the Australian Press Council, are 42% above the long-term average.

This publication was commissioned by Avaaz. CPD thanks Avaaz for the opportunity to help inform public debate on media ownership, regulation, and self-regulation.

ChilOut was a volunteer group campaigning from 2001 to 2006 on behalf of children in immigration detention. We wound down our campaign after the amendment was written into the Migration Act that “Children should be detained as a measure of last resort.” At the same time, children were removed from the main immigration detention centres (IDCs) and put out into the community either on bridging visas or residence determinations. The only children held in any form of secure facility – residential housing– were those whose parents were a proven security or flight risk. This was not a radical left agenda. It was done by the Howard government.

The sad fact is that right now 618 children are being held in detention facilities – of the 628 in the immigration detention regime, only 10 are in the community under residence determinations. If you read the very small footnotes in the Immigration department detention statistics summary, you will see that this is the only form of detention where the person does not have to be accompanied at all times by a designated person i.e. under guard going to and from school.

The statistics summary states that as of August 27, 438 children were detained on the mainland “ten were detained in the community under residence determinations, 317 were in alternative temporary detention in the community, 51 were in immigration residential housing and 60 were in immigration transit accommodation. Of the 2379 people in immigration detention on Christmas Island, 190 were children (aged under 18 years) – all in alternative temporary detention in the community.” Let’s unpack what these nice sounding places mean.

Alternative temporary detention in the community is not ‘temporary’ as children have been in Leonora for four months as of the end of September and for far longer on Christmas Island. It is not really ‘in the community’ as children are held behind fences, and the few lucky enough to go outside to school do so under guard and are brought right back afterwards. There are 190 kids held in this form of detention on Christmas Island. Most of them are unaccompanied afghan children – effectively war orphans. There can be no argument that they are being held because they are a security risk.

For the 51 kids in immigration residential housing, things are no better. These places are actually mini-detention centers, albeit more humane, less institutional and with less security. It is generally a cluster of houses or demountables built around a common recreation area, fully fenced with a guard house and CCTV monitoring in the common areas. Again, there are no visitors in without authority and kids generally only go outside for school under guard. Any recreational trips are few and far between. The last category is the 60 kids held in immigration transit accommodation (ITAs.) These places were intended to be used only for very short term (around 7days) as a place of transit while a person was in the process of being removed from Australia.

Many children have not left their place of detention in months. While it was laudable that the ALP policy was to remove children from IDCs – the main detention centres – the result has been that kids are now held for long periods in places that do not have anything close to adequate facilities. At least the IDCs were purpose built to house people for long periods and have recreational and educational facilities. Places such as the Darwin Asti Motel are cramped, with only a cement carpark for children to play in. 150 afghan boys held in the Darwin Lodge have not been outside since April. Dr Louise Newman, an adviser to Government on immigration detention issues, has stated that in some cases, detention centres are actually better than the alternatives currently being used for children.

Sadly, ChilOut has had to resume our campaign in light of so many kids being held in immigration detention facilities in unacceptable conditions that are a breach of the Convention on the Rights of the Child. When we ended our first campaign, there was overwhelming support from the Australian community to ensure that children were not being detained. When we closed up shop, members of our group were drained – emotionally, physically and financially.

But there is no way we are going to stand by and watch this happen again. Not in our name, not in our country. No way. We will not allow our government to damage and traumatize another round of vulnerable children who fled to us with arms outstretched, seeking safety and protection.

The first time around we were just simple middle-class mums and dads who thought a couple of letters to the papers would solve the issue. After a 5 year hard-fought struggle we are seasoned campaigners, polished media performers and savvy political operatives. And we are mad as hell that we have to do this all over again.

For more information or to join the campaign, go to www.chilout.org

Below are John Menadue’s speaking notes, first published in Croakey, Crikey’s health blog:

Under-resourced mainstream media is not in a healthy state. It is failing significantly, with a few notable exceptions, in the health field as in most other fields. It is much more than just the shrillness of the Murdoch media. With so little news to break or analyse, it is not surprising that journalists spend such an inordinate amount of time-sharing opinions with each other.

Can online media fill the vacuum? Crikey/Croaky, Centre for Policy Development and others are in the field, but they will take time to grow. The important issue for online media to recognise is that technology is the easy part. The hard part is content both information and analysis.

