What is wrong with Australian democracy?

The Rt. Hon. Malcolm Fraser AC (Former Prime Minister of Australia ) and The Hon. Barry Jones AO ( former President of the Australian Labor Party) voice their opinion on what is wrong with Australian democracy.

The 3rd Ideas and Society lecture, held on 7th October, 2009.

Transcript

Mrs Sylvia Walton:

Ladies and gentlemen, and may I say particularly all those who come… who are involved in and work in all the areas connected with human rights and thus a greater understanding of our democracy and democratic… democratic process. It’s a great pleasure to have the chance to welcome our two distinguished guests, Malcolm Fraser and Barry Jones, both of whom have as people from a very early age, had a burning desire to be part of the process of society and moving it in ways that according to their thoughts and their philosophy and their idealism was going to yield great promise. They also had the courage to go into public life and put those ideals and practices into actual effect. They were active and they stood well above the parapet and I think that counts for an enormous amount. Too many of us, myself being the main offender I suspect, avoid at all cost the clicking of cameras or putting our head too far, even near the top of the parapet.

I have here a wonderful run-down of each one of our speakers’ contribution to public life and I’m sure it comes as no surprise that we begin with the fact that Malcolm Fraser was Prime Minister of Australia and that Barry Jones was a long-term minister of science and technology, both in different sides of politics but nonetheless, leading to the same… same aim. One of the things that I think unites rather than divides, is the fact that when you have such a commitment and a belief, you are in fact working towards a goal which values the fact that each person, each individual, if we think about just this room as the cosmos, each one of us has an enormous desire to find meaning and… and a life that is both satisfying and active and giving.

And when one goes through, if we start first with Malcolm Fraser’s record as Prime Minister, SBS Television and the thing that I think stands very high at the moment, is the first Aboriginal Land Rights legislation, diplomacy both in and out of Parliament in terms of Africa, South Africa and the staunch defence of the principle of international law and of course acknowledging the fact that Australia is a society made up of most parts of the world.

Barry Jones, with his marvellous and inspiring work in terms of science, technology, education and many other areas, has been both a minister in government, as well as president of his party. He’s been a key participant in the struggle against capital punishment and advocated amongst a number of other things, that we look towards the future in both a grounded and practical way. And I think it’s a very, very good thing that he’s the only person ever to be elected to all four of Australia’s learned academies.

We are in the presence of people, who not only should command our respect but who do and whose lives have led them to a conclusion that humanity as such is worthy of our work. I now handover to Robert Mann and to our guests. Thank you.

Robert Manne:

Okay, I’m politics department of this university and I’ve been here for longer than I care to remember and I’m now involved in a thing called Ideas in Society Program and which will… whose purpose is to bring the university together in a… actually in a place called the Agora, fittingly to discuss things of moment. Today’s conversation with Malcolm and Barry is… comes out of a thought I’ve been having more and more over the last few years, a concern… and a… and a… anxiety actually as to whether the institutions of democracy in Australia and elsewhere are adequate to the kinds of tasks that we now face. In… as people here will know by now, I’m particularly concerned with questions of climate change and one of the issues that occurs to me is whether democratic institutions, as well as international relations are going to be poss… are going to be able to cope with this. But we also have in… in the world problems of terrorism and how we respond to it, Malcolm’s been in very involved in questions of international law. We have questions of extraordinary global inequality and food security, we have at home things like the collapse apparent of our river system in the southeast of the country or problems shameful for Australia as the question of indigenous life in the more remote areas and so on.

So today’s discussion which I’m going to dominate by asking questions which neither Malcolm nor Barry yet know, is… is really probing the democracy, probing whether the Australian democracy is going to be adequate to the task and we’ll go round. There’ll be… it is meant to be a conversation and it’s… it’s going to include you, so there’ll be a time before we get to the end where you’re able to ask us questions. And I have to say, the reason I’ve invited Malcolm Fraser and Barry Jones is that I regard them, and this is a matter of, I promise, complete sincerity, as the most formidable and impressive public figures in post-war Australia and I think we are very greatly honoured, I’m very greatly honoured that they have so readily agreed to come and talk, and I thank you all for coming to listen.

So, can I now start… I don’t need… there’s no order as to who, the questions are to both of you and… and I won’t… this is the only one that I’m going to ask you to look back a bit and that, and the question is, which political practices and institutions in Australia do you think have changed the most, since the time you both entered the political fray? That’s a hard question in a way to begin with but it’s… it’s the only backward looking one that I intend to ask. I would like you to think about what… the difference between our democracy and the democracy you first encountered. Malcolm, do you want to start?

Malcolm Fraser:

Okay, yes I can start, very probably the Liberal Party. If you looked at the party Menzies founded, it was meant to be forward looking, progressive, encouraging new ideas, willing to make experiments but it was also formed in a very specific way. It’s the political arm of the party, members of parliament in Canberra would have been totally divorced from fundraising, and I never knew in my electorate or nationally, how much money anyone gave, I didn’t really know if people had given anything and that barrier has been totally broken down. Members of parliament are given quotas of money to raise and if you’ve given $50,000 to somebody’s campaign fund, he comes into your office and asks you to support a piece of legislation, it’s going to take a very strong person to say no. The… you have situations in which you get access to ministers in a government, that people spend enough money to go… and it might be thousands, might be $10,000, then alright you might sit next to the Treasurer for $10,000. Now, it’s a public beauty to be available to the public, you’re paid to be the Treasurer by the citizens of Australia and I don’t believe those officers should be exploited to raise additional money and I also believe that when that happens, the power of money grows ever greater and that might divert governments from what they ought to do.

I think coupled with all of this, there’s a loss of independence, the party machines are much stronger and maybe Barry will correct me if I’m wrong, I thought it was always strong but the Liberal Party almost encouraged dissent, it didn’t mind if somebody on a conscience vote, voted against the government. We had independent senators, especially I think from Victoria and especially from Tasmania, like Reggie [unclear – Rafe ?], Alan [unclear – Mithon ?]. You couldn’t ram a 600-page industrial relations bill through the senate in two or three days, they’d say we need a senate enquiry and we need to ask a few questions which is a proper role and which ought to happen. Well, in the last 15 years, that role of the senate has been almost entirely undone. The sense of independence of a member of parliament has quite deliberately I think, been diminished by the power of the party machines, and that means the machine is more important, the individual is less important. So, there’s an amalgam of things there embracing political parties at the core, I said the Liberal Party in particular because we used to be quite different from Labor in these respects. I’m not quite sure we’ve become like Labor but we’ve gone down a wrong direction, which I regret.

Robert Manne:

Barry, how do you respond to that question?

