Wanted: a Tanner in the political works

POLITICS ... with Mungo MacCallum

Lindsay Tanner is probably the best leader that the Australian Labor Party never had. Many would dispute this assertion; Gough Whitlam, for one, would award the dubious honour to John Faulkner. But while the dour and relentless senator was a hugely effective parliamentary performer and campaigner, for my money he did not have Tanner’s depth and hard-headedness when it comes to policy.

Tanner, like Faulkner, is nominally from the left of the party, the traditional breeding ground for ideas and idealism. He joined the left when the label still meant something, before the factions degenerated into mere cannon fodder for the party warlords’ endless turf wars.
He has always been a genuine and avid advocate of reform, but not the sort of reform that can be condensed into a thirty second grab for television or an election slogan. Tanner’s great talent, the one for which he is most sorely missed, is for stringent analysis and deliberate, step by step development of policies which fit firmly into the Labor tradition but which are not bound to the shibboleths of the past.
He can be daring, but he is pragmatic and driven by outcomes more than ideology, a stance which does not always sit comfortably with the self appointed guardians of the party’s conscience. Above all, he is a clear thinking and dispassionate realist when it comes to the state of his beloved party, and indeed of Australian politics in general.
For this quality alone his views should be compulsory reading not only for his former colleagues, but for the pundits who so fearlessly hold forth on their problems, and, according to Tanner, are themselves a major cause of the malaise. Inevitably the mainstream coverage of his treatise, Sideshow, has concentrated on what are considered the instantly newsworthy bits: his thoughts on Kevin Rudd’s demise and the performance of Julia Gillard. But the book is a much wider and more interesting examination of the downward spiral fed by the misuse of the news cycle by politicians and journalists alike.
Federal politics has developed into a never ending election campaign, in which every appearance, action and comment is treated if it is the last thing the voters will remember before going to the polls. Thus every policy has to be reduced to a slogan, and every debate considered not on its merits, but in terms of the perceived winner or loser. The dumbing down is obvious, what is even more insidious is the way the regime encourages conscious dishonesty.
A politician asked a question like: “Will you guarantee that there will be no tax rises in your term of office? That not a single worker will lose a job? That no one will be worse off?” has just two choices: lie, or obfuscate. A refusal to play the silly game on the grounds that the question is unanswerable in that form is automatically taken as a negative. Yet such questions are the daily provocation ministers face, not just from the shock jocks, but from broadsheet gurus who regard themselves as the real kingmakers of the process.
They are the most willing to submit themselves and their readers to the tyranny of the opinion polls, an immensely damaging ritual which has effectively rendered serious forward planning impossible for any but the suicidal. A poll two years out from the next election which starts with the qualification: “If an election was held tomorrow...” is by definition meaningless. When the election is actually imminent, the polls can be a useful indicator of developing trends, but their use as a fortnightly gauge of the public’s mood swings has turned the politics into an ongoing popularity contest.
The standards of reality television shows such as Big Brother are now applied to the whole process of democratic government. The situation is farcical, but the aforementioned gurus take it, and themselves, terribly, terribly seriously. In fact they are mere observers, and frequently pretty lazy ones at that.
But they now regard their every utterance as not only infallible truth, but as determining the future for politicians and public alike. This should not matter, since they are in fact talking largely to each other. The holy trinity of The Australian, Paul Kelly, Dennis Shanahan and Greg Sheridan, generally communicate in prose comprehensible only to the initiated, and when their language fails to deter the reader, their pomposity does the job – I once noted that if the word “profound” ever disappeared from the English vocabulary, it would be necessary to buy Kelly a set of alphabet blocks.
But the politicians, sensitive plants as they are, react – indeed, usually over-react – to every nuance of the media’s pontificating and to every twitch of the polls. It was not always thus: Tanner notes that while Kevin Rudd was dumped as leader largely as a result of poor polling and an abrasive personal manner, 12 years earlier Paul Keating, who had the same problems, was never at risk. Such has been the steady drift away from substance towards spin.
Modern journalism is all about the search for the “Gotcha” moment; the gaffe, the slip of the tongue, the contradiction which can be seized upon and endlessly replayed as a clear demonstration that the reporters and commentators are not merely the judge and jury, but the real controllers of the process.
Such is their arrogance that they now feel qualified to set tests: If the prime minister does not instantly do what I say, it will be an admission of failure and probably of gross moral turpitude as well. Okay, here is a test for the media: read Tanner’s book, acknowledge the truth of it, report it seriously and at least try to learn from it.
And if you don’t, then ... then ... well, you won’t, will you? It would be much too hard. It’s so much easier to dismiss the whole argument by finding one tiny slip where Tanner breaks his own rules. Like he admits once having agreed to give a one word description of a politician. Gotcha.