http://www.abc.net.au/news/stories/2010/09/02/3001013.htm?site=thedrum


A refreshingly new political paradigm

By Fran Kelly

Updated Thu Sep 2, 2010 5:44pm AEST
Parliament House, Canberra.

It's refreshing to have our political leaders busy negotiating on issues like parliamentary reform. (ABC Canberra)

I know it's not popular to say so in some company - but I am a fan of the new paradigm!

As Labor takes a slight, but still inconclusive lead in this long laborious process of gathering the numbers in the Parliament to form government, there are some encouraging signs in terms of the quality of the MPs on the crossbenches and in the crosshairs.

Take the new Tasmanian independent Andrew Wilkie for instance. As he declared himself as a vote for the ALP in the Parliament today he also revealed himself as an increasingly rare commodity - a politician less interested in pork-barreling than in the national interest.

Not entirely disinterested of course - he took with a rush, Julia Gillard's offer of $340 million for an upgrade of the Royal Hobart Hospital in his electorate of Denison. But in doing so he preferred her plan to pay this from an expedited, existing $1.8 billion hospital fund open to all comers, not just Tasmanians, and so rejected Tony Abbott's very generous offer of $1 billion for a brand new Royal Hobart Hospital.

He was tempted he said, by Tony Abbott's offer, but in the end decided Labor's more modest pledge reflected a government conscious of fair and ethical process.

Andrew Wilkie's standard for deciding who to support was always based on who he thought could form a stable, competent and ethical government.

Having said that, his support is limited to not blocking supply and not supporting reckless no-confidence motions against the Government. There is no pledge on any policy position, which makes him a tricky but not impossible element for any government to manage.

And then there's the member for New England, Tony Windsor. His interview on RN Breakfast this morning only made me love the paradigm even more.

In the midst of a crowded program of briefings with public servants and politicians of all shades, he takes the time to do an interview to bring all of us up to date with his thinking:

Q - Tony Windsor, Australians want to know when you will make a decision - how close are you?

A - ... we're part way through that process, I suggest that the earliest Friday and the latest Tuesday.

Q - In a statement last night, your colleague Rob Oakeshott said the Treasury costings raised "a number of issues" - what are those issues?

A - The issue of trust. Two teams want to form government, they both went to the polls with policies and costings, Treasury assessed both and Coalition costings came up with some significant questions as to their validity and some of their assumptions.

Straight, clear, as helpful as he can be in the midst of all this without a running commentary on which way he's leaning ... and without bagging anybody out just for good measure or to score a quick point on the way through.

So refreshing!

But my love for the notion of a "new deal" goes beyond my delight at having politicians answering questions directly for a change.

I also think it's healthy. It's better for all of us to break out from the hackneyed negative and eye-glazing "to and fro" we're subjected to by the major parties day in day out. Fights over costings ("my surplus is bigger than yours"), confected arguments about debt, fear-mongering over asylum seekers and revisiting old arguments over Workchoices.

It's refreshing to have our political leaders busy negotiating on issues like parliamentary reform: designing a more credible and relevant Question Time, a parliamentary budget office, an election debates commission, limits on political donations and a mechanism for including all members of parliament in policy development by actually considering and debating their private members bills.

This is not weakness, this is improvement. We are all better off for these changes if they indeed come to pass as a result of the negotiations with the independents and minor parties.

Yet Labor's signed deal with the Greens yesterday, locking in all these measures and more, admittedly, has been lambasted by most senior commentators.

But let's cut to the chase. Yes Glenn Milne is right when he says on this site this signed deal reveals "Labor can no longer govern without Green support". But the truth is it can't govern even with Greens support, because it's still three votes shy of what's needed and so it will have to sign even more deals with other cross benchers. And guess what? So will the Coalition. It too has only 73 votes and needs to be doing a deal with others. Probably a signed one, because as Tony Windsor said this morning "technically there's no need but in terms of stability it may be better to have a signed agreement".

Would such a document put the Liberals in coalition with the three country independents. Of course not.

And as for arguments that Julia Gillard's deal with Bob Brown permanently compromises Labor's brand, well there is another political brand more vulnerable in all of this trading off, and that's the National Party's? If Tony Abbott forms government with a signed deal with the three crossbenchers, putting country independents in the box seat and able to get all sorts of policy wins for rural and regional Australia in the next three years, voters might start to wonder why the Nats are value for money in a democratic sense. If a good, strong, country balance of power independent can achieve more outside of the Coalition than a National Party MP within can manage inside, why vote National?

The same goes, even more vehemently if Labor forms government with the help of the country MPs.

I'm not predicting here the end of the National Party by any means but you can bet there's some National Party MPs right now worrying about this very question and the manoeuvrings they'll have to do to keep themselves and their policy arguments up in lights.