Barry Jones:

I agree with about 90% of what Malcolm said, but I just put a slightly different spin on it, as we’d say. I think the most important single factor has been the rise and rise of managerialism. That really the managerial approach, the management of public affairs means that the ideology, the debate has really dropped to a large extent out of… out of politics. It may be perhaps too early to feel nostalgia for John Winston‑Howard (audience laughing) but I think sometimes that you might think of him as being… as being the last prime minister who really had a strong political ideology which he argued out. Whereas I think it’s fair to say that the Prime Minister, his approach is essentially a managerial one and he’s got a very competent managerial team but his interest is not pre-eminently political or ideological.

The main area of difference that I’d say that I had with Malcolm on the issue that I’m not at all sure that the party structure… that the party structure is getting more important and more dominant and I think this may simply mean that because the Labor Party now holds eight out of nine governments in Australia, rather shakily sometimes, but eight of nine governments and in means that in government, the dominant force is really the cabinet and the government and in particular the Prime Minister and the result is that the party structure, the party structure seems to me, not to be carrying too much… too much baggage at the moment. What you’ve got is a situation where the… the premier of the state or the Prime Minister says, well, we want particular outcome in an election and therefore, you know we’re going to rely on the party, on the party structure to massage things, but it seems to me that the party structure itself isn’t really initiating much in the way of ideas or debate. I’ve argued with a number of my colleagues about the last time that there was a debate at a national conference at the Labor Party that really mattered and there’s a difference of opinion. Some people say it’s as far back as 1969 (audience chuckling), Robert Ray thinks it’s 1984 but you really had a period of 25 years when what happened… when what happened in the party structure was decisive.

If you look back at that famous image which not many people in the audience will remember, there was a famous image of when Arthur Call and Goth Wickham were standing out at the lamppost while the federal executive determined inside what our policy was going to be on a particular issue. That’s all completely gone, nobody gives a continental what the national executive thinks about a particular issue. So, the party structure itself, since the privatisation of the Labor Party and that’s what faction to me is. It means that the factions are essentially not ideological at all, they’re executive placement agencies (audience laughing). They’re executive placement agencies and you make up… so the result is when you go and say, well look I think I’ll join up with your… it’s like joining a football club, it’s not that there’s an ideological position, they say I’m prepared to wear your guernsey, it’s not ideological at all.

Malcolm Fraser:

And is… I think I explained myself badly (audience chuckling). I didn’t say that ideas come out of the party machines, they don’t. But where the machines assert power and influence is over their attitude to somebody who shows some independence of mind in or out of the parliament. I mean, when you elect somebody, you think you’re electing somebody who will exercise his judgement or her judgement and that’s the whole foundation of a parliamentary democracy but you’re not really doing that, you’re electing somebody who will support the platform of the opposition or of the government and it’s in this arena in relation to pre-selections, the attitude that the party has and the hierarchy of the party haveto somebody who may be independent, say no the party’s wrong on this, I wanted something else. Now in the Liberal Party we usen’t to mind if people did that and in my time, people said I had control of the senate but I had at least six senators who had to be persuaded on any significant issue, that probably involved a senate enquiry and whatever. But now, you couldn’t find six senators who had that sort of independence of mind in the parties, they don’t vote against the party machine because the machine will make sure you don’t get pre-selection next time round. When I resigned from the Gorton government, if it was in today’s world, headquarters would have found some way of getting me out of parliament. I knew my own electorate, they were the only ones who could vote for me or against me and they trusted me so there was no challenge. And that’s where the machines exercise influence.

The Labor Party rejected a wonderful candidate in Sydney, human rights lawyer, experienced and all the rest. He got … he was beaten in the Labor Party pre-selection by a staffer, who owed allegiance to a front bench member in the Labor Party which was then an opposition. Now, if you’d had a good pre-selection process my friend the lawyer, QC, human rights lawyer would have been a… you know a beacon.

Robert Manne:

This is George Williams?

Malcolm Fraser:

It was. For either political party.

Robert Manne:

Yeah I mean that’s what… I mean Barry perhaps we should turn that on you a bit because you’ve been president of the Labor Party for a very long time in the ‘90s and again recently. I mean one of the things that does strike… I mean people I know too, who have tried to get pre-selection for Labor, that unless you are… have a certain kind of relationship to the factional bosses, no matter what your skills you may as well give it away. Is that… and brand stacking is obviously the other issue which seems to come into this.

Barry Jones:

I don’t think it makes a lot of difference whether you’re in government or whether you’re in opposition, the factions are more powerful when you’re… when you’re in opposition but when you’re in government… see I think Malcolm did in fact use the right term, he said when he referred to party hierarchy and that party hierarchy isn’t necessarily the… the factional heavies because in fact you’ve got a situation now, something that didn’t happen before where although the Liberal leaders had the capacity to pick their own cabinet, Labor prime ministers didn’t, they went through the process and the [unclear] elected them. Now, you’ve got a Prime Minister who says, well I’ve been given the mandate, not the party structure, I’ve been given the mandate to lead, I’ve been given the mandate to rule and I’m going to make the choices. Now, of course if he’s … if he’s prudent, he’ll say well I’m not going to absolutely court disaster by alienating all these people, I mean you can see the other Malcolm, Malcolm Turnbull has shown how it’s possible to court disaster (audience chuckling) and you know with very risky, very doubtful outcomes. But in fact if you said, where does the power generate? Where does the power lie? I think it could be argued that power really is dominated by… in Canberra by the gang of four and the gang of four are in a position to say look, do you want the show to hang together? Do you want to make sure we win the next election? And if you do, then you’d better go along more or less with what we’re doing.

One of the things that… I mean I do very fervently agree with Malcolm on this, Australia is unusual in having tighter party discipline in the chamber, in the parliament, [unclear]. Liberals sometimes used to cross the floor, they don’t very often now. Labor people never cross the floor and… and you see it’s curious, if you look at the House of Commons under Blair and also under Brown, there’ve been a number of issues when in fact in a vote in the House of Commons, the government has lost, now theoretically, that should never happen but in fact you had an issue where you had enough people who either abstained or said, no I don’t like this, I think it’s a crumby piece of legislation, I’m going to vote against it and then perhaps it can be amended at some future time. But we don’t have that flexibility and I think that’s deplor… that’s deplorable.