In pay television for example, we have excellent new technology that has given us more channels and better pictures, but the improvement in content is marginal. We have more choices, but little increase in value. Online media is much cheaper to produce and deliver, but the continuing problem will be access to good content at reasonable cost. Bloggers give us worthwhile and diverse opinions, but are not particularly strong on the dissemination of factual information.

The Australian polity and the media are in a downward spiral, almost a death wish. Disappointment and disillusionment with politics and the media is widespread and growing.

Trivia and personalities prevailed in the media in the last election campaign. The best example of trivia that I can recall was the Australian Financial Review’s portrayal of Julia Gillard saying ‘Nauru’ instead of ‘East Timor’. As the AFR put it ‘Gillard’s Nauru gaff rocks asylum seekers’ stance’. Really? I have been getting my four children’s names confused for the last 50 years! Even Kerry O’Brien mis-speaks the ABC for the ALP.

Politicians are clearly running away from the big ticket issues – particularly climate change and the two or three track economy that the mining boom is foisting on Australia. Politicians listen closely to lobbyists on these big-ticket issues – 900 full-time of them, or 34 for every Cabinet minister. Journalists are under-resourced to examine policy issues and in many cases have become the mouthpiece of special interests with their well-funded public relations activities. The Australian Centre for Independent Journalism at UTS found in a survey of the 10 major metropolitan newspapers published in Crikey in March this year that 55% of content was PR driven, and 24% of content had little or no significant journalist input. In the specific field of health/science and medicine, the survey found that 52% of content was PR driven, with 23% of content having little or no significant journalist input.

Before I come specifically to health, let me mention the problem in the wider media context.

The Rudd Government introduced timid climate change proposals and then over-compensated the polluters. Frightened by a ‘big new tax’, the government ran away. The result of the power of special interests and the failure of the media to explain has resulted in what Ross Garnaut has described as a ‘diabolical problem’.

For a $7 m advertising campaign, the three wealthy foreign-owned miners saved themselves $7 b in taxes. There were some media commentators, Ross Gittins and Ian Verrender, who wrote cogently on the issues, but much of the media, which was the beneficiary of the miners’ advertising money, either diverted public attention from what was at stake or clambered in political support of the foreign miners. I wonder how those same journalists will react when Chinese state-owned enterprises follow BHP, Rio Tinto and Xstrata in running future political campaigns against the Australian government.  The media was missing in action on this big-ticket item.

On asylum seekers, the government and the media, and particularly the ABC, failed to frame the debate with facts. Television news and current affairs obviously worked on the assumption that if there were no pictures, there was no news. It was easy to get pictures of asylum seekers’ boats floundering in the Arafura Sea, but it is hard to get worthwhile pictures of asylum seekers’ coming by air, despite the fact that over 90% of asylum seekers come by air and not by boat. Tony Abbott said that Australia was being ‘invaded’ by asylum seekers, yet neither the government nor the media took the trouble to point out that asylum seekers represented only 1% of our migration intake.

Special interests in health, as in other areas of public policy, hold sway, with the public and the community largely excluded. The health media has gone missing on the following.

