Can anyone explain The Shoppies?

Lindsay Tanner. has been in the news over recent weeks peddling his book Sideshow, but today I want to talk about an earlier book.

Tanner made his name by leading a campaign to wrest the Victorian Federated Clerks Union from the Right, and successfully becoming a left-wing State Secretary. He wrote the story under the title The Last Battle.

Reviewing the news from the weekend one sees reportsthat the NSW Labor Conference moved away from a vote in favour of gay-marriage and "It is understood the decision followed indications from delegates with the socially conservative Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees' Association, that they would vote against it."

I don't find this surprising - the Shoppies are renowned for their socially conservative stance - though it should be called what it is a very deeply held Catholic religious position.

What I do find surprising is that this stance endures within the Shoppies. I'm not exactly sure that shop assistants are by nature a very conservative lot. Indeed, a targeted campaign to recruit gay members to the union for the express purpose of breaking its "socially conservative stance" would probably have a high chance of success.

What's more it may be the essential pre-condition for getting the ALP to change its policy stance.

Maybe the campaigners for gay marriage should go get strategy advice from Lindsay Tanner.

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Gough at 95

An interesting column in The Monthly by (another) child of the Whitlam era Lindsay Tanner as a Gough retrospective at 95.

I'm with Tanner in agreeing that the Whitlam Government is often misrepresented as being economically negligent and careless in foreign affairs. Tanner is right to note how turbulent the times were, but he perhaps also fails to remind us that 1972-75 oil shocks were not only due to oil embargoes arising from the Yom Kippur War but were also a simple conscious economic act of "monopoly" pricing by the oil cartel that was OPEC.

The fact that Whitlam shared with every other Western Government the inability to deal with the consequent "stagflation" is conveniently forgotten. The fact that the very first piece of removing economic rigidities that was the correct response to stagflation was the 25% tariff cut is also underplayed. The conservatives don't want to admit it was an essential pre-condition for all the reforms that came later, and the left cannot accept ownership of it.

The coalition didn't especially revile the Whitlam Government because of the way they obtained power - it is always the nature of incoming Government's to critique their predecessor. Maintaining Whitlam as leader and being prepared to run the 1977 election on the same basis of 1975 was the ALP's choice. If Gough had stood aside immediately for Bill Hayden, the man widely credited as having renewed credibility to the Whitlam Government, 1977 would have been an election on Fraser's record, not Gough's.

In the praise of the Whitlam Government there is also a little too much of the "great man" view of history. Gough's Government was as much a product of the times as it was of any action by a single leader. In the west there was a "revolution" in 1967-68. Only in a few places (like Paris) did the revolution resemble earlier revolutions (like 1948) where the forces for change won the war without winning any battles.

Evidence of this can be found in the reformist zeal that infected even parts of the coalition, the Government of John Gorton giving particular expression to it. That forces of conservatism in the coalition destroyed Gorton simply showed the error in the ways of those conservatives.

The same factors underpin why the Government of Malcolm Fraser ultimately did so little to dismantle the Whitlam legacy - it amended at the edges but never the core.

Footnote: Gough and Margaret Whitlam were at Sydney University with my parents. My aunt Barbara Manton (nee Glasgow) gets one small reference in Susan Mitchell's Margaret Whitlam: A Biography.

Footnote 2: I can also recall exactly where I was when I heard Gough had been dismissed, I had jost crossed City Road on the over-bridge from Wentworth to Carslaw, and my Physics I tutor John Gerofi told me the news.

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On Democracy

I'll admit to having bought but not yet read Lindsay Tanner's Sideshow. I am however in violent agreement with him on the fact of the dumbing down of politics.

I contend, however, that this is a global phenomenon, not one that is uniquely Australian. I further contend that the culprit is not, primarily, the Media (meaning traditional big media) but is instead social media and communications technology.

I take as a starting point an observation I made as a school boy, that Robespierre instigated the Terror after the French Revolution as an expression of direct democracy - what he was doing was expressing the "will of the people" as discerned by understanding "the mob" that filled Parisian streets (one day I'll re-write and post that essay).

Today's politicians find themselves equally distracted by the mob, that has new forms of organisation.

Take the reaction this week to the 4 Corners report on live cattle exports to Indonesia. I've already mentioned the fact that the Australian designed box is more humane than the traditional method. To ban Australian live exports doesn't mean any cattle will not die inhumanely, only that Australian cattle won't die inhumanely.

But the reaction of politicians has been swift spurred by the intense interest created through Facebook. The call has been merely for an end to the export trade. Reaction has been swifter than it has been to the "greatest moral issue of our time", that is climate change.

What we see is the critical weakness of direct versus representative democracy, the opportunity to plump for all the individual preferences you might make without reconciling across issues. Its extreme is seen in the model of California where direct democracy demands more services and lower taxes.

Unfortunately I'm still short on solutions to the scourge of "the mob". I don't favour a return to "elites" as espoused by some (be that Plato or Pareto). But I sure as heck don't agree with Ordan ANdreevski who wrote in Online Opinion;

Australians are increasingly becoming dissatisfied with the dumbing of democracy. The nation is ready for a transformation of civic and political culture. Australians are poised to embrace a smarter democracy that is fit for purpose.

Australia needs a new, vibrant, well informed and vigorous political culture, practices and performance to upgrade the dynamism of society and economy and increase our image, relevance and ability to attract and persuade others on a world stage. The dumbing down of politics can be curtailed though social innovation and collective impact involving all relevant stakeholders including parliamentarians, the media, research and education institutes, communities, civil society and progressive diasporas.

