November 21st, 2019

Catastrophic Deficit of Leadership
 
Democracy in the western world is in deep crisis over a catastrophic leadership deficit. Reform requires policies that necessitate  change.   It is easy to elicit fear in the prospect of change. Good policy is either never presented, or is struck down at an election because whichever party is in opposition presses the fear button and wins the popular vote. Binary politics has become the death of democracy.
 
The deficit is most obvious in energy and climate policy (now is not the time to talk about climate change -Morrison), but is far from restricted to this arena. Political policy making lags so far behind the need for reform, it has become almost irrelevant to the big issues faced by contemporary society.  In a previous age three estates, the Church, the Nobility and the Commons competed for their interests to be heard and preferably safeguarded.  Media the fourth estate, has the task of making events and trends known.
 
What might those three estates be today? The commons, or civil society, must surely be the first estate, may I suggest, business and the business community the second, and government the third.  In a democracy the ‘commons’ or the interest of the public should prevail. But is this the case? Notwithstanding the claim made by politicians that their first duty is to listen to the electorate, clearly this duty has limits.  As noted in a previous blog, the voice of ordinary people, especially whistle blowers, is treated with suspicion, even animosity. As major issues continue to suffer from a policy vacuum this voice will not be shut down and will increasingly take to the streets, as recently observed with the student climate strike. Increasingly businesses will adopt moral or ethical positions on significant issues, as has recently been the case in relation to climate and gender equality.  Politicians are ignorantly wrong in thinking they have the right to tell business to stay with money making and ignore deeper moral and ethical issues. It is probable that these two estates will increasingly work in partnership together. The interest of business must be aligned with the interest of the public.  Government does all in its power to stop this growing partnership, for it perceives it to be trespassing on its own territory.  While politics lacks the capacity, or the will, to fulfil its responsibilities, this collaboration will grow stronger.
 
Those who aspire to serve through a political calling almost always start altruistically in service of the common good, but inevitably find themselves serving the party and ideology with which they identify.  Those who watched the recent ABC series Total Control would have been struck by the mirror that it held up to present practice and in particular would have some sympathy for the plight in which Ken Wyatt the minister for Indigenous Affairs finds himself, torn between the voice of his own people and the government’s refusal to listen to words that do not fit their world view.
 
Let’s have  look at some of the most glaring deficits.
 
No one is under any illusion that even if Australia moved immediately to zero emissions, this action would, on its own, make the slightest difference to climatic change already the frightening experience of many.  We are part of a global community in which greenhouse gases recognise no national boundary. That is not the point.  So what is the point?
 

• Our current targets are the least we can get away with rather than the highest to which we might aspire.

• Unless we adopt a strong position, we cannot have any influence on the direction that must be taken by the global community.
• The absence of policy has had a detrimental effect upon investment that must drive Australia’s inevitable transition to a post fossil fuel world.
• Setting environmental responsibility against employment is a wilfully dishonest dichotomy. Clever jobs that Australia rightly covets will be found in the emerging technologies of sustainable practice.
• Technologies like clean hydrogen (hydrogen extracted with the use of renewable energy) has the capacity to replace coal extraction as a pillar of the Australian economy.  The longer we take to invest in this and similar technologies the more we risk being beaten to the market.
• New technologies will give us the capacity to be a net producer, not a net importer of goods.  We should not be exporting raw material that we could be developing ourselves.

 
Economic and social policy:
 

• Far too high a percentage of national wealth is invested in property rather than production. This situation is undergirded by negative gearing and taxation policy.  This has had multiple consequences.  It has kept the younger generation out of home ownership.  It has driven asset accumulation above salary earnings to prime place in wealth dependency. Salaries have remained static. Negative gearing reduces tax liability.  The wealth gap exponentially widens as the poor, dependent upon salary earnings, fall behind the rich and their asset accumulation.   Middle, and lower income families are heavily mortgaged as result of home ownership and therefore less able to keep others employed through purchasing power.  People with property worth multiples of seven figures are still able to receive social service benefits.
• Economic capital is treated as sacrosanct while social capital is treated as dispensable.   We are currently reaping the consequences of underinvestment in aged care provision and underinvestment in care of national parks and bushfire mitigation, to name the two most obvious.
• A serious ideological error has been made in assuming that privatising and commoditising everything leads to greater wealth.  It might to some individuals, but at the expense of common good. Two examples: the commoditising of water and the privatisation of poles and wires. Making water available to the highest bidder has had very serious consequences on the Murray Darling Basin and those whose livelihoods depend upon it.  In theory a resident of Sydney’s eastern suburbs could hold millions of dollars-worth of water rights to be traded to the highest bidder.  A family farmer has no capacity to compete with a multi-national cotton or almond farmer. The privatisation of the grid has accelerated the cost of power. It has also taken the task of making the grid flexible enough to cope with diversified power generation out of the hands of policy makers, leaving it with those whose primary motivation is profit. 
• There should be a federal minister for volunteerism.  Research shows that humans are healthier and more content when others, rather than self, become the major preoccupation. It is also obvious that many of the ingredients that undergird social capital are best delivered by volunteers. The treasurer has recently pre-empted policy to keep the aging in paid employment longer. Would it not be far more productive for them, and for the nation, for those in post-employment years to be encouraged to participate productively as volunteers in a vast range of society building activities.

 
Democracy will continue to be devoid of leadership while:

• Fear remains the primary motivator of voters in general elections
• Political parties continue to be funded through private and corporate donations – funding must happen pro-rata from the public purse.
• Politics remains a binary blood sport