At the April COAG meeting, State governments and their health bureaucracies were left in control of hospitals. Kevin Rudd described it as the ‘greatest reform in health since Medicare’. That was nonsense. John Brumby and the states won the arguments over hospitals and got a lot more money to boot. Where were the professional and searching journalists in mainstream media? We were all overwhelmed by the spin.
Compared with many other countries, we have a much higher number of hospital beds. Australian governments have an obsession with hospitals at the expense of non-hospital care. But no journalist to my knowledge has examined this obsession we have with hospitals and hospital beds.
The media is yet to examine the gaming that goes into waiting lists. These waiting lists are more rubbery than Goodyear tyres.
The AMA resists any significance change in archaic work practices in health which if implemented could give this country enormous improvements in productivity. Health is our largest sector and our largest employer. There is serious concern about lack of national productivity improvements in recent years, but the potential for health sector productivity improvements is scarcely ever mentioned by mainstream media.
Many media economists extol competition, but the Australian Pharmacy Guild maintains its protection from competition through location rules, the cap of 5,000 on the number of community pharmacies, and the exclusion of pharmacies from supermarkets. But scarcely a peep from mainstream health journalists.
The media responds to hot button issues like a particular death in a hospital, but scarcely examines the systemic problems that cause about 10,000 avoidable deaths in our hospitals each year or 200 each week. That is the equivalent of one Bali bombing or one Victorian bushfire every week of the year.
The health insurance industry retains its corporate welfare subsidy of $5 b per annum. Yet the mainstream media spends more time publishing the views of this highly protected industry, rather than examining alternate policies to produce better public outcomes.
At the last election, pathology companies, such as Primary Healthcare Ltd, ran ads against the government’s attempt to curb burgeoning pathology costs. It was obviously affecting their profits. In the 8 years to 2008-09, pathology services, paid for by Medicare, have increased 62% and benefits paid increased by 71% – way ahead of inflation. Put another way, medical services per person from 1995-96 to 2008-09 have fallen by 5% for consultations, but risen 30% for procedures and 65% for diagnostic, including pathology. No wonder the government needs to act. Whilst Australian Financial Review journalists were talking up the problems of the pathology sector, nowhere did they frame the discussion with some facts about the enormous growth in pathology and the excessive level of referrals. Their stories seemed like public relations handouts from Primary Healthcare Ltd with minimal journalistic input.
How can the information base be improved to promote public health and a healthy media?

The health sector is so large, complex and technical that it is difficult to understand. This is a problem for all, including journalists. It is also true for ministers, both federal and state, who are easily captured by their health bureaucrats with their mastery of detail.

The best-informed health commentary is, and I hope you will excuse me for saying it, in Crikey/Croakey and CPD. But their resources are limited and their readership falls far short of mainstream media. Hopefully such organizations will continue to grow and develop. But content is the hard and expensive part.
Health information and policy advice is biased heavily in favour of governments and their bureaucracies. They are able to dominate the debate with this monopoly of information. With the balance of power now to be held by Independents in the House of Representatives and with the Senate to be controlled by the Greens from July 1 next year, there is a unique opportunity to substantially expand the resources, both quantity and quality, available to members of parliament through parliamentary committees and the parliamentary library. The media and the community would be much better informed. (By far the best information I was able to find recently on asylum seekers came not from the Minister for Immigration and Citizenship and his department, but from the Australian parliamentary library.) The proposed parliamentary budget office will also be a considerable help, but it will be limited to budget and fiscal matters which are only one part of a much wider agenda of economic policy.
Julia Gillard was rightly criticised for her proposed citizens’ assembly on climate change. It was obviously a diversion from the main issue. But she had a point about our need in many policy areas, including health, for a better-informed community that will enable our leaders to make some tough decisions. I have been a long-term advocate of citizens’ assemblies, deliberative polling, and citizens’ juries to explore at every level, local, state and national, informed community views on hard issues in health. We need community groups who are informed by experts and not dependent on the Herald Sun or the Daily Telegraph.
The federal government has proposed a number of authorities to report on health performance, eg the National Performance Authority will report on emergency departments and elective surgery waiting times, adverse events, patient satisfaction and financial management. There will also be an Independent Pricing Authority and a permanent Australian Commission on Safety and Quality in healthcare.  All these new monitoring authorities will be helpful in providing the information-base for more informed reporting and public discussion.
This new information will not only help public policy, but also provide better information to consumers to help each of us make better decisions about our own health ‘My hospital’ similar to ‘my school’ should also be helpful.
The establishment of an Australian health commission would also facilitate better public understanding and analysis of health issues. Such a commission would implement government health programs, subject of course to the government setting out the principles and policies that should guide the commission, eg universality, equity, subsidiarity, pooled funding, etc. I foresee this commission working in the same way as the Reserve Bank in the economic field. The Reserve Bank has proved itself to be independent and largely immune from pressure from special interests. Importantly the Reserve Bank, as should an Australian health commission, facilitates and leads an informed debate on health issues and policies. That would better equip the media and us all in understanding.
Other health authorities, such as Medicare and the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, should be instructed to facilitate public discussion on important health issues and help us get away from the current debates that are really a two-way discussion between the minister and special interests. The information they supply must be much more customer-friendly, and highlight the key issues where greater public understanding is necessary. It would make for a better-informed media. The key issue that we don’t discuss in health is that we can’t have all we want and that priorities and hard choices have to be made.
There are many ways in which public interest journalism in health can be advanced. With the failure of under-resourced mainstream journalism, the key is enhanced information and independent advice to facilitate a more informed parliament, media and community which would in turn make it easier for adaptive leaders to make the necessary but hard decisions in health.