Robert Manne:

Well, can I put a general proposition to both of you, coming from what’s just been said, I mean one of the cases that could be made against our system, but I think Paul Kelly, the journalist, actually has it in favour of the system, is that we’ve drifted more and more towards a quasi-presidential system with prime ministerial power being not .. the diff… it’s always the difference seems to me, and that’s linking to your idea of party discipline, that the United States President has to cope with the Congress and the Congress is clearly you know almost never under the control, I won’t say never under the control of the President, even if his own party as now, dominates in both lower and upper house there. And do we sort of have the worst of both worlds in the sense of having both a drift towards incredible power within the executive or even the chief of the executive on the one hand but then no parliamentary kind of rein upon the power of… because party discipline is so powerful? Malcolm, do you …?

Malcolm Fraser:

The idea of a presidential system or Australia moving in that direction I think comes from the nature of electioneering, and television. If the prime minister is the main spokesman, what anyone else says is going to be… unless they say something stupid, will probably be ignored. So during an election you focus on the prime minister, but if this…

Robert Manne:

More so than in your time?

Malcolm Fraser:

Oh, probably because the big rallies no longer take place, they’re more… much more tightly organised events. I used to have large meetings and rallies and walk throughs which were, you know sometimes they worked and sometimes they didn’t and… but the… the… I don’t think that necessarily is the reality. I mean you can get prime ministers, and we’ve had them who believe that what they wanted, cabinet ought to support. My major arguments when I was government was with prime ministers of that kind. I believe that cabinet government ought to operate and that cabinet meant something and you know I got out of one ministry really on that sort of basis. But, if a cabinet is prepared just to go along with the prime minister, then you have in fact got a semi-dictatorial situation but that’s going to change because you can’t… I think you have to believe that the prime minister can find a dozen decent people who’ll form a cabinet and I think it was Curtin who said that, you know it might have been shifty, one of those men and 12 fools will make much better decisions than one wise man. So, you do need to kick ideas and policy decisions around and a prime minister who ignores the cabinet and doesn’t use the system properly is likely to fail quite soon and that can be a warning for people, you can point to people who have failed. So, it depends so much on personalities whether the system works as it’s meant to work or whether it does not.

There are some things in the American system, which I believe we should have, that doesn’t mean to say we’ll be going to a presidential system. I don’t believe a prime minister or the cabinet should have power to make war anymore, that should be a power vested in the parliament as it is in the United States, war powers authority with Congress. I don’t believe ASIO should have the capacity to censure a parliamentary committee report on Australia’s intelligence agencies, but ASIO does have that capacity, all you need is a compliant attorney general. Now, such a situation cannot exist in America, the Senate remains totally master of what it prints in its annual reports. The President is entitled to object, they’ll listen to the President’s objections but if they don’t agree with them, they’ll go on and publish what they want to publish. And in that respect the parliament is greatly strengthened in the United States. We could strengthen our own parliament by adopting those practices, but it doesn’t mean to say we’re moving to a presidential system, I don’t really believe we are.

Robert Manne:

Barry, do you ..?

Barry Jones:

Well, I… I think we are because I think… I mean my view would be to say you’ve got the executive wing and the executive wing totally dominates the parliament. I think I’m starting to lose my faith in… in John Howard and I don’t know whether you saw his argument the other day, that he said that one of the reasons he was against a bill of rights, was he said that the best defence of a bill of right, was a robust debate within the parliament and I think, well I can’t remember the last time there was a robust debate within the parliament.

Malcolm Fraser:

On another occasion he said he was against a bill of rights because it would stop the government doing some of the things that it wanted to do (all laughing).

Barry Jones:

So that you… you’ve got a situation now where… where power really resides in the executive wing, the legislative wing has diminished tremendously, debates are either gagged or circumscribed or limited and so on, and you know question time becomes really farcical and it’s very rare to get serious bits of information put across. So, it’s a poorly informed political process and increasingly power goes into the hands of the bureaucracy and really linking up with one of the points that Malcolm made earlier on, one of the deeply troubling things is the rise and rise of the power of the consultants and of the lobbyists and in particular, with the lobbyists the concern that you… you can see a number of ministers in some states who sit there and say, hm I’ve got the power of saying yes and no on something… this character comes in as a lobbyist but on the other hand, maybe in three years’ time the roles might the reverse and I’ll be a lobbyist myself, operating on a success fee and I’ll be earning three times as much as I am as a minister. Maybe I’d better be sympathetic of this joker, because it might help me get… now do you call that corruption? Well, not in a…

Malcolm Fraser:

Yes, yes (audience laughing and clapping).

Barry Jones:

… probably it… it probably doesn’t breach the Crimes Act and yet it’s…

Malcolm Fraser:

Oh, I’m not so sure.

Barry Jones:

… because if you’re really thinking about something maybe three years down the track.

Malcolm Fraser:

If you use your position as minister to organise a good consultancy with people who are clients of your government and present clients of yours because they relate to your ministry, if that doesn’t breach the Crimes Act, it damn well ought to.

Barry Jones:

It ought to, yeah.

Malcolm Fraser:

And we could all point to examples where things like that have happened.

Robert Manne:

I mean, one of the things that’s…

Barry Jones:

In … in older times it couldn’t have happened because I think up to the end of my time, if it was a major defence contractor for example, you’d call them in and say well you can hire anyone you like as a consultant but don’t think you’re going to write anymore business with the Australian government, you’re not. You might as well pack up and go home and then people would get the message. In Menzies time, if anyone tried to organise that sort of job for themselves, they would have been crucified from one end of the country to another. And so, where did… I mean I think political morality in these areas slipped, at the same time as corporate greed began to be so totally excessive, probably in the middle ‘80s and it ran on from there.

Robert Manne:

Can I… can I link these many different themes, but one that I wanted to link it to was something I’ve wondered about, which is, an actually goes to the opposite to the question of whether we’re getting over powerful executive government, whether if it was necessary a government in Australia could make a decision which might be very unpopular? I mean one of things that strikes me as amazing and both of you went through this, that Australia made the transition from the white Australia policy to a… both multi-culturalism and a very open migration policy, and Malcolm’s government was I think crucial to that. And on the face of it, one would have thought that a country which had the history that Australia had, that the transition to the end of white Australia would be almost impossible to do without you know, really great angst, but it happened I think with great servility and with great effectiveness. But I think now for example, you know and I don’t… I’ve no idea what you both think about this, that it might turn out that it’s as clear that if you want to get rid of lung cancer you have to do something about the tobacco industry, it now seems to me almost as clear that if you want to take climate change seriously, you do something about the coal industry. I’m not… it doesn’t matter what for the purpose of my discussion, but you might make life uncomfortable for the coal industry and for those who work in it. I mean are we in a situation, because of the power of money and lobbies and also we’ll be talking about the media a bit later, and the collapse of bipartisanship on some things, is it now sort of really possible for this, the Rudd government to take decisions in the area, let’s say the coal industry that would cause great problems for it? Malcolm what do you think? Do you think we’ve got to the stage where sort of bipartisan change of a fundamental sort is almost impossible?

