Why are leaders in Australia so bad?
In Freedom, writer Sebastian Junger discusses the value of honesty within tribal society. He states that honesty was vital, firstly because it improved a group’s cohesiveness by developing mutual trust and secondly because the margin of survival was so thin and resources so scarce that the price of deceit often fatal. Junger points out the reason it was so easy for colonialists to deceive native inhabitants and take their land was they struggled to conceive of lying - so entrenched was honesty as a basic necessity for survival.
Today our margin of survival is much wider. The agricultural and medical revolutions mean that humans are far less vulnerable to disease and starvation than in any previous era. War has become so devastating between equal powers that it is made at great risk.
Conditions in which we are insulated from catastrophe naturally allow dishonesty to flourish. After all lying is a supreme natural advantage in politics: untethered to the truth is a far more agile position. This is supported by the reductionist soundbite and the short media cycle which shies away from accountability, meaning most the of the time you can lie and get away with it.
In the context of oppositional parliamentary politics this natural advantage means the incentive to match lie with lie is strong. Sooner or later the system evolves around the assumption that all politicians will lie - it becomes a structural trait of the system itself. This can only be undone with a catastrophe that forces populations or power brokers to address the root problem - that leaders are not accountable for their lies. While things continue to be rosy the problem continues.
Two concepts that continue to resonate from Donald Horne’s ironically titled The Lucky Country: First that Australia is indeed lucky on one hand in terms of the natural advantages we have in lifestyle, wealth and environment, yet unlucky on the other that our leaders are “second rate”. In fact, I will argue here that the first of Horne’s observations implies the second.
To put this another way: in Australia we have been spared the true consequences of bad leadership for so long that it has warped our political system which has grown to demand dishonesty and deceit as necessary ingredients for success.
A quick caveat - naturally the consequences of bad leadership are borne unevenly through society. Australians do not all share our wealth evenly and naturally those who are disadvantaged are far more exposed to national catastrophe than those who are comfortable. It’s a sad fact that much of society can stomach a portion having this exposure. There is a tipping point at play in which if enough people suffer enough or the wrong (powerful people) hurt from such a decision it will be politically disadvantageous.
Ok so - as long as survival margins remain wide a society like Australia can absorb minor calamities without feeling the pinch. Australia is especially (un)lucky here. Domestically we produce many times the amount of food that we consume, exporting around 70%. We have public healthcare and are a fully developed first world economy. With such margins the calamity must be at least as big enough to overcome these natural advantages.
We saw this for a moment last year with COVID when food began to disappear from supermarket shelves. This was due to our vulnerability to global supply chains that had grown far too long and a just-in-time logistics model employed by supermarket chains. The calamity though was COVID and when I wrote this piece on food security it was amazing to see how often our natural advantage was pointed out by politicians. It meant an awareness that their decision making was cushioned. As a thought exercise - imagine the political consequences to lie about there being enough food and being caught out.
Consider the last time pre-COVID there was a major global correction. It was dishonesty that operated en masse that lead to the global financial crisis. Poor leadership had allowed global business to spiral out of control, unchecked by lax government regulation. Here the dishonesty lay in the abnegation of responsibility of the US rating agencies that rubber stamped toxic CDOs as good investments. The contradiction between true situation and the dishonest system that supported it was allowed to bubble away until reality corrected it - the truth will always have the last word.
The ensuing calamity of mass unemployment in turn lead to a crisis of trust with a significant portion of American society in their leaders. They acted to destroy these power structures by voting in Trump. Of course, Trump did not represent them even less than the last guy - but trust broken triggered a destructive and furious impulse which was easily manipulated. Trump was therefore a continuation of the catastrophe.
The US continues to live in the wake of this disaster that will likely lead to its downfall as superpower. Biden won on a promise to return things to normal. That is effective governance that is promising to be honest and sober about the crises it is handling. Trust and honesty are at a premium because the price of living with such dishonesty is broadly (but not universally) apparent. In the history of the 20th and 21st century simple honesty is an historically modest goals for an American president.
Australia has had no such realignment. We skipped over the GFC thanks to Rudd’s quick acting stimulus package and a mining boom. The mining boom was a natural advantage that Horne touched on. We simply have so many minerals that the world wants and we will be rich(ish) with any political decision making better than third world embezzlement. Before the GFC freemarketeers in the US were ascendant. Then the calamity exposed the rising tide that lifted all boats as a myth. As a correction the GFC has lead to a far more sceptical perspective on the freemarket’s ability to create the optimum conditions for populations in countries that experienced it. Not so with Australia - our politicians on both sides still peddle the same pro-freemarket, pro-privatisation rhetoric that has become qualified or extinct elsewhere.
There has been little popular acknowledgement in Australia of Rudd’s quick response, his honest appraisal and effective leadership circumvented calamity. Rudd had many problems - he was an egomaniac and a micromanager. Yet it became clear to see exactly what an encumbrance honesty was within such a system when he tried to implement his carbon tax. A particular arm of the media, that has come to represent power far more than holding power to account crushed the carbon tax together with lobby and industry groups. The leadership and honesty of the situation was washed away in a flood of misinformation. And because our survival margin is so wide - we have not experienced the consequences of the dishonesty supported by the political system. Yet.
Today we are unable to confront the crises of climate change and COVID with anything approaching a realistic assessment of the calamity at hand. Instead we are seeking to cook the numbers the moment they are becoming politically disadvantageous - refocusing on deaths from the number of COVID cases, not looking at our carbon emissions including exports etc.
We have been so lucky for so long our political system has warped to such a degree that there are no longer consequences for dishonesty. As almost any Australian regardless of stripe will begrudgingly accept - you can’t trust the bastards.
Indeed our political system that has evolved to reward such behaviour. Yes, leaders like Scomo and Berejiklian may experience a dip in the polls thanks to the glaring reality that the lie is not fitting the numbers, but watch how quickly they recover. This is thanks to amnesia in the media and a political system that has not evolved toward accountability. We haven’t needed accountability because most of us will generally be ok regardless of the decisions made.
We certainly do have some honest leaders. Dan Andrews, despite his faults, was able confront the initial COVID outbreak. His honest assessment enabled him to get on top of the problem rather than redefine failure as success. Many Victorians ended up trusting him for this (although a shrill majority did not). Yet the counter-narrative in which Andrews is an authoritarian, anti-business zealot thrives.
Even though Andrews has risen as a beacon of competent leadership during COVID, the political advantage of being mostly honest and mostly capable seems quite slim compared to the political advantage of being mostly dishonest and mostly incapable - Morrison and Berejiklian. The gears that enable us to grapple with our situation have become stripped and we’re spinning wildly, living off the momentum of past efforts. Yet we are slowing down.
The point is that in Australia we are victims of our own inherent advantage. Most of us (although a minority certainly have not) have lived completely insulated from the consequences of our own political decision-making. Dishonesty and incompetence has been allowed to flourish because we are so lucky that we have been cushioned from the drop. This can’t continue forever. What we are witnessing in this moment is a reckoning in which the culmination of poor decision making, dishonesty and incompetence are overwhelming our natural advantages. In other words - we’ve been running up a hell of a debt and now the bill is due.