New technology is important but the real problem is access to good content. As in all media, the key is not so much technology as content.

If you want to hear more from John Menadue on what is wrong with our media and some ideas on how we might fix it, you can listen to his conversation with Deborah Cameron on ABC’s 702 Mornings here.

Does a tied vote for the major parties show that the voters are evenly divided, or is that most can’t see enough difference between them? The extra votes for independents, Greens and even the Nationals suggest that many voted on the basis of anything but the majors and together with the rise in informal votes suggest confusion, Most undecided voters would not have found it easy to seek out policy options that engaged their interest.

The tied result does not seem to be because Australian voters were happy with the offers of the major parties. 82% thought the ALP did not deserve to be re-elected but neither were more than half prepared to support the Coalition instead. Between a deluge of major party advertising and the very limited coverage by the media, most voters were given little access to minority views.

Real choices were silent
What would have happened if the voters had had easy and professionally devised access to the assessments and scores of advocacy and Lobby groups policy options and omissions done by groups representing the really forgotten voters and issues? Scoresheets such as those produced by Equal Rights Australia, Women’s Electoral Lobby, GetUp!, and The Health Reform Alliance. Most of these rated the Greens policies as being the best for their group interests and for a more socially inclusive, fairer Australia.

The Greens did make considerable gains in their votes and representation but why didn’t they score more? Their lack of capacity to push their views contrasts with the cash resources that were used by both major parties and the various well-heeled major lobby groups such as business organisations.

Most voters limited access to the minor group policies or the recommendations of independent assessors means the results neither reflect a keen duel between two clearly differentiated major policy agendas, nor do they suggest most voters knew that there were alternatives on offer. The serious danger is that voters seeing no possibilities of their interests being met show a level of discontent translated into cynicism and disconnection and are vulnerable to possibilities of more populist appeals to the politically disillusioned.

A supermarket election
What the results do indicate is that electors are not impressed with being treated as consumers buying products,. A few policy initiatives, none of which could seriously grab the public imagination, were designed to buy votes in particular marginal seats. The results were unspectacular equivalents of Woolworth or Coles as the best buys for the next three years. There are costs in underestimating voters and reducing citizenship to customer benefits. A major failure to understand voters has particularly affected ALP policy plotters for some time. They have forgotten that leadership requires some need to inspire the led to have confidence, to see some integrity and create trust.

However post election discussions so far do not suggest that either of the major political parties has any regrets about their limited vision or their negative type of campaign. Who in the Coalition will recognise that abusing the ALP and negative options are causing damage to the political processes? A cynical exploitation of fear tactics is deeply immoral and shows expected disconnects between ethics and politics, something that should sit oddly in a publicly Christian potential PM.

Furthermore who in the ALP is going to apologise to us all for both losing the plot they set up in 2007 and boring us with an almost content free campaign? The boring machine (mainly) men who cannot read the entrails disguised as focus groups, dumped a major policy commitment, then dumped the leader who lost his credibility over this, then presumably hobbled together a new leader with a policies devised by focus groups – a politically mortal sin producing a most boring campaign.

As a long term researcher, I listened to the conversations on air, in buses and amongst friends and contacts and could find no fire but just a sense of pain in the belly, and a lack of interest in all but those supporting the Greens. This particular piece of poor planning and campaign implementation also diminished the odds for a first elected woman PM. The puerile whimperings of the campaigners managed to undermine the potential novelty of having a gender basis for voting ALP. Even if the policies were not great, Gillard, as the first woman in leadership, could have given hope of better things to come. She was drowned in a sea of me-too crap and the many omissions of equity policies I outlined here. So, no one should dare ascribe any losses to failures of feminism, because this is a classic boyzone effort that shows the power of bad macho organisational cultures.  However, the stuff up the ALP has ‘master’-minded is truly scary because Karl Bitar and the rest so far have failed to recognise they have done anything wrong! A definitive recipe to repeat their errors.