Malcolm Fraser:

If … if you take a… a fundamental decision about the future and you’ve got the arguments on your side and if those arguments can be put clearly, I believe a government can sell those arguments. If I’d taken a poll before we said yes, Indo‑Chinese refugees will come into Australia, I have no doubt, 80% to 90% of people would have voted against it. If I’d said it about Normanby, being the biggest Greek city outside of Greece, if you’d asked Melbourne before it happened in 1947, did they want this to happen, 80% or 90% would vote no. If you took a vote today, what’s the contribution the Greeks have made to Melbourne, I think 90% would say it was a wonderful contribution and applaud it, so some decisions governments have to make, they’ve got to then argue that they were right and they’ve got to win that argument or do their best to try and I… I can see a government saying to the coal industry, well, you’re creating a lot of emissions. Now those emissions are going to have to be reduced on a steady program, we’re getting to a certain figure in 20, 25 years’ time. Now, that’s going to involve an awful lot of research but if they want to survive they’re going to have to do that research, otherwise they’re going to find they’ll have to be replaced with nuclear power, which is something we ought to embrace anyway because it offers one way of reducing the danger of a dangerous environmental future.

Robert Manne:

Well, do you think a strong government could still do this?

Malcolm Fraser:

I think a strong government could still do it, but I’d like to see that strong government have a… overall environmental policy, one which embraced water, didn’t just build empty pipes coming down from Shepparton (audience laughing), although there’s a business opportunity out there (audience laughing), perfumery and powder shops for men, when the day when Brumby has to say, showers are banned (audience laughing). But I’d… I’d sooner see that water going into the Kurongs, I think it’s a national disgrace that the Kurongs disappear. We have no water policy, the states aren’t going to do it by themselves, the commonwealth couldn’t require it.

Now, to persuade the Australian public that the environment really matters, I think you need to take serious decisions about emissions, but also serious decisions about water and what we do as a nation to survive and expand when that commodity is very scarce. I mean, politicians are just waiting and hoping it’ll rain a bit more over the catchments and then they won’t have a problem (audience laughing) but this city goes on growing, year by year and the demand is greater year by year, there’s no overall policy. Brumby’s got no overall policy, Rudd’s got no overall water policy and… and therefore I think there’s a degree of scepticism. Not enough people understand emissions trading, I don’t think I do (audience laughing). It’s a bit like insurance, you… we need to take out insurance on these matters.

Robert Manne:

Barry, how do you respond to that?

Barry Jones:

Well, I think there are two elements. One is you can do so much more if you’ve got bipartisan support. If the opposition are prepared to go along with you, for example…

Malcolm Fraser:

I didn’t have bipartisan support on Vietnamese…

Barry Jones:

Oh no, no, no I understand…

Malcolm Fraser:

I reversed the Whitlam decision.

Barry Jones:

No, I understand that and I think you were very… you were very courageous on that but I’m saying that back in 1983, for example when… when Hawke took on the new economic direction and so on, if he’d had… if he’d had strong opposition from the coalition at that stage, it would have been very difficult for him to persuade the party but in fact because he had a bipartisan support within the party, he was able to get things through. The tragedy with the emissions trading legislation is, in fact the legislation’s actually better than you… better than you might think. I’ve had the advantage of having a pretty close detailed briefing on it and what I find mystifying is why the campaign in favour of the legislation has been so feeble. In fact to call it feeble is actually to over-praise it (audience chuckling), it’s not even feeble and in fact if you compare what is being sought, the objectives compared to the objectives in Europe and the objectives in the United States, Australia really comes out of it… comes out of it pretty well. But it means that, like the unfortunate… the republican referendum of 1999, the tragedy I think with the ETS legislations is that it has no psychological carrying power and because it has no psychological carrying power, and even a well informed audience like this, I doubt if there are more than 5% of the people here who could explain clearly what they thought was… what they thought was really happening in the ETS and why it was important and how it was going to work.

The other factor which is one of… one of the setting problems about our democratic system has been that we’ve come to see in recent years the growing power and influence of vested interest as against the more diffuse power of community interest. And I remember the… when we had the 20/20 summit, the Australia 20/20 summit of immortal memory last year, it was interesting that in the… in the stream that was on climate change and the environment, which I was on, it was astonishing to see the ease with which the coal lobby captured it, because the people who were close to the coal industry, you know probably only made up 10% of the total who were there but they were able to exercise a kind of blocking role, because if… if somebody was raising issues like say, renewables, renewable power sources, they’d say well there’s no consensus on that. There’s no consensus so we can’t … so… and in fact the decision was made to say, oh well…

Robert Manne:

That happened in your stream?

Barry Jones:

Exactly, so if there’s no consensus, well we can’t go on. So, it means that the power of the coal lobby and of course understandably the power of related unions in the coal area are… and of course members who say, well my own region of Australia is going to disappear beyond… beyond recognition, makes it extremely difficult, unless the government really pitches its argument to the community at a much higher level and says, this is really… that Australia has the potential to play a leading role to help shape the international debate, rather than simply passively following it. And the disastrous situation that’s going on with the… with… I mean I do feel inclined to send get well cards to Malcolm Turnbull because I’m sympathetic with what he’s trying to do, I think (audience laughing).

Robert Manne:

You’ve worked it out?

Barry Jones:

But he’s in… he’s in an absolutely deplorable spiral now and it’s hard to see how he can really come out of it with… with distinction.

Robert Manne:

Yeah, and it’s also I think, hard to see that if he doesn’t come out of it with distinction, how the Rudd government will be able to do the kinds of things that it needs to, in my view.

Barry Jones:

Yeah.

Robert Manne:

Can I just say, as something that links to what you’ve both said, Malcolm you were saying about the parliament should be the place if there’s going to be war, declares it, which I agree with and Barry was talking about the way in which at 20/20 got hijacked. I went to the 20/20 conference when I was in the political stream and I only… I decided that the… which was an observed hope, that I might be able to achieve one thing. And the one thing I decided was exactly Malcolm’s idea, that I would recommend that the parliament should be the place where declarations of war must be made, and I worked with a couple of other people to try and get that up. And it was vetoed by Gerard Henderson and Paul Kelly and a group of 100, they said no we don’t think it’s a good idea, and it was such chaos, the 20/20 conference that two voices against it was sufficient to bring the whole idea down. So, it’s just a kind of joke.

