Trust Me: Australians and Their Politicians

Trust Me

JACKIE DICKENSON worked in the advertising industry before completing a PhD in history in 2005. Her doctoral thesis was published as Renegades and Rats: Betrayal and the Remaking of Radical Organisations in Britain and Australia. From 2007 to 2010 she held an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship in the History Department at the University of Melbourne. She has published on political and labour history, and is co-author (with Robert Corcoran) of A Dictionary of Australian Politics. She is currently researching a history of the impact of the advertising industry on Australian democracy.

Trust Me

Australians and their politicans

Jackie Dickenson

A UNSW Press book

Published by

NewSouth Publishing

University of New South Wales Press Ltd

University of New South Wales

Sydney NSW 2052

AUSTRALIA

newsouthpublishing.com

© Jackie Dickenson 2013

First published 2013

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study, research, criticism or review, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced by any process without written permission. Inquiries should be addressed to the publisher.

National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry

Author: Dickenson, Jackie

Title: Trust Me: Australians and their politicians/Jackie Dickenson.

ISBN: 9781742233819 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781742241548 (ePub and mobi)

ISBN: 9781742246512 (ePDF)

Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Subjects: Politicians – Australia – Public opinion.

Votes (People) – Public opinion.

Australia – Politics and government – Public opinion.

Dewey Number: 324.2

Design Avril Makula

Cover design Xou Creative

Cover image Thinkstock

All reasonable efforts were taken to obtain permission to use copyright material reproduced in this book, but in some cases copyright could not be traced. The author welcomes information in this regard.

This book is printed on paper using fibre supplied from plantation or sustainably managed forests.

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1    Politics becomes a profession

2    A sacred trust

3    Broken promises

4    The great salary grab

5    The good local Member (then)

6    A political birthright

7    Pensions and pay rises

8    Fear of the monster

9    People power

10    Betrayal

11    Women will make it better

12    Managing trust

13    Blaming the media

14    The good local Member (now)

15    Trust now

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book is the result of an Australian Research Council Postdoctoral Fellowship (2007–10) and an Australian Prime Ministers Centre Fellowship (2009–10). The Faculty of Arts and the School of Historical and Philosophical Studies at the University of Melbourne provided additional funds to enable the book’s publication. I wish to thank NewSouth Publishing’s Phillipa McGuinness for her persistence, Nick Dyrenfurth for his helpful suggestions, and the editor, Sarah Shrubb, for guiding me expertly through a challenging but enjoyable experience. Finally, thanks to Patricia Grimshaw, Stuart Macintyre and Sean Scalmer for their encouragement and advice.

Introduction

‘Gillard’s betrayals threaten democracy’

ON THE EVE OF Australia Day 2012, Melbourne’s right-wing pundit Andrew Bolt went into hyperbolic overdrive. The behaviour of the Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, was threatening Australian democracy. She had ‘won the last election’ based on ‘lies’ or ‘false promises’, assuring voters that ‘there will be no carbon tax under the government I lead’ and gaining the support of the Tasmanian Independent Andrew Wilkie by promising ‘to implement pre-commitment technology on every poker machine in Australia by 2014’. Gillard had ‘welshed on both deals’ and Bolt demanded an immediate election so voters could ‘take back control’.¹

Rhetoric like this has become increasingly familiar. Almost every day in Australia the media carry a story about the dire state of our democracy, mostly revolving around the low esteem in which we hold our politicians. Our trust in politicians and political institutions is at an all-time low, we’re told, and when pollsters interview us about our attitudes towards politicians we repeat this back to them.²

This isn’t just an Australian phenomenon. Voters in other Western democracies are also increasingly inclined to say they no longer trust their elected representatives; that politicians are all equally contemptible, motivated only by self-interest and addicted to telling lies.³

Problems inherent in representative democracy seem to have accelerated in recent years, though clearly the alternatives continue to offer no solution. In the wake of the global financial crisis, people have questioned the value of our system. Driven by the unwillingness of elected governments to regulate those financial institutions whose greed caused the problems of 2008 and who continue to pay their executives obscene bonuses, the Occupy movement, for example, demanded a new form of democracy, one that listens to people rather than corporations.⁴ In December 2010 the whistle-blowing organisation WikiLeaks posted thousands of diplomatic cables on its website, embarrassing governments around the world. Some argued that these revelations would change citizens’ relationship with their government: the latter would be forced to become either less or more secretive.