Choice + leadership = decent outcomes
What if, as I asked above, the voters had known more about the other options?  Where they did, they voted solidly for Greens, independents and where not, they often chose nobody. Maybe the tied parliaments will allow the independents to make the system work better. I hope they do because otherwise the basic trust of the system that underpins the democratic process may not survive too many more elections. If voters are treated as venal and self interested, they may become that way and also be vulnerable to extremists who can inspire them into a belief that complex problems can have simple solutions.

So, if what we get is the government we deserve but don’t like, maybe we need to work out what has gone wrong. We need to make sure that there are decent policy options and explore what more can be done to improve the content for next time.

Reform to government advertising is part of point 7 of the Independents’ seven key demands. The Prime Minister has undertaken to pursue such reform, and the Leader of the Opposition has said that he is at least happy to consider it.

Mr Abbott’s comment also represents progress of a sort, since the last Coalition Government denied that any such reforms to its media campaigns were necessary. This was a Government that in its time became Australia’s biggest advertiser, ahead of corporations such as McDonalds or Coca-Cola.

Political parties fund their election advertising from political donations. Between elections incumbent governments fund their advertising through taxpayers. Such advertising is meant to inform the public about government business. It is not meant to be used for party political propaganda. Nevertheless, Opposition parties and taxpayers have been increasingly concerned that party political business is often what it is being used for.

In 2007, Labor in Opposition promised that if it took Government, it would see that advertising and information campaigns would provide objective, factual and explanatory information, free from partisan promotion of government policy.

The Rudd Government met its commitment to deliver guidelines on government advertising. The 2008 Advertising Guidelines were not legislated and were not always clear with respect to some procedural matters. But they did have a practical impact, so much so that there was outrage earlier this year when the Government gave itself an exemption from its own Guidelines in order to fast-track a defensive campaign on its proposed mining tax.

The problem is that there will always be a temptation for incumbent governments to turn explanations of their policy decisions into good news broadcasts. Until they are made into law, advertising guidelines will always remain vulnerable to reinterpretation or revision; following a change of Government, they could be ignored altogether.

Getting legislation to control government advertising should not be too hard. Since 1995 Guidelines have been considered and revised by the Auditor-General, the Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit and the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. The 2008 Rudd Government Guidelines—which drew substantially on these processes—were themselves reviewed in 2010. In 2009, in the face of Government opposition, the Liberals and Greens combined to pass legislation public information campaigns in the ACT.

Political parties are not the only ones who are taking an interest in curbing government advertising. The Centre for Policy Development has a collection of ideas for citizens and a to-do list for politicians called More than Luck, which looks in detail at both political donations and government advertising. . GetUp! has developed a Blueprint for Australian Democracy that recommends substantially the same legislation.

Legislation on political advertising is unlikely ever to appeal to incumbent governments.  That means that the current situation offers a rare opportunity to do something about it.

CPD thinkers – Miriam Lyons, Ian McAuley and Marian Sawer – have contributed their ideas to a GetUp! report, A Blueprint for Australian Democracy: This Moment and the Renewal of Parliament, Government and Elections. The report is being sent to all members of the House of Representatives and the Senate.

As has happened in Britain, Canada and New Zealand, a political system that was designed in the early twentieth century must now adapt to the very different conditions of the twenty-first century. With a changing society and more complex challenges – including a three speed economy, a second round of the resources boom, skills shortages, infrastructure deficits, climate change, refugees, indigenous recognition – our parliamentary and electoral processes need to be progressively re-cast.

The formal political and policy process is an arena that has huge influence on the wellbeing of all Australians. Taking lessons from the past and along with more recent thinking about fair electoral processes, the report suggests how both policy making and electoral regimes can be re-configured to engage Australians much more effectively in politics and policy making. It is a moment where we can renew and strengthen our democracy.

Marian Sawer is co-author of a chapter from More Than Luck, Strengthening Democracy, which was one of the background documents provided to the report’s authors. Read Marian’s chapter & download the report for ideas on how we can renew government, parliament and elections.

Pledges to stop the boats were made from both the major parties seeking votes in marginal seats during the election campaign. The Coalition promised to bring back Temporary Protection Visas (TPVs), reopen the detention centre on Nauru, bring back the 45 day rule and bring in mandatory sentences for convicted people smugglers. The ALP said they would open a regional processing centre in a third country, preferably with the participation of UNHCR, and send any boat arrivals there for protection claims processing. There would be no guarantee of resettling refugees in Australia or other regional countries.