Barry Jones:

It’s funny, I should say after… after the 20/20 summit, there was a… a dinner … a lunch of delegates from Melbourne University who were there and one of the speakers got up and said, I have no doubt that the stream that was in was the worst stream in the whole conference and there was a groan around the table, and said, no, no mine was worse, mine was worse (audience laughing).

Robert Manne:

If it’s convincing of anything, 20/20 it is that if you don’t have a proper organisation and a structure for discussion, it is total chaos. But anyhow that’s just… that was just… Malcolm, can I ask you a really serious question about something that we haven’t touched on much yet, which is your feeling about whether the media in a general way, particularly the… and the question of concentration of ownership media, in a particular way has a bad affect on the democracy in this country?

Malcolm Fraser:

Well I’m… I’m sure it has a bad affect. There were seven or eight paper proprietors in my time, what are there now? One and a half, or two and so, some papers don’t have any philosophy, I think Melbourne’s paper has fallen down in recent times, it’s…

Robert Manne:

Which one? There’s two of them.

Malcolm Fraser:

Well, the Age (audience chuckling) which ought to have better ideas and whatever, but I think it’s lost a lot more lustre in the last six to eight months. I know the previous editor was not popular amongst the Age staff, but in his time I thought the paper was better than it is now. The Australian is so totally predictable, I look at the headline and I look at who wrote the story and I can write the words in between (audience laughing). They also have used very many Wall Street Journal articles, which seem to me strongly influenced by neo-conservatism and that’s a strong thread in the Australian. I think that’s a very destructive thread in the United States and in Australia and you know, there’s not much opposition to this. But then you see the net, you see the Crikey, you see all sorts of other forms of sharing information and getting things around and through Foxtel you’ve got access to news services, there’s a very good news services in Aljazeera if you want to look at it, it’s on my website amongst other things (audience chuckling) or it’s on my computer.

Robert Manne:

And is that balancing the problem of the concentration of [unclear]?

Malcolm Fraser:

I think it balances the problem a bit, yes but not totally and the concentration of media ownership I think is one of the consequences of the whole series of really bad business… not business decisions, decisions by government. This was where Gough Whitlam and myself combined I think, you know post-political lives and trying to prevent it going further.

Robert Manne:

Barry, what’s… what’s your feeling about the… the present role of the media in our democracy?

Barry Jones:

Well, I’m struck by the number of my contemporaries who… who rely increasingly now on the web, who are not newspaper… not newspaper readers at all, or if they do read newspapers, it’s likely to be the Guardian or the… or the New York Times.

Robert Manne:

Online.

Barry Jones:

And … online? Absolutely or on their… on their BlackBerry’s and… and so from that point of view there is a… there is access to much broader information but I mean my… my primary concern has been that while, if I can use that dreaded term, elite, while elites have access to a great diversity of material and can use it in a sophisticated way, I suspect that the level of general understanding in the community is… is not… is not very profound and is often… often you know, whether deliberately or not, I’m not sure but there is a dumbing… a dumbing down. And I noticed when people engage in conversation with me about political processes, they really don’t quite understand you know what federalism means, or what… or how the states differ from the Commonwealth.

Nor are they aware… see when we argue at election times and we talk about… we talk about issues, there’s a kind of an assumption that there’s a shared knowledge out there and that if you put up 10 major propositions, you know they’ll all understand what it means, but in fact often when you find new names coming up, they don’t mean anything. I… I had to go to a university, a year or two ago to talk to a group of Year 2 students, because they were going off to see Keating the musical and they wanted to know who Keating was (audience laughing). You see, you’d assume, you’d say oh well of course we all know who Keating was. But if you’re perhaps… if you’re only 20, if you were 20 then and if you were only nine when you had the change of government in 1996, maybe Keating’s name doesn’t mean very much. And I… I just told… just told a very brief story, ‘cause I gave an example. I said, look, we’ve never been very good at recognising our former political figures, our former great figures and I said for example, I said you’d all know a name like somebody from Victoria who we think of as our Robin Hood, you know and who has been the subject of films with Mick Jagger and Heath Ledger and the subject of iconic paintings by Sidney Nolan, you’d all know… and of course I was trying to get them to all say, yes Ned Kelly, we all know Ned Kelly. Then I said, I’m sure you know who I mean and of the group of 50, two hands went up and I said … I said you know who I mean, they said… the first one said, Bob Hawke (audience laughing). And the second, this is more worry… the second said Captain Cooke (audience laughing). And I think… I think for university students, aged 20…

Malcolm Fraser:

I don’t think I would have got it from your description (audience laughing).

Robert Manne:

Well there is, one of my favourite books is Eric Hobsbawm’s History of the 20th Century and he says he was teaching at Yale or Harvard or somewhere, Princeton, you know one of those universities, teaching a group of undergraduates and they started to discuss the Second World War. Someone from the student group said, so that means there was a First World War? (Audience laughing) So, it’s a common complaint. But I mean there is… I mean I suppose you know something that Barry said, it is a genuine question, which is given you know the information revolution and the amount of information that’s available and also given the expansion of higher education, I’m not at all convinced that the level of political discussion is higher than it was in the 1950s. And I… and I’ve often tried with my students to get them to think about it and if I’m right, why this might be so, but maybe I could ask… you know whether it’s a wrong perception. I mean often people… you would think with the increase, and I know Malcolm you were very concerned with increasing education and the level of education, but why hasn’t it led to a… what might turn out to be critical for our democracy, a better discussion? Why does everyone complain about the seven second nightly grabs on the television as the way in which our politics goes?

Malcolm Fraser:

If … if you shut down AFL for a year there’d be time for people to talk about something else (audience laughing). When I… when I went to university in England, I reckoned my education from an Australian public school was 18 months to two years behind my counterparts from English schools and I’m not talking about Eaton and Harrow, just talking about people at the university, a lot of whom came from English government schools. I suspect that that’s still so, but the thing that encourages me when you… if you go to a school and speak to school kids in Year 11 or 12, I think they’re mostly bright, they’re mostly interested, I think their teacher’s seem committed. My grandchildren’s friends all seem very lively and highly intelligent and interested in things going on around them. The… you know I… I don’t…

Robert Manne:

But do you think… I’m speaking more about the way in which politics is conveyed on the nightly news and commercial television and so on. I mean, it seems to me …

Malcolm Fraser:

Well, after…

Robert Manne:

…that’s a real problem for our democracy.