So let's try and step outside the "old paradigm" for a moment and see where we're at.

Tony Windsor put it best this morning: "If we want this to work we're going to have to look through different shades of glass. It will be a different parliament. In my view it will be a better parliament, a lot of exciting things can happen. Looking through the prism of the two parties, one eating the other, well people have to adjust their sights and look at it through different eyes."

So if you adjust the sights what do you get?

For a start the unassailable fact that the Australian electorate did not overwhelmingly endorse the record or the policies of either of the major parties.

The failure of the first-term Labor Government to win outright is the biggest rebuff in this result. That's clear. The voters were not impressed with what they got over the past three years in terms of performance and capacity, nor with the policy vision or lack of it put forward for the next three.

But the Coalition didn't impress enough either. While roundly defeating Labor in New South Wales and Queensland the Coalition suffered a swing against it on primary votes in Tasmania, South Australia and Victoria.

It's a well-worn cliche by now, but this vote was a pox on both your houses.

Which is why the other unavoidable fact is relevant here too. The Greens scored an historically high vote in both houses, unmatched for a third party vote ever. This doesn't appear to be a mistake by the electorate but a determined move. In almost every state the swing to the Greens in primary votes was higher than the swing to the Coalition.

So - the major parties don't deserve to get it all their own way because neither side was offering what the voters wanted. And the Greens deserve to get some hand in policy development by dint of their vote and the fact that they'll almost certainly have the balance of power in the Senate until 2017. That fact alone means a new way of doings things will be required.

The same goes for the four independents for the next three years.

So the negotiations going on between them all are neither a sign of weakness, nor of a broken system, nor a dangerous pork-barrelling precedent. They are a reflection of the failures of the major parties, and more importantly, they are an opportunity.

Rob Oakshott's dreams of reaching across the party divide and forming some kind of Grand coalition with a Malcolm Turnbull in a Gillard government or Kevin Rudd as foreign minister in an Abbott one were, without doubt, a bit too dreamy. Though Andrew Bolt's description of the idea as "the kind of pixie dust that dazzles Greens and women" was just offensive.

But what about a step back from that and negotiations that mean we end up with the best of the policies on offer from both sides. Maybe that's exactly what the voters were hoping for.

A vote for an outright Abbott government, after all, meant an end to a laptop computer for every high school student, no National Broadband Network, no mining super profits tax to spend on services, no GP Super Clinics. And no hope, ever, of a price on carbon.

A vote for a Gillard government meant no very generous, 26-week, taxpayer-funded paid parental leave scheme, no guaranteed offshore processing of asylum seekers, an end to the Government-run school stimulus building program, an imperfect mining super profits tax, and a commitment to a price on carbon eventually.

So why not try and get a bit of both?

All crossbench players for instance, are committed to high-speed broadband and want more than the Coalition is offering though not necessarily Labor's $43 billion NBN.

Some will insist on a Coalition government maintaining Labor's computer in schools program and its spending on programs for better teachers and more skills development.

On paid parental leave there is a better compromise to strike between Tony Abbott's overly generous, inequitable, taxpayer-funded scheme and Labor's bare bones plan which is too short and not generous enough. And if a Coalition government is forced to compromise here there would be plenty within its ranks who would thank the independents for forcing their hand.

Just as many within Labor think the Greens climate change committee proposal is a better option than Julia Gillard's citizens assembly, an idea many in the Government will be happy to see the back of.

See! Already, better policy outcomes are clear to see.

And if Julia Gillard does manage to get enough independents across the line to win Government the deal with the Greens has some popular policy ideas in it too.

Ideas which, rather than striking terror into the hearts of conservative country voters in the electorates of Windsor, Katter and Oakshott, might actually go down well. High Speed rail for instance. Or more money for dental care.

Why wouldn't voters in the bush like these ideas?

They might not be so keen on a commitment to a carbon price or the mining tax, but you never know.

Mix and match - that's the new paradigm. More minds from more sides of the political spectrum working together to come up with better policy, unlocked from the necessities of one side wedging the other, or of past discredited promises and hyperbole.

A more representative, inclusive parliament.

I Know! I know! Political Nirvana I hear you chant. It won't work. It won't last three months let alone three years.

The thing is maybe it will have to and to quote Tony Windsor one last time;

"There would be some difficulties ... but if everybody steps back and starts to talk about some of these questions it's amazing what can happen. The majority of people in our Parliament nearly all of the time agree with 85 per cent of the issues but we go to the 15 per cent to create the differences so people can have two sides to look at. But wouldn't it be great if we went to the 85 per cent we agree on and forget about the 15 per cent for a while and solve those problems?"

Yes Tony, I think it would!

Fran Kelly is a presenter on the ABC's Radio National Breakfast