Malcolm Turnbull's big test in an age of coup culture and disenchantment

Extract from The Guardian

Katharine Murphy

As the drumbeat of discontent grows louder, politics is increasingly becoming a complicated and messy affair – just ask Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott

It did not take Tony Abbott long to show he possessed none of Julia Gillard’s supple backroom arts. Photograph: Lukas Coch/AAP

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Friday 11 December 2015 19.42 AEDT

The political scientist Gerry Stoker tells us democracy is designed to disappoint, and he’s absolutely right. Politics is a deeply flawed business. We want our politics simple, clean and conflict-free, when inherently it is none of those things. Democratic politics isn’t a panacea, it is simply a mechanism to synthesise societal conflict without resort to violence.

Democracy is about “the tough process of squeezing collective decisions out of multiple and competing interests and opinions”, Stoker writes in Why Politics Matters: Making Democracy Work. “Politics is designed to disappoint – that’s the way that the process of compromise and reconciliation works. Its outcomes are often messy, ambiguous and never final.”

Stoker also notes one of the great paradoxes of our age: “Democracy is more dominant as a form of governance than ever before, but within both established and newer democracies there appears to be a considerable disenchantment with politics.”

In all western democracies, this is the age of disruption and of disenchantment. In our consumerist and on-demand societies, we think we can trade up to a better model of politics. Disenchantment is powerful enough to have swept Jeremy Corbyn to the leadership of the British Labour party, despite the surfeit of punditry suggesting a leftist of such unfashionable persistence is entirely unelectable as British prime minister. Corbyn, in parliament since the 1980s, is the insider’s outsider. The consistency of his dissent is, apparently, a beacon for supporters tired of endless compromise and repositioning and tough love for the greater good.

Disenchantment is also the drumbeat of the presidential race in the United States. Americans are flirting with political “outsiders” – the most voluble being billionaire Donald Trump, who is busily creating a universe where things don’t have to make sense as long as they generate a headline. Elaine Kamarck, writing for the Brookings Institution, considers the current phenomenon of non-politicians:

There is a lot of speculation as to why non-politicians are so popular this time around. Most of it centres on voters’ distrust and disappointment in traditional politicians and on polarisation among the two political parties. The political system is not working very well at all. You have to go all the way back to 2009 in the Real Clear Politics averages of polls to find a point where the same number of Americans thought the country was going in the right direction as thought the country was going in the wrong direction – a time when America was still in the honeymoon phase with their new president, a political newcomer himself. Since then many more Americans have thought the country was on the wrong track.

Kamarck counsels against defaulting to the easy conclusion:

The logic that seems to be pushing forward the Trumps … of the world is the belief that politics and politicians are the problem. But what if the problem with our politics is just the opposite? Not enough politicians who are good at politics?

She contends that politics once worked to sift out its own show ponies. The backroom process of securing major-party nomination for the presidency – a system that prevailed until the 1980s – might have lacked showbiz, but it worked to test core skills:

Would-be presidents had to wheel and deal their way to the nomination of their party. Those who won had generally shown some ability to put together coalitions and to win the respect of their peers. As the process changed and primaries replaced those awful smoke-filled rooms, a critical element of the nomination process got lost.

This is an interesting thought to inject into the Australian political scene. Julia Gillard’s failure to secure a working majority in either chamber at the 2010 election could have delivered paralysis: a do-nothing parliament. In fact, it delivered the opposite. During that period, the parliament passed more than 400 bills, some of them big reforms, including a carbon pricing scheme, the mining tax, plain packaging laws for cigarettes, parental leave and a Murray–Darling Basin plan.

Gillard as prime minister struggled to project competence in public. She lacked the default arrogant entitlement of the “great men of history”. Her private self got lost in the expanse of bitterly contested public space. She also failed to soothe or reassure, her mere presence being an affront to harmony for critics who crouched contentedly in the comfort of her flaws and missteps, the better to justify their more bizarre misogynistic impulses.

But while the writhing and the discontent thundered outside, and the reverse treachery seethed inside, Gillard proceeded, grittily in the circumstances, with governing and legacy-building. She was a flawed prime minister in many respects, an enigmatic character who failed to inspire confidence, but she proved a master of the head down, bum up, getting it done approach. Ezra Klein recently reflected in Vox on this public–private phenomenon:

The inside game – courting donors, winning endorsements, influencing the primary calendar, securing key committee assignments, luring top staffers, working with interest groups – makes up the bulk of politics. Mastery of the inside game is hard to assess and so is frequently undervalued, but it’s also determinative – it’s why wooden campaigners like Mitt Romney and Al Gore win primaries, and why no current leader of either party’s congressional wing can deliver an exciting speech. The media often scratches its head over how such weak politicians prove so successful at politics, but the answer is they’re not weak politicians –they’re excellent politicians, but the part of politics they excel at is largely hidden.

When Tony Abbott succeeded in replacing the riven Labor government, he quickly demonstrated he possessed none of Gillard’s supple backroom arts. He achieved the demolition of some of Labor’s policies – carbon pricing, the mining tax – but his wheels spun on his own agenda. He arrived in government asserting entitlement and mandate, including, bizarrely, for things he had neglected to tell the public about before winning the 2013 election. Abbott hectored the non-government parties in the parliament, eschewing courtship. As a consequence, the government’s agenda failed to progress. Delivering neither a coherent agenda nor certainty in the polls, he was torn down by his own side.

While the United States flirts with out­siders as the antidote to its malaise, Australian politics is imposing a short shelf life on leaders. We’ve developed a vicious coup culture. Kevin Rudd and Abbott were deposed during their first terms. Gillard was denied the chance to campaign for a second. It looks corrosive and highly unstable, and perhaps it is. Perhaps in two decades, we’ll say with certainty that Australian politics veered into zero-sum chaos in mid 2010 and never recovered. It is entirely possible. But I’m not prepared to call that yet.

Every event of the past five years is connected to every other event. There’s nothing random about the sequence. Treachery is nothing new in politics, nor is turbulence a new condition. There were five prime ministers between 1967 and 1972. Gough Whitlam could probably tell Abbott and Malcolm Turnbull what winner-takes-all hyper partisanship and a hostile press look like, having experienced both in his tumultuous period in office.

A feeling of semi-permanent chaos and crisis has visited us before, and politics being a cyclical business, the national parliament has stabilised to deliver the voters more productive times. Malcolm Fraser stabilised after Whitlam by talking big but sitting tight, and Bob Hawke stabilised after the vacancy of the Malcolm Fraser years by jolting Australia into modernity.

There is one constant in politics: success breeds success. The question is: what will Turnbull do? Can he find his own circuit breaker, and more importantly, will we let him?

• This is an edited extract from Katharine Murphy’s essay The Politics We Deserve, published in the current summer edition of Meanjin