Malcolm Fraser:

… it’s got to come after… it comes after road accidents, it comes after murders, it comes after national disasters, it comes after floods, it comes after landslides, I think our television stations have all got lousy, even SBS which when it was half an hour, wasn’t bad but nobody watches it for an hour. So, now I generally look at BBC or Sky News is not a bad service for getting the essential things in, in a short time without too much… But one of the reasons for this is that people do it on the cheap, car accidents, murders you know… you don’t… it’s very cheap for them… for the media to report these things and if they want to report more seriously about events, they might have to have a better quality of journalist or pay a bit more effort in trying to fill up the news half hour. The… but again, with Foxtel, which increasingly people have, you’ve got CNN, BBC which have a lot of very good programs. So, you know there… there are many more sources of information out there and I think you’d be surprised at the numbers of people that kept those sources.

Robert Manne:

What I’m worried about is why it doesn’t congeal into what seemed to me to be a kind of publicly shared discussion of politics, which is more advanced and more sophisticated.

Malcolm Fraser:

Does that happen anywhere?

Robert Manne:

No, no I’m not saying it’s an Australian problem I think it’s a worldwide problem.

Malcolm Fraser:

Worldwide problem. I don’t think it happens except in specialist areas and maybe never has but there’s something we haven’t mentioned, I… I think there’s an instinct amongst people which politicians or leaders anywhere, too often don’t recognise but they ignore it at their peril. I mean Menzies used to say the larger the Liberal Party gathering, the more sensible the decisions it would make, the smaller the gathering, the sillier decisions it would make. Well we don’t have all that many very large gatherings (audience chuckling), so that might mean why we’ve made… and what applies to the Liberal Party I think applies across the broadercommunity also. You get a large number of people together, and even though they don’t necessarily know a great deal about a subject, even though they might not be able to speak articulately about that subject, very often they have some sort of instinct which will guide them in one direction or another and quite often that instinct’s going to be right.

Robert Manne:

Barry, do you want to…?

Barry Jones:

I think… I think that you’re talking about the 1950s, there might have been that greater awareness in some of these… but remember too, this is perhaps true more of Malcolm, the age that Malcolm and I are, rather than… I talk to you as a young chap (audience chuckling) but the…

Robert Manne:

Extremely kind of you.

Barry Jones:

…is that… is that if you remember people who are old enough to remember the Depression, remember World War II, remember what appear to be great threats in the area, it… and if you think of the impact of the war on people, you know say a typical primary school teacher who goes off to the war, comes back as an officer, has been making decisions about life and death, he’s not… he really is taking a serious view about the kind of world that he wants to live in. And … and to say, look I risked my life for a particular cause and I want to make sure that it’s followed through.

Malcolm Fraser:

Yes, but Barry, that… that leads to another difference, in the late ‘40s, ‘50s, there was fear between members of the political parties. Now Liberals would fear the nationalisation programs of the Labor Party, they’d point to Chiff and the attempt to nationalise the banks and the great fuss that caused and they’d be worried about the number of Labor members traipsing off to Moscow and [unclear] pulls a letter out of his pocket from Mr Molotov, who says there’s no spying in Australia (audience chuckling). You know, there was something that people on the liberal or conservative side of politics were frightened of. On the other hand, on the labor side of politics, they would have been frightened of what the bosses might do to them and they’d have a real consciousness of the 1930s and the Depression, wasn’t really the bosses fault, it was the world’s fault but the result was that up to 25%, 30% of people in parts of Australia were unemployed. Now, the further we’ve got from the ‘50s, the more those divisions have broken down and I think since the Hawke feeding time, the debate between the parties is not an ideological one, it’s one about competence.

Barry Jones:

Exactly.

Malcolm Fraser:

And that’s an entirely different debate. And that is not going to stir your passions…

Barry Jones:

It’s managerial.

Malcolm Fraser:

Well I think Rudd’s more than a manager, I think he… some of the things he’s trying to do on nuclear arms and climate and whatever, I think that understates …

Barry Jones:

His approach, his methodology is managerial.

Malcolm Fraser:

Well any… anyway (audience laughing).

Robert Manne:

It’s a wonderful thing to have a former Liberal Prime Minister defending the Labor (audience laughing) Prime Minister, from the former president of the Labor Party (audience laughing).

Malcolm Fraser:

I doubt that anyone out there is really frightened if one party or the other gets into office.

Robert Manne:

I actually… there’s one… I mean because I teach some of our most politically interested students, I think there is one fear to be honest, which I don’t think the political realm is fully representing, which is climate change stuff. I think there’s a feeling that our…

Malcolm Fraser:

I’m not saying frightened of an issue.

Robert Manne:

You mean of each other?

Malcolm Fraser:

I mean frightened of each other.

Robert Manne:

Yeah, that’s… I agree.

Malcolm Fraser:

What Liberals are frightened of what Labor might do, we know they’ll try their best, they mightn’t do very well. What Labor people are frightened of the Liberal Party, well you might think they’ll do worse at the moment.

Robert Manne:

But Labor was there anyway.

Malcolm Fraser:

And that I think is a real sea change over the last 50 years, because there was that fear, it was a very real fear in the ‘50s, ‘60s and probably up to the ‘70s. I think Gough probably exacerbated that fear a bit, then the Hawke changes…

Robert Manne:

You played some role in that I think.

Malcolm Fraser:

I probably did (audience laughing). But then the Hawke feeding governments came in and they tore up their policies and acted quite differently.

Robert Manne:

Now, I want to be able to allow people from the audience to ask you questions, can I just ask one final thing? And then we’ll open it up and that… something I haven’t told you I’m going to ask but I still want to ask it, which is if you could introduce one major reform and you might need a referendum to do it, say you can get the referendum through into the Australian democratic system to make it a better system, what would that reform be? Barry, do you want to ..?

Barry Jones:

I … I think I’d like to follow up one of Bill [unclear - Kelding’s ?] suggestions a few years ago which was that there ought to be an agreement between the two major parties that each party put up a series of commitments at election time that they regarded as binding and people had to sign a pledge to do it, but when new issues came up… when new issues came up, that there were more free votes, more conscience votes and so on. So, that you can say that where an issue like Iraq for example, obviously it didn’t come up in the 2001 election, might have been implicit, but isn’t in the 2001 election, to say alright well, I’m not committed on that because I didn’t go to the electors in 2001 and say, yeah if elected I’m going to use such and such in the Middle East.

Malcolm Fraser:

I … I’d try and introduce a reform in a somewhat… designed to make a more independent parliament and I’d go to the pre-selection processes of both parties and remove the influence of head office in the pre-selection process, put it entirely back o on the electorates and make it a criminal offence to penalise somebody who exercised a conscience vote in the Senate (audience chuckling). That’s frivolous but I would look for a range of things that would encourage the independence and strength of mind of individual parliamentarians. And that I think, so many of the ills we’ve spoken of flow from a lack of that, today in both parties.