Whether or not these proposals are good policy (they aren’t) is not the point of this article. Instead, given the outcomes of the election we should evaluate whether they can get passed by parliament at all. Given the tight election, the views of the Independents plus the Liberals likely to cross the floor again, can either party live up to their election promises? Looking at the numbers, it looks highly unlikely that any regressive or punitive law changes towards asylum seekers would ever see the light of day.

To reopen Nauru would not require going to parliament, as the ALP did not repeal the excision laws that allow for it when they ended the Pacific Solution policy. Either side can immediately send asylum seekers to any ‘designated third country’ for processing, be it Nauru, East Timor or deepest darkest Peru.

Other policy promises by the Coalition will be much harder to follow through on. They have said that TPVs are critical to stop the boats, and they would need to lodge new regulations to bring them back. Likewise to bring back the 45 day rule to restrict work rights for asylum seekers.

Regulations do not automatically require a vote, but anyone in either House can disallow them, which then triggers a debate and a vote. A tied vote means the regulation does not go through.  In the lower house, if everyone turns up that day, you need 76 votes to pass legislation or regulations. This means the Coalition would need all their 73 seats plus an additional 3 votes from the 5 independent MPs (I includes the Greens MP here, but not Tony Crook the so-called independent National Party MP.) This is highly unlikely given the recent media statements by independents Wilkie and Oakeshott, the voting past of Oakeshott and Windsor who supported ALP reforms, and of course the Greens policies for Adam Bandt.  The Coalition could count in Bob Katter, but would also most probably lose votes from the re-elected MPs who have already crossed the floor to vote for ALP reforms, Broadbent and Moylan, with Mal Washer reported as intending to but was unfortunately rushed to hospital and unable to attend.

The Senate does not provide any more joy for proposed asylum law changes by the Coalition. After the changeover next July, the ALP, Greens and DLP will be 41 Senators to the Coalitions & CLPs 34. Until then the current count is 37 Coalition, 37 Labor-Greens, with Steve Fielding and Nick Xenophon holding the balance of power. Fielding would be likely to vote for anything against labor, but Xenophon has already voted and spoken out for compassionate and sensible asylum policy reform. This would be a tied vote, and any regulation would therefore not be passed. Any that’s not counting liberal Senator Troeth once again crossing the floor, as she did to vote for ALP reforms on detention debts and the 45 day rule. She’ll have even less to lose as she will be retiring from the Senate at the end of this term.

Overall, apart from third country processing, neither party will be able to bring in harsh or regressive laws aimed at asylum seekers. One could hope that this would prompt either side to listen to the advice of policy experts, that the punitive approach taken for the past 15 years has clearly failed. That offshore processing, TPVs and other punishments do not work. The only way for harsh policies to work is for them to be worse that the situations people are fleeing. Worse than persecution, torture or death.

Both Gillard and Abbott put forward the idea that people smugglers ‘sell’ protection in Australia. If they are serious about their desire to shut down the people smuggling rings, the most effective way to do this would be to work on strengthening refugee protection options in our region. After all, people smugglers wouldn’t have any customers if refugees could get the ‘product’ of protection for free through UNHCR and resettlement countries such as Australia.

Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have a huge task ahead of them over the next few days – a burden made heavier by the poor level of secretarial support successive government have provided. So we thought we could lighten their load by drafting a template letter to send to the two contenders:

The first challenge posed by the disconnect between the two party system and political reality is absolutely fundamental. This is to create a larger capacity to expose real (if broad) consensus and to focus on specific disagreements. This will require a policy making process that can explore points of consensus and points of sharp disagreement between key protagonists. In addition, what might be termed a contemplative phase is needed in the process.

In other words, a new infrastructure is required to manage the strategic or agenda entry end of the policy cycle. This is the key phase for marking out consensual possibilities and points of fundamental difference. This is the phase in which a new issue is recognised and its broad significance and priority assessed. This would represent a new and transparent political phase in the policy making process.

Remember this is only at the preliminary stage in deciding what to do – it’s only at the stage of gaining the degree of agreement possible that there is an issue and (also if possible) a definition of its broad scope. Remember too that political leaders mostly work with the grain of public opinion. Sometimes they must confront their publics. But mostly they need to work within an envelope of interest group and community opinion.