Democracy also took a surprising turn at a more parochial level: in 2010 desperate colleagues rolled an incumbent Australian Prime Minister when his popularity rating plunged. And the most recent countrywide elections in Britain and Australia both ended with a draw between the major political parties. In Britain the situation was resolved by the formation of a coalition between the Conservatives and the Liberal Democrats, a solution for which the latter party is likely to pay very dearly at the next election. In Australia, weeks of negotiations ended with a handful of Independents facilitating the formation of a minority Labor federal government.

The full implications of these events are yet to become clear. The Occupy movement persists, but in a diminished form, as it rarely attracts media attention. As for WikiLeaks, claims for its effects on democracy were overblown. With its founder, Julian Assange, facing numerous challenges, including sexual assault allegations, threats from governments and individuals, soured media relations, the blocking of online payments by corporations and now confinement in the Ecuadorean embassy, support for WikiLeaks’ mission seems on the wane.⁵ Julia Gillard’s unlikely government has stayed its course but the poverty of Australian political debate in the past 12 months offers little comfort to those concerned about the future of representative democracy.

Some of those people yearn for a Golden Age of trust; a mythical time in the past in which politicians said what they meant, when back doors could be left unlocked with confidence, when women and men lived side by side in perfect harmony, a pre-spin paradise when citizens could trust their elected leaders and public institutions implicitly.

In the past 20 years, a small part of the political studies industry has addressed this yearning, and the idea that there has been a loss of trust has become a cliché. This ‘crisis of trust’ literature relies heavily on public surveys in which those interviewed lament the loss of trust in contemporary life generally (how strangers are regarded) and specifically express their extreme distrust of people they do know (to some degree, at least): their elected representatives.⁶

There are two camps in this analysis of the decline in trust. In one camp are those who take a market approach to the problem. They regret the decline in trust, arguing that community social life is giving way to family isolation and community stagnation. They believe that the economic success of some countries and the economic failure of others can be explained by the degree to which communities in these countries bind people into networks of trust.⁷ The decline in trust, then, will have serious ramifications for the economic wellbeing of Western democracies, because adequate stocks of social capital can boost economic development, and without it economic development will suffer. Trust, they say, can only be rebuilt at the individual level and governments have little or no role to play in this process.⁸

In the opposite camp are those who take a moral approach to the problem. They reject the neo-conservative assertion that governments have no role to play in making and remaking trust in society, arguing that good government and good laws make good citizens. Trust can be increased if governments provide examples of ‘truth-telling, promise-keeping, fairness and solidarity’ to their citizens. Most importantly for this book, they argue that the social capital of trusting and cooperative civic relations isn’t simply inherited, but can also be encouraged, acquired and generated. They also reject neo-conservative assumptions about social capital and trust, arguing that assessments of a decline depend entirely on the conceptualisation of social capital that is used, the measurement that is applied, and the available data.⁹

Not everyone is convinced that a decline in trust is a bad thing. Some think it’s sensible to mistrust, as we rarely find ourselves in a position to make a rational choice to trust institutions. Others believe that the decline of the general trust that politicians need to mobilise citizens and party members will open the way for the democratisation of democracy, so political processes will be organised at the everyday level of the citizen, as well as in parliament and in the government.¹⁰

