Do not be fooled: the most dangerous element in the Australian body politic to the value of the voter is our current political parties.
Or more correctly, the party machines.
Madly obsessed with discipline, political parties in Australia deny their members a voice of their own. Elected representatives are hog tied to shilling the party line whether they believe it or not. Vote against them, you’ll be punished. Say something they don’t like, you’ll be punished. Express a concern with a party policy, you’ll be punished.
Sent to the back bench, disendorsed, or forced to take a fall on something… the result is the same – our politicians are basically confined to an existence comparable to lemmings.
Yes, there are the exceptions. And we love the exceptions. In my senior thesis at ANU I did a case study on two “maverick” National Party MPs. One started as a good party boy and increasingly became more rebellious. The other started as a maverick and progressively behaved herself. The first was relegated to the back bench and now holds one of the safest seats in the country. The second was promoted to the Ministry but lost her seat.
So what can we discern from this? The parties do not want what the voters want. They want the opposite. They want EXACTLY what the people don’t, and the end result is the continued, institutionalised devaluation of Australian voters.
Are we really surprised then, if we accept this little hypothesis of mine, that both major party leaders at this moment in Australia are weak, uninspiring, poll tested spin vomiting, pratts with no capacity for vision? They are exactly what the parties want – and the voters don’t. It’s just taken a couple of decades of progressively increasing addiction to discipline to destroy or sideline all true leaders in Australian politics. In essence, the parties have produced the weak, ineffective leaders they want to maintain the partisan battlefield and, in the process, never do anything productive for the country.
Even the best MPs not able to truly represent their constituency – although the notable exceptions like Malcolm Turnbull try, they all end up checking their language and going back to singing the party’s battle hymn of the day.
The discipline addicts of the party machinery also kill any kind of substantive debate in their quest for discipline, refusing to allow members of their party to voice their own view or hash things out as the leading minds of our nation should be. As noted elsewhere in this series, depriving the voters of informed debate is just as damaging to the value of the voter as any other action.
Of course, there is not all that much we can do about it. The entire electoral system is designed to protect and preserve the dominance of political parties in our system – you can’t win government without having one. Primaries will help, but as I understand it no party in Australia is considering open or real primaries – just closed ones to members of the party, which are more rightly called caucuses.
And of course, most active members in political parties that show up to vote are not your average Joe on the street, but people drinking the Kool-Aid, playing the party discipline game to further their own ambitions – whether those ambitions be a future political career for themselves or their own egotistical need to feel important and powerful in their narrow social circles.
Yes, there are exceptions. And I love and applaud those who speak out and seek change in any political body. I just wish there were many, many more of them. And that those highly capable, intrinsically gifted and intelligent people who have made their way in to the political spectrum would use their talents more in the interests of the voters, their constituents, and not the party.
The order of priorities should be this:
1. Constituents. (Of course they should be first, that is who elected them and who they are supposed to be serving.)
2. The Nation.
3. Their own conscience.
4. Their Party.
Instead it is more like this:
1. The Party.
2. The Party.
3. The Party.
4. Their own political interests.
What’s wrong with this picture? Simple: the voter is not valued in the Australian body politic. If they were, then this situation simply wouldn’t be permitted to exist.
This post is part of the Cheap Votes series. See more here.
