Ideas@TheCentre
The phantom coup and poll-driven politics
In the wake of last week’s putsch against Prime Minister Julia Gillard, there was much hand-wringing about the health of Australia’s political culture.
Are Australians in the grip of an ‘island mentality’ that blinds us to how lucky we are and leaves us hungry for political scalps?
Or has Australia’s democratic contest degenerated into an unsentimental blood sport—the political equivalent of Hunger Games?
Pointing the finger at the apparent shortcomings of Australia’s political culture is a convenient explanation for the recent bout of infighting among key ALP figures. And yet the root cause of last Thursday’s political turmoil may be far more benign.
Indeed, the leadership row simply shows that governments can no longer afford to lose the electorate’s support—even if polling day is still far away.
In the lead-up to the spill, the Gillard government suffered a series of painful political blunders. There were unpopular political tactics: the sleep out in Rooty Hill and the choreographed attempt to appear in touch with Western Sydney.
There were also policy embarrassments: the mining tax that raised spare change. And there were poorly executed attempts at reform: the rushed and hastily abandoned push to regulate the media.
The net result of these stumbles was hardly surprising. As the ALP numbers in the polls began to slide, the parliamentary Labor party once again got jittery about its choice of leader.
There are obvious drawbacks to poll-driven politics. It increases the influence of often unaccountable back-room power-brokers and makes it harder for political leaders to propose visionary and politically risky policies.
However, Australia’s capricious poll-driven politics hardly suggests that we are ungrateful or that our political culture is needlessly brutal.
If anything, it just means that governments are hyper-sensitive to the attitudes of the electorate.
The latest Labor spill is therefore further evidence against an old political truism: The poll on election day is certainly not the only one that counts.
Benjamin Herscovitch is a Policy Analyst at The Centre for Independent Studies.