A policy structure capable of exposing consensus would be good for politics, good for policy making and good for the community. This needs to occur without compromising the electoral standing of the various parties or the government’s right to govern. In fact, procedures that would achieve this end are evident in our own political history. Between 1901 and 1909, the electorate returned three parties – the Free Traders, Protectionists and Labor.

Governing required at least two of these parties to reach an accommodation with each other on particular measures. Deakin, the architect of the period, led minority governments. To create sufficient parliamentary support to enact acutely contested measures, he needed to seed a parliamentary (and hence public conversation) at the strategic end of the issue cycle, but before the government’s own approach was determined.

To achieve this outcome, he turned to a tried and tested vehicle: committees of the legislature. Indeed the Australian constitution provided him with an ideal structure. The Senate had been conceived as an independent House on the American model. In its initial years most members acted in this spirit.

More recently, the (late) Liberal David Hamer recommended converting the Senate to a Committee House. Ministers would not be drawn from this Chamber. Its committees could then become important agenda entry points for new and emerging issues. The adversarial culture, which is now often breached in committee enquiries, would be equally qualified in broader Senate proceedings.

With their scope specifically confined to emerging and strategic issues, committees could be agents of the legislature rather than the executive. They could recommend action – and the legislature would debate their recommendations. Ideally this would be free of the whips. But even with whipped or partially whipped votes, majority, cross-party support in the Senate would provide important guidance for the executive. A more diverse expression of views in the legislature would give the executive more flexibility in response. Following this debate, it would be up to the government to decide what to do.

If government rejects a report, the committee could return to the issue and respond to the executive’s argument. If it rejects the latter and the Senate votes to uphold the report, the government could either back down or use the mostly dormant procedures for resolving inter-House disputes. There are numerous imaginative examples from the US.

Within this constraint, the key point would be to shift some of the power in defining strategic policy direction from the executive to the legislature and, via this forum, try to narrow points of agreement and disagreement between the key protagonists. The theatre of parliamentary contention might then unfold in a more positive way. Meantime, the enquiry process and the subsequent parliamentary debates would educate all participants (the political parties, stakeholder interests, the media and the broader public) about the need for action and perhaps also about the most effective forms of action.

At the same time, such a procedure might be expected to have much greater impact on the mobilisation of relevant interests and the broader public. By such means, it might stimulate processes of social learning and the development of public opinion. All this would be designed to create a base in constituency and public opinion for whatever action might later be required.

Is this thought experiment just fantasy? Probably, until the hold of the two main parties is seriously challenged – as it may well be by the rise of independents in the House of Representatives. The present adversarial culture would need to be significantly qualified. Senators would need to approach their task with a more independent sprit. The fact that matters are being considered before decisions are taken by the executive would no doubt be opposed by ministers. It would compromise their powers – but it would be good for ministerial performance.

One path to change involves the rise of minor parties. With the Greens gaining such a pivotal role after this election, such a change would be in their particular interest. They will need to be able to demonstrate to supporters why they accept particular government measures and how they are advancing their own program. Backroom deals will not be sufficient. (Remember the Democrats?) A strong committee system would make the reasons for such decisions, including the trade-offs that might have been negotiated as part of a compromise, much more transparent.

If the challenge is to reconnect voters to the formal political system, few options are available. Other responses, like community cabinets or ministerial door-knocks, involve political make-believe where the distance between espoused purposes and actual achievement ultimately fuels public cynicism. The real need is for a process to build public consent for political action. A tilt of the overall political incentive structure from wholly adversarial toward more consensual styles is the only option. In recent decades, the major party structures have calcified and the social base of the two party system has imploded. But the major parties continue to draw upon and deploy its considerable resources and inertial power. For how long can the assumptions of another era thwart adaptation?

This is the second of two articles by Ian Marsh about the two party system and policy making in Australia.
More Than Luck is a collection of ideas for citizens who want real change edited by Mark Davis and CPD Executive Director Miriam Lyons. A to-do list for politicians looking to base public policies on the kind of future Australians really want, More Than Luck shows what’s needed to share this country’s good luck amongst all Australians – now and in the future. Click here to find out more. Like what you’ve read? Donate to help make good ideas matter.