Not everyone is convinced that there’s even been a decline of trust. The British philosopher Onora O’Neill, for example, warns against a blanket acceptance of the ‘crisis of trust’ theory, questioning whether current levels of mistrust are really greater than those of the past. She thinks that claims for a crisis of trust reveal an unrealistic ‘hankering for a world in which safety and compliance are total, and breaches of trust are totally eliminated’. This hankering is unrealistic because the risk of disappointment – or even betrayal – when we place trust in others is an essential part of human life. In the words of Samuel Johnson: ‘It’s happier to be sometimes cheated than not to trust.’¹¹

O’Neill also insists that it’s important to distinguish between what people say in surveys and how they act in real life: people in Western democracies continue to place a remarkable level of trust in all aspects of institutional delivery, especially in their trusting use of infrastructure.¹² In other words, they might say they don’t trust politicians, bureaucracies, institutions and governments but their actions belie their words: they expect buildings and bridges to not fall down, they expect the health system to help them when they need help, they send their children to schools, they expect their welfare payments to turn up in their bank accounts, they sign up for phone and internet services, they buy insurance. Also, the answers given to the simple questions asked by public opinion polls and academic surveys suppress the complexity of our real judgments, and the reporting of these polls in the media by journalists (ironically one of the least trusted groups in contemporary society) sheds further doubt on their reliability. O’Neill argues that it’s crucial to examine the real-life behaviour of those in trust relationships. This book responds to that insight. It examines the real-life behaviour of two groups engaged in a trust relationship: voters and their politicians.

The work of the political scientist Nadia Urbinati has been especially useful in informing my approach to the topic. In her defence of representative democracy against the criticisms of those who favour direct democracy (when people vote on each specific issue to be decided, rather than for representatives who will do that in parliament), Urbinati offers important ways of thinking for this book. First, as discussed above, representation is a relationship between the politician and the voter. Urbinati describes representation as a mediating process,

‘an intricate network of interdependency between the representative and the represented’. We don’t simply let ourselves be represented, she argues; we actively participate in the creation (and re-creation) of representatives. Second, this process happens over time (the fixed periods between elections), encouraging us to think about politics in a future-oriented way that delegation (or direct democracy) cannot. For Urbinati, the election cycle is a great strength because it extends democracy beyond the moment of voting (unlike direct democracy). In this longer timeframe the voter has numerous opportunities (in Urbinati’s formulation, ‘sites of popular sovereignty’) to manage the representative and engage with democratic processes. Finally, representative democracy, by emphasising the role of judgment in politics, gives voters a presence that they couldn’t enjoy in direct democracy. The argument is that it is more engaging because it demands more attention.

Urbinati’s emphasis on the value of the election cycle has important implications for political trust because it reveals an underestimation on the part of many voters about their role and importance in political processes. This underestimation, and the ambivalence towards politics that it causes, provides the background to the crises of political trust examined in this book.

In examining the relationship between voters and politicians, this book takes a different approach than is usually employed. Most of those who have written about the decline in trust have been sociologists and journalists, and both groups cite imprecise historical examples to support their assertions.¹³ Historians have contributed to the scholarship on trust but so far there has been no sustained examination of shifts in trust relations in one society across a time period long enough to allow for a valid ‘crisis of trust’ theory to be proposed.¹⁴ This book redresses that by taking a historical approach, travelling back across more than 160 years of political history, looking for a Golden Age of political trust in Australia.

There are a few things to bear in mind when writing about trust. First, like any emotion, trust is difficult to recognise and define, but in the following pages I treat it as something that can be detected in written and printed material from the past. To help with this, when searching for expressions of trust or mistrust in documents from the past, I have broken the emotion down into the four components suggested by the sociologists Roderick Kramer and Tom Tyler – competence, reliability, honesty and openness.¹⁵ Second, trust is by no means fixed. What people understand trust to be and how they express the emotion shifts across time. For example, in times of war citizens might be more willing to trust their political leaders than they would be in peacetime because the existence of an external enemy causes political leaders to act with greater resolution, strengthens national unity and irons out pre-existing distrust. Third, over time, the act of speaking (or writing) an emotion changes the ways in which people experience that emotion.¹⁶ So the more that is written and spoken about the untrustworthiness of politicians, the more untrustworthy they appear to be. This becomes especially important with the introduction of opinion polling in the middle of the 20th century.

