More than luck

Miriam Lyons and Mark Davies

This article was published in Living Ethics: issue 81 spring 2010

More than luck: ideas Australia needs now is a collection of ideas for citizens who want real change and a to-do list for politicians looking to base public policies on the kind of future Australia needs. Editors Mark Davis and Miriam Lyons showcase practical steps we can take to share this country’s good luck amongst all Australians – now and in the future.

Some say we get the governments we deserve, and to an extent this is true. When we stop paying attention to politics, we make it easier for politicians to stop paying attention to us. If we vote for the political equivalent of the crazy warehouse guy (‘All the services you want at half the price!! Why pay more?’), we shouldn’t be surprised when we get policies built to fall apart as soon as the press conference is over.

Yet it is also true that governments get the citizens they deserve. If you treat elections as a marketing campaign instead of a genuine contest of ideas, then you should expect people to shop around for the best deal they can get for themselves.

Both sides of politics have been happy to abandon their values and fight on their opponent’s territory this year – with Labor attacking the Coalition’s parental leave policy as ‘a big new tax’ and the Coalition arguing that Labor’s refugee policy is cruel to boat people because it fails to treat them badly enough to discourage them from coming.

if you treat elections as a marketing campaign
instead of a genuine contest of ideas, then you
should expect people to shop around for the
best deal they can get for themselves

In this context it’s understandable that the timing of this year’s election debate was shifted to avoid clashing with the finale of Masterchef. It’s much easier to get a clear picture of Callum and Adam’s different philosophies on cuisine than of Gillard and Abbott’s different philosophies on Australia’s future. In a choice between two stage-managed contests, why would you choose to watch a battle in which the shrapnel from small bullets ricochets off even smaller targets?

There are significant differences in what the major parties have done in the past, and in what they would like to do now, but the scope for difference on what they actually plan to achieve is so limited. Gillard is drawn reluctantly, Abbott gleefully, towards the politics of fear and exclusion. The Coalition would prefer not to act at all on climate change, while Labor wants to do what’s needed – but only if it comes at no political cost.

Politics, like nature, abhors a vacuum. Fear dominates elections when there isn’t a positive vision compelling enough to crowd it out, and neither major party has been telling a positive story this election year.

A stasis has settled over Government and Opposition in Australia. We need to change the game … the present stasis isn’t simply the product of the people at the top of the political food chain. The current Labor Government is a symptom of a broader political system that no longer seems to know or care what issues are important, even crucial, let alone how to begin to address them. A system bogged down in its own cultures …

It often seems as if our major parties don’t trust voters to look beyond narrow self-interest – even when opinion polls and research groups tell them otherwise.

When Australians are asked whether they would prefer tax cuts or more spending on health and education, the answer is clear: invest in services. And yet both major parties promised tax cuts at the last election, Rudd’s leadership fell partly because of one attempted tax hike, and Labor enthusiastically attacks Abbott for the economic irresponsibility of the tax he wants to pay for the kind of generous parental leave scheme they’d love to offer themselves.

it’s not enough to point fingers and complain
and say ‘no’ to what we don’t like.
revolutions in thinking don’t start that way.
we also need to map a viable path to the future we want

Rather than focus on what politicians can do to improve people’s lives, the media focuses on personalities. Politics is usually reported as if it were a horse race. Journalism lives for the leadership contest and little else. It might sell papers, but it doesn’t fix broken planets, brittle economies or entrenched disadvantage …

But it’s not enough to point fingers and complain and say ‘no’ to what we don’t like. Revolutions in thinking don’t start that way. We also need to map a viable path to the future we want.

New thinking and leadership always starts small. In More than luck: ideas Australia needs now you will find one strand in a wider global stirring of progressive sentiment. There are small ideas and big ideas, all of which seek to add to new narratives about the future that many people now feel are necessary given the failures of the recent past. All share a commitment to the same core principles: that in order to move forward as a nation we need to share this country’s luck more fairly and learn how to make it last.