Robert Manne:

Now can I suggest questions. There is a microphone but I think we can take questions from the floor or the seats as long as you speak loudly and I’ll… if… I’ll try and redescribe, but can I ask for questions, not statements.

Audience member:

Thank you. I think…

Robert Manne:

Oh we’ve got roving mics as well.

Audience member:

I think we’ve all noticed that the devastating impact of Wall Street and the influence of industry on the bureaucracy. Today we’ve also heard about the influence of industry on politicians. It just seems to me that there may be the same pattern of industry… of involvement and influence occurring at all three levels of government, both state, federal and local levels. I’m wondering whether, is this why democracy is so supported worldwide? Is this influence advantaging and marketing the merits of democracy while under democracy the control is… is… is so pervasive? Isn’t it time for a perhaps a public interest lobby instead of taking the money from consumers and feeding it through to industry? Isn’t it time the state funded a public interest lobby to get people’s issues heard just as well as industry is heard? Or are we to live under this perception that democracy is so different?

Malcolm Fraser:

In the United States they do have public interest radio and I think television, which I suppose is designed to fill that purpose but another way of, in part meeting your concerns, I was opposed when Hawke broke in public funding for elections, but having seen what’s happened in the last 20 years, I would now bring in total public funding for the elections, you’d have to have lenient means for enabling new groups to try and emerge, that that could be done and I would make it a criminal offence for any individual or any corporation to provide any resources to any political party or aspiring politician. Take money out of the political process and then politicians owe nothing to this construction company or that defence company or whatever else and that would do more to clean up the political process than anything else (audience clapping).

Barry Jones:

Well, it’s just so that I… I mean just to repeat what I said earlier on, that where you have a vested interest, which argues very passionately to say well we’re concerned about you know the employment of coal miners or concerned about regions and so on, they’re prepared to go on you know 50 hours a week for months and months and months. Whereas normal citizens say, well yes look I’m prepared to sign a petition on this, might even send an email. You say, what’re you going to do next week or the week after or the week after that? They say, well I haven’t got the time, I can’t quite do it. So, in a sense you might think that the impact… take in education, you might think that the impact of … you might think that the parents of state school children would be a far bigger lobby than the lobby of people who go to private schools. Forget it, forget it, it’s the other way around because the… the people who’ve got the vested interest operate strategically and tactically, they know where to operate, they know where the pressure points are and they don’t give up. The other interest is too diffuse.

Audience member:

That’s why I put the proposition, why not have a public… publically funded, public interest lobby that continues and puts the other point of view before politicians so they can decide whether they accept the industry position, the organised Labor position or the public position.

Barry Jones:

But you’d have to… you’d have to ask why it is that the… the community generally don’t feel excited enough to get involved? That’s part of the problem. I mean they do get excited about some issues but not about education, not about public education.

Robert Manne:

Is the question?

Audience member:

I guess my question relates to sort of the managerialism and perhaps the media, but certainly one of the things I’ve noticed, and certainly I’m not alone here is the amount of… or how language is used or… to either get a point of view across or not express anything at all, I mean this managerial speak which Kevin Rudd is very, very good at, I mean you can use a whole lot of words from the dictionary but if you can just say in very simple terms then more people would understand what that would mean. But I guess my point is, is this… to me it seems very, very deliberate and of… extremely… a big problem because what it is, it’s preventing communication and communication is probably the key factor of democracy.

Barry Jones:

I think it’s absolutely right, it’s all… it’s part of the managerial revolution, which I think will really turn out to be the most important single change in which our… our structures operate since World War II. Don Watson’s new book, the name of which I’ve forgotten, is being launched this very day but he’s talking specifically about that. But it also means that the use of… of management speak or the use of new approaches means that there are a lot of things in government that are simply not open to scrutiny. Now, if you take for example, the concept of… of public, private…

Robert Manne:

Partnership?

Barry Jones:

Yes, public, private partnership, it means that where you might have a construction project which is open, if it appeared in the… in the budget, and it’s open and transparent, now you see if you’ve got a PPP and you ask about it, they say it’s commercial in confidence. You can’t… so it means that something that’s a very important element of public… what ought to be public policy, then becomes obscure because you say, oh you can’t interfere with anything of the public… that’s commercial in confidence. Universities, universities are increasing, and I say this with profound respect to Madam Chancellor, universities increasingly see themselves as being part of an industry, it’s the education industry and there’s no doubt that universities see themselves understandably, as trading corporations. So, the result is, when they look at what they ought to be doing, they say yes but what’s most likely to affect the bottom line? And that has a very profound impact on where we’re going.

Malcolm Fraser:

That’s because federal government are taking about eight billion a year out of government spending for universities in the last 15 years and that’s one of the reasons, maybe the main reason why our universities continue to fall on the world’s scale. We might have to wake one day (audience clapping) and find that other countries [unclear]. And the reliance on overseas students is a very tenuous reliance.

Robert Manne:

That’s why we’ve taken the Indian students questions so seriously.

Malcolm Fraser:

And also, why every country hospital in Australia is staffed, every might be an overstatement but not much, by doctors and nurses that have come out of the third world, who in a better world would be helping their own people (audience clapping). We’ve been too mean to train our own doctors in the last 20 years.

Audience member:

Robert … yeah sorry, Robert, I really liked your analogy between the coal industry and the tobacco industry of the late ‘80s I suppose, and I encourage you all to read the Cancer Council’s publication of the history of the Tobacco Control Act in the ‘80s which was really world leading legislation in the area. And it seems to me this is where this kind of fawning over an American style system of democracy really falls down because that wouldn’t… that legislation would have had no chance of passing if Kane hadn’t said, John Kane hadn’t said, well this is what we need to do and this is… this is going to be Labor Party policy and we will pass this. Because there are several members of the Labor Party in parliament who, you know as many members of parliament in the late ‘80s were, in the pocket of the tobacco industry, but because you’re a member … a member of this party you will accept this policy, because it’s in the interests of the public. And that could never have happened in a system like the United States and it still hasn’t happened in the United States and we’re in you know, 2009 and they have terrible tobacco control legislation. So, I think that’s… I mean that’s… I actually view it as it can be a potential strength of our democracy and has been in the past a real strength of our democracy.

Barry Jones:

Look, you can see the argument, you can see a… you can put that alternative argument about… about the discipline and you can see clearly that if you take an issue like you know the… the guns legislation that came in, in 1996, that was a situation where there was a very strong discipline imposed and maybe if there’d been a free vote, you know it wouldn’t have got up. But I think the number of issues, I think on balance… I think on balance having a more flexible approach would in fact make it easier to get superior legislation. I don’t think, for example that the… the legislation that went through after… after 9/11, I don’t think that would have gone through unscathed, if there’d been a freer vote on that, you’d have had… you’d have had some opportunity for improvement, because of people on both sides. It’s only when you’ve got both sides involved and say, we want to have a robust debate.