Unlike Lindsay Tanner, I am optimistic about the future of Australian politics. Australian democracy has the ability to change and improve for the better as new voices, new practices and talent enters the Australian Parliament, the media, research institutes and universities and contribute to national, parliamentary and policy debates and actions.

Indeed this is written in MBAese (The Urban Word of Today).

What is the actual "social innovation and collective impact"? How will "stakeholders" progress it.

I actually think the solution relies on some structural constitutional reform that does a few things;

Properly construct a "Washminster" system. Have a bicameral parliament in which one house is elected by national proportional representation and the Prime Minister and Ministers are exclusively drawn from this house. This house behaves a little like the US electoral college for President but the PR process results in the whole potential Ministry being on the ballot.

The other house continues to be drawn from separate electorates with either one or two members per electorate. But we do a better job of one-vote one-value than we do now by giving each MP the number of votes as they were elected by (in a one-member electorate that is the total of all formal votes cast, in a two-member structure it is their final votes after the elimination of all but the last candidate). Actual votes in the House require computer tabulation (can anyone explain why we still have tellers and headcounts for divisions), things won't be decided "on the voices" but by the button - press Yes or No. Even show the result on a screen. You can't use "pairs" to get around unavoidable absence - but proxies would work fine (simple rule though, a member can have a proxy for only one other member - the Whip can't control all the votes).

This at least provides some logic to the system and addresses the public concern about thinking they "vote" for the PM of their choice under the existing system. You get to vote for the PM you want and the person to represent your local needs. he local rep really stays local by not faxing redistributions every six or so years.

Does this make an improvement?



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Voting

Democracy and the idea of government by all expressed by a vote has been around since antiquity, but it has formed the backbone of anglophone government since the late 17th century, being mostly refined first in the US and then other countries so that through most of the twentieth century the issue seemed "settled:.

The reality is somewhat different. There has remained a tension between the concepts of representative and direct democracy, the original distinction between the American party labels of Republican and Democrat (respectively).

At the same time electoral systems have been reviewed and reconsidered. The major dimensions for electoral systems are;
1. Whether the executive and legislature are directly elected separately (the US) or whether the latter determines the former (Westminster).
2. Unicameral versus bicameral legislatures, and the nature of selecting the "second" house - e.g. US and Oz have Senates, Australian States only recently moved to election rather than appointment, UK has a hereditary/appointed house, and NZ and Qld have none)
3. The voting system. First past the post, alternative vote (preferrential) or proportional representation. If the latter Hare-Clark or MMP i.e. a party balance "top-up").
4. Compulsion. Whether voting should be compulsory or voluntary.
5. The franchise. The issues of universal adult suffrage have been long resolved, but the definition of "adult" continues to be open for debate - with some in Australia suggesting 16. But there have been others thinking in terms of tightening the franchise (I saw something I now can't find that was proposing an educational qualification). The related issue is electoral district size and how they are drawn.

In the last week three different pieces have popped up on these issues. The Economist last week had a story on the perils of the direct democracy experiments in California. This outlines the problem of allowing individuals to vote directly on issues where they don't have to reconcile the consequences. Direct votes will lower taxes and increase services. Yet this week in diagnosing "what's wrong with America's economy" they note the inability of the representative federal government to reconcile the revenue with the expenditure.

The second issue has been the referendum in the UK over the Alternative Vote. I was bemused to see The Economist discussion which suggested the AV could increase the vote for extreme parties and indeed that PR could be more "stable".

The same article notes that part of the balancing of votes received versus seats includes the redrawing of electoral boundaries that some are concerned about breaking "local" ties. I have noted that very issue in Australia since the reforms that limited the variability in seat sizes to first 20% then later to 10%. With boundaries redrawn every second election and often quite big changes flowing there is a breakdown in the relationship between member and electorate, with more votes being based on party affiliation.

There is an alternative. That is to let seats vary in size but allow an MPs parliamentary vote reflect the size of their electorate. Voting could be done electronically rather than by physical division (fingerprint swipe - press yes or no) and the vote tallied. The system of pairs would need to be replaced by a formalised system of appointment of proxies.

Finally we come to the question of compulsory voting. Lindsay Tanner in his new book Sideshow, has suggested abolishing compulsory voting "thereby reducing the voting base to people who are sufficiently engaged to be less susceptible to cynical marketing strategies and entertaining forms of manipulation."

This sounds fine in principle, except that the voting base is not actually thus reduced. While citizens have the choice to vote, the self same "less engaged" become the target of the campaign to "turn out the vote". politics in the US and UK is no less a sideshow than it is in Australia.

(In fairnes to Tanner he quotes Richard Speed on this point, but Speed's analysis is wrong. By contrasting Obama's election with Gillard's he is not making a reasoned comparison. Secondly, the need for a party in compulsory voting to "look after its base" is just as real - just look at the NSW ALP and Federal Labor and how they bled to the Greens).

If there is indeed a problem here requiring a solution - rather than a mere transitory phase that will self-correct - it is unlikely that it is only to be found by fossicking through the existing collection of democratic forms. It probably requires a deeper conversation about the intention of democracy and what it requires.

I have previously thrown ideas into the mix, including (1)more frequent rather than less frequent elections (2) formalising the idea that one house of parliament exists to create the executive and the other the legislative review body, the latter to be built on national PR so each party's list is the people they will make Ministers.

The latter idea could have some tweaks. These would include some restrictions on candidacy - you must be at least thirty, you need to have already "done something" which can include having been elected to a representational legislature, held an executive position in a corporation or in an association or GO, or achieved a certain "professional" status....

It could include a process whereby all the parties contesting pre-commit to how they will vote in that house on who should form government.

There are lots of possibilities rather than simply recycling the choices considered over the last one hundred years.







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