This study of trust concerns the relationship between voters and politicians. Political factions and parties have always intervened in this relationship, but anyone who is looking for in-depth analysis of individual parties’ involvement in these events will be disappointed. A great deal has been written about political parties in Australian democracy. In an environment in which it seems party loyalty is becoming increasingly irrelevant to most Australians’ lives, this book aims to shift the focus away from parties and onto the concept – and the possibilities – of representation itself. It will deal primarily with federal politics; the issues apply equally to state and territory governments, but not to local government.

That doesn’t mean parties will be ignored; given that the politicians considered here were almost all members of a party, this would be impossible. It does mean, however, that they will not be the focus. Although many more people belonged to political parties in previous eras than do so today, the great majority have never been members. Since 1924 Australian voters have been obliged by law to choose between politicians, and thus between parties, at the ballot box, but this act has never been a reliable indication of party loyalty.

The book is also concerned with the relationship between voters and politicians, rather than voters and governments. The trust that’s examined here isn’t about a particular government and its policies; it’s about those people from whom all and any governments are formed –the elected representatives. This doesn’t mean that governments are ignored – far from it, especially as the non-delivery of election promises is such a crucial element of political distrust. But governments, like parties, will not be the focus.¹⁷

The book also moves beyond the relationship between politicians and voters as expressed at elections, bearing Urbinati’s insights in mind and responding to the question posed by the political philosopher John Keane: ‘Are people entitled to representation between and outside of elections, and if so, by which representatives?’¹⁸ In this respect, voters’ interactions with their local representatives – letter-writing and opinion polling, for example – will all be considered, as will more abstract issues such as claims for a mandate and the so-called permanent election campaign.

The book tries to broaden the sources that are usually employed to gauge voters’ opinions. Specifically it goes beyond a reliance on letters to the editor, a source that has well-recognised limitations. Its representativeness is questioned for a range of reasons, including the motivations and perceptions of the writer and the commercial imperatives of the editor. The implications for democracy of editorial judgment in selecting the letters for publication raise the broader issue of the intervention of the press in the relationship between politicians and voters, an issue that will be discussed repeatedly in the book.¹⁹

The book resists the well-worn path of tracking opinion polls. The political scientist Judith Brett’s study of ‘ordinary’ people’s politics in Australia pinpointed the limitations of this popular quantitative approach, arguing that polling techniques ‘turn voices into numbers’.²⁰ Where it can, this study follows Brett’s example and tries to hear the actual voices of those forming and responding to political trust. This isn’t possible for most of the scope of the book, so instead I respond to the academic R.W. Connell, who also outlined the limitations of opinion polls:

What can the readers learn from [the public opinion poll]? No extension of their experience is possible; they can learn nothing but the distribution of assent to simplified and utterly familiar propositions. They can learn more about their society from the ‘human interest’ bit-pieces that the rest of the newspaper is stuffed with: these at least might stretch a reader’s imagination, engage his sympathy, confront him with something new. Or by reading a good novel.²¹

As noted earlier, claims of a contemporary decline in political trust are frequently made without the support of historical evidence, and this book seeks to remedy that failure with studies from Australian history. Australia is a mass representative democracy with features that reflect two seminal models: the Westminster system of parliamentary democracy and the US model, where the federal nature of the government is acknowledged by an elected house of review. ‘Mass’ refers to the fact that the mass gets to vote – not just a particular group. Australia’s hybrid ‘Washminster’ system makes it ideally suited for studies whose findings can be extrapolated to all mass representative democracies.

