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Is the Party over?

By Graham Young - posted Friday, 23 August 2002


Part of the debacle in the Democrats is that the control of the party has fallen to people who support a leader who is not supported by the majority of Democrat representatives. It was also part of the Liberal debacle in Tasmania. The Tasmanian Liberal Party would have won at least one more seat if Greg Barns had not been disendorsed. (I can be 99 per cent certain of this because of the way that the Hare Clarke system works, and correspondence can be entered into on this point). Barns would have stayed as the candidate, except that those who controlled the whole party (as opposed to his preselection council) didn’t want him. In Queensland those controlling the state organisation supported Clayfield MP and factional warlord Santo Santoro for Leader while he was an MP, and would do anything to advance this position, including undermining the elected parliamentary leader. This is part of the reason for their opposition to Quinn now.

This diminished base interacts with the third theme – the effect of consumerism on political choice. This is a little esoteric, but bear with me. Fifty years ago we all pretty much took what we were given. Children ate their dinners not so much to save the starving in Ethiopia but because that is what you did. We all went to church, and normally the same one as our parents, because that is what you did. Restaurants served much the same food, because that is what they did. Nowadays we run menus for meals cooked at home because the kids think nothing of sending ones they don’t like back. If we go to church it is as likely as not because we like the type of performance they put on, and we’ll change denomination at the swish of a surplice. In fact we may well regard eating out as a spiritual experience.

As a result of this surfeit of choice, we are coming to believe that we have the right to have whatever we want whenever we want it – that we have complete control over our environment. The idea of compromise is just a little old-fashioned. Yet compromise is the essence of politics. So, if our political leaders don’t give us exactly what we want (and they can’t, whatever they promise), we want to change them, not later, but immediately. In the Democrats’ case that means ditching Meg Lees. In the Liberals case that means ditching, Peter Collins, Kerry Chikarovski, Dennis Napthine, and possibly Bob Quinn, because we can and because they are not doing exactly what we want.

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This attitude leads to distrust. The old-fashioned bargain with politicians that most political party members used to make was that we would trust their judgement to do the right thing and only judge them once a term at their preselection. The new-fashioned bargain is that we want them to be continuously accountable to us all the time. The Democrats have this enshrined in their constitution – the membership is so controlling that it requires elected representatives to invariably conform to organisationally determined policies. Labor only pays lip-service to this – it has gotten over its control-fixation, although it does expel members who vote against caucus decisions. While the Liberals have less opportunity for control during parliamentary terms, they are enforcing their wills via extremely active stacking of branches of even their most successful members.

In an interesting inversion of this trend, One Nation was set-up so that Pauline Hanson would have complete control over policy. One Nation MPs had a constituency of one to please.

The final common theme is that politics, particularly at the branch level, has come to be dominated by people who have a very narrow focus and who are disconnected from the electorate. When parties are dominated by people who can be transported from where they live to somewhere else just to help someone win a preselection they are repellant to the people who join most organisations. Parents organisations at schools, scouts, Meals on Wheels, the RSLs and the churches, to mention just a few community organisations, are still full of people who do it for the love of it. They may, and do, play politics at some levels, but they all share a common connection to a community and a common purpose which tend to overwhelm personality differences in the end. The intersection between these people and branch membership is now very much less than it used to be. Political parties are becoming more and more like commercial concerns where you apply for a job rather than taking out membership. This increases the jostling for position, decreases the satisfaction that is given to electors, and therefore increases the tendency of electors to disconnect and to shop around.

As a result independents are becoming more common, and political parties less secure in their existence and more prone to fracture. Stott Despoja describes the Democrats, a party which has been in existence for 25 years, as a "young" party. It seems that they are showing their "older" colleagues the way into decrepitude. Perhaps in the future, 25 years will be a very old age for any political party.

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This article was first published in The Brisbane Line on 22 August 2002.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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