The recent election campaign would have been a good joke if the issues facing the country were not so serious. These include climate change, how not to dissipate our next resource windfall, the two speed economy, education, asylum seekers and refugees — to name just a few. But neither party campaigned on any of these matters in any other than populist terms. Short term political incentives wholly trumped longer term policy needs. National interests were sidelined. The result of the weekend’s poll was anything but equivocal and the record number of informal votes testified to a high level of voter dissatisfction.

What is to be done? The answer to this question is ultimately a challenge to political imagination. One way of responding is based in the familiar two party patterning of politics – but there is another which requires an altogether different imaginative effort.

Let’s imagine your response is shaped by the traditional way the game has been played. What assumptions lie behind this construction of political life? To answer, we need to look back to the genesis of the present system.

The two party system had its origins in the rise of the Labor Party as a mass political organisation. This occurred in Australia roughly from 1891. Important moments occurred in 1909, when the Protectionists and Free Traders merged, and again in 1946, when Sir Robert Menzies established the modern Liberal party. In this perspective the political game is fundamentally about two main parties periodically contending for public support.

This approach makes an important background assumptions about Australian society. It assumes that for political purposes we broadly divide in two – our community has a real social divide that each party broadly mirrors. This was indeed a valid assumption for many years. But does a binary divide still hold?

Pointing to two dominant parties also involves making assumptions about their ideologies. It suggests that the two parties present the community with real and divergent choices and that these are based on broader differences of political philosophy or ideology. These have been valid assumptions for most of the past hundred years. But do they still hold?

There are further assumptions about the roles of the major party organisations. These are assumed to play a significant role which involves internalising many important political tasks. They mobilise activists. They set or at least influence party agendas. They cue broader partisan opinion. They integrate interest groups. For many years, the mass party organisations did indeed perform all these roles. But do they still contribute any of these capabilities?

All these assumptions were once reality but none of them accord with the contemporary scene. The community is now much more differentiated and pluralised. Australians exhibit a much wider spectrum of attachments and attitudes. Relatively small numbers of voters remain rusted on loyalists of the major parties. For their part, party organisations have virtually collapsed. They play almost no role in policy development or in activist mobilisation. Membership is insignificant and real power has flowed to party leaders. Party organisations have a minimal role in linking the community to politics. This has moved to the media: hence the corrupting 24-hour news cycle.

Finally, there is now often cross-party agreement about the general direction of policy. Witness the big change in Australian public policy that occurred after 1983. Tacit bipartisanship was the most important cause of its speed and degree. This continued through much of John Howard’s 11 years in government. The major parties often agree at least about the broad direction of policy. But this is a truth that dare not speak its name. All our present political incentives discourage such acknowledgement. This creates the incentives for opportunism, populism, manufactured difference and exaggeration, outcomes that now irritate many voters.

So this brings us to the second perspective. Recall what has changed. We are a much more diverse and pluralised community. We do not divide along binary lines. To think of ourselves in linear, left-right terms would be a gross distortion. A kaleidoscope is perhaps a better image.

We no longer have powerful party organisations. The remnants are shadows of their former selves. But none of the tasks that they once performed are carried out anywhere else in the political system. The media has filled this vacuum with generally baleful results. Short termism and manufactured difference predominates.

We no longer have two parties divided by a clear programmatic orientation. Rather the major parties agree on many aspects of the broad direction of policy, particularly in relation to the economy. Real disagreement often mostly concerns priorities or important details. You would never know.

Or the major parties may agree and freeze out other voices that have a right to be heard. They may also disagree profoundly about particular issues like gay marriage, environmental protection, euthanasia, education reform etc. But where they do disagree you can’t read responses off a central program or ideology. Each case must be taken on its merits.

If this is the reality of political life in the early twenty-first century, what new challenges does it create for politics and policy making?

Ian Marsh addresses the policy challenges which arise from the transformation of the political landscape in the second article in this series.

More Than Luck is a collection of ideas for citizens who want real change edited by Mark Davis and CPD Executive Director Miriam Lyons. A to-do list for politicians looking to base public policies on the kind of future Australians really want, More Than Luck shows what’s needed to share this country’s good luck amongst all Australians – now and in the future. Click here to find out more. Like what you’ve read? Donate to help make good ideas matter.