The book traces political trust in Australia from the beginnings of representative democracy in the 1850s to the present day, using a range of sources, including newspaper articles, political memoirs and diaries, correspondence, government documents, political ephemera, poems, cartoons, novels and, where possible, interviews. I have tried to select sources from across the political spectrum, but the reader is likely to notice that the balance leans towards the conservative side of politics. This imbalance shows the degree to which anxieties about the behaviour of politicians have emerged from the defence of class interests, and, specifically, from inchoate fears of the consequences of extending democracy. Democratic innovations including extension of the franchise and the abolition of plural voting – which allowed those wealthy men who owned properties in different districts to have a vote in each of those districts – and the payment of Members of Parliament were central to the labour movement’s drive to break down class privilege and ensure a fairer distribution of wealth and opportunity. Because these innovations meant that landowners and established business interests were no longer guaranteed political power, criticism of the measures was most vociferous in the conservative press. Sections of the mainstream Australian press, which has been – and remains – broadly supportive of the conservative view, also provided a regular forum for resistance to these changes.

The book takes a chronological approach as it examines the developments that have affected trust relations between politicians and voters. Beginning with the impact of the introduction of payment of Members of Parliament, and of increasingly organised parties, on nostalgia for the attributes of the Independent (honesty, integrity, courage, persistence and, above all, sincerity) and resentment of the ‘professional politician’, it also shows how compulsory voting, expanding government bureaucracy, and advances in education and technology have all led voters to question the value of their representatives.

The book also makes use of two in-depth studies of periods when political trust was particularly fraught: 1929 to 1933 (the Great Depression) and 1968 to 1978 (a time of substantial social and political unrest). In the Depression, some citizens were driven by fear, mistrust and contempt for their elected representatives to organise into paramilitary groups that for a short time threatened to shake the foundations of representative democracy in Australia. Again, in the late 1960s, citizens took to the streets to demand civil rights and women’s rights, and to protest the Vietnam War and the secrecy of their governments (among other things). From these activities rose a range of institutions, including the Office of the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, that were designed to improve the relationship between the government and a new, better-educated and more demanding citizen.

After analysing the media’s role in political trust, the book ends with an appraisal of the situation in Australia at the beginning of the second decade of the 21st century. It looks first at the role of the local Member of Parliament in her constituency in comparison to the good local Member of the 1930s, then examines where we stand with political trust today.

The book makes no claim to be comprehensive: the limitations of space make it impossible to deal with every activity that fuels mistrust. Political corruption is one example: the findings of Queensland’s Fitzgerald Inquiry in 1989, the jailing of senior politicians such as the former premier of Western Australia, Brian Burke, in 1994 and the revelations of the 2013 Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) inquiry involving Eddie Obeid and Ian McDonald have all made it harder for voters to trust politicians. Buying the transfer of a politician’s allegiance is nothing new (Whitlam’s purchase of Vince Gair with an ambassadorship to free up a Senate seat might be the first example), but the shoddy dealings between the Howard Government and Mal Colston in 1996, and now the Gillard Government and Peter Slipper, lower the standing of all politicians. The rise of political lobbying, the recruitment of political candidates from a small pool of insiders, and the growth of post-political careers, in which retired politicians use influence gained in office to build lucrative second careers – all these activities undermine political trust and merit further exploration.²²

This book tackles three important questions. First, it asks what, if anything, has changed since the beginnings of representative democracy in Australia. The assumption that political trust today is at an all-time low deserves to be challenged because it feeds cynicism and apathy, and threatens the engagement of voters in politics. This is the first history to explore the relationship between politicians and voters in Australia from the beginnings of responsible government. Taking the long view allows us to examine the issue in specific contexts and to begin to identify themes, influences, change and continuity in order to make a more informed and less hyperbolic assessment of the situation in which we find ourselves today. Second, the book asks, if there have been changes in political trust over 160 years, do these changes really matter? Again, taking the long view allows us to build a more nuanced picture of political trust than is usually proposed, seeing how it might be fluid rather