Audience member:

Sorry, [unclear] first?

Audience member:

No. I just wanted to ask… I just wanted to ask, I think at the moment we’re facing a really critical situation in which we’re about to see some really poor legislation goes through by the… by the coalition and the Labor government in terms of carbon emissions, mostly due to the coalition being scared to lose seats in an election, triggered by a [unclear] solution. Is this a problem of our constitution? Or is… it seems to me that the system itself is conspiring against real strong legislation being put through, is there an alternative approach? Or is there a better way that you… you perceive of this being structured?

Malcolm Fraser:

In the… in… we need to keep in our minds that while democracy has got innumerable deficiencies, anything else has more deficiencies and much more serious ones. Secondly, in any government and including obviously a democracy, government, parliament will be as good or as bad as the people who are in it at the time. I mean the wrong people can muck up the best institutions and the best constitution in the world, while good people can make a pretty poor and weak constitution work to the benefit of the people being governed. So, I… I … too often I think people look to the mechanism, the institutions and say, what’s wrong with them? When really you should be looking at what’s wrong with the people? What’s wrong with the process that puts them there? And to me an awful lot of it begins with that, the process that puts people into parliament, whether it’s here or in the United States, I think that aspect is more important than the fact that the Americans do have a presidential system and we have a… have a different system. So, you know there’s no answer for all time, to the kind of question you’re posing and what the opposition does, doesn’t just depend on Malcolm Turnbull, it also depends upon the actions or reactions of some people who want to support him and some other really conservative people who want to go in another direction. So, these things get back to people.

Audience member:

Mr Chairman, and the topic is, what is wrong with Australian democracy? Well I think there’s nothing wrong with Australian democracy because we don’t have any democracy in Australia to go wrong. Now, in China the people don’t have the right to vote, but in Australia we do not have the right not to vote, We are the only country in the world, that I know of that we are compelled by law to go to the polling booth on election day and vote for thieves to rob you and rob me and steal from the elderly and the children and the poor. Now, it doesn’t matter who you vote for, you will still finish up with either tweedle rob or a tweedle  robber in government, and that is a very … and this is of democracy and humanity.

Robert Manne:

Are you asking, is compulsory voting a good or a bad idea?

Audience member:

Well, compulsory voting, it’s… it’s not democracy, it’s the anti-thesis of democracy.

Robert Manne:

I know, but can… can we have an answer now on the question of compulsory voting?

Malcolm Fraser:

Well I think freedom should be compulsory (audience laughing), I’m in favour of compulsory voting (audience clapping).

Audience member:

[Unclear].

Robert Manne:

Barry, what’s your ..?

Barry Jones:

I … I agree, I mean I think it’s a critical part of the Australian system, which we evolved and which we’ve got the world’s best practice. I think one thing we can claim, is that we’re better at elections really that anyone and that the whole system, for example of preferential voting means you don’t get elected until you get 50% plus one. You say 50% of what? Well, 50% plus one of the electorate. And in fact it’s not compulsory voting, it’s compulsory turning up to vote. Once you…

Audience member:

[Unclear] how to vote…

Barry Jones:

No, no once you’re in the…

Audience member:

[Unclear] tell you how not to vote. They hand you a ballot paper, don’t talk rubbish.

Barry Jones:

No, no you’ve only got your own point of view.

Audience member:

Not to an Irishman, don’t be stupid.

Barry Jones:

No, but you’ve been talking to yourself for too long (audience laughing). But essentially, essentially it’s compulsory to turn up, once you have the ballot paper it’s up to you what you do with it.

Audience member:

They don’t tell you that in the polling booth, before the election they [unclear] in the paper, telling you how to fill in the squares…

Robert Manne:

[Unclear] don’t understand.

A:           … and make your vote, to make your vote right, they tell you all this, but they won’t tell you how not to vote, so don’t talk rubbish.

Robert Manne:

Next question here.

Audience member:

Strangely enough this actually does add onto this. I’ve been to question times in Victorian parliament and the federal parliament and I’ve spent a lot of time walking around the federal parliament, reflecting on do we actually have a democracy? What is this? Is this my house? When I walked in there. I’ve… I’ve thought about this for many, many years because I’ve not felt engaged by the system, I’ve sent letters to the federal parliament on the issues of Iraq and I’ve asked specific questions and what I’ve received is a very sort of universal generalist letter in return, so, I’ve not felt heard and it’s really made me question whether in fact I do live in a democracy. Now, I just received a few months ago a form from the Victorian electoral commission asking me whether I wanted to vote and I’ve had it sitting in my in-tray for quite some time, really contemplating, am I really wanting to give consent to a system where I don’t really feel heard and if I was to withdraw my consent, does that give me power in respect of saying, well I actually didn’t vote for you, I’m not part of this, therefore my consent’s withdrawn, I don’t have to comply with this. Or do I you know fill out the form and comply and maybe find other channels to really have my voice heard. So, these are my reflections, what would you like to say in response?

Malcolm Fraser:

I think it gets back to the sort of people that are in parliament and the sort of public servants that we have. I had a head of department on one occasion and the same sort of thing would have been replicated in older days in the Army department but the head of the Prime Minister’s department said to me, Prime Minister, you’re wasting an awful lot of the department’s time. I said I might be, but I’m not conscious of it, tell me how (audience chuckling). You’re insisting on all these letters being properly answered. Why shouldn’t they be properly answered? And maybe yours was one of them. Prime Minister, don’t you understand? They’re only from members of the public (audience laughing). Now, that’s what I call the Canberra attitude and you know I was in the Kimberley’s a month ago, six weeks ago, speaking with somebody in the Kimberley land council and I said, how much consultation do you get? He said what they call consultation we get a bit of it, but they make up their mind what they want to do and by the time they talk to us in consultation, it’s a question of them telling us this is what they’re going to do and it would be a good idea if we liked it (audience chuckling). And that again, is another… another example of a Canberra attitude. Now, people get… politicians get in there and they have to have fights with that bureaucracy also, sometimes a new minister finds it very hard to win against the bureaucracy. Other times they’ll be stronger and have more confidence and they will win and the [unclear] won’t mind, they’ll get away with whatever they can get away with but when they’re really told to do it properly, I think most of them take some pride in doing it properly.

Robert Manne:

Can I just say… it’s not really my place but I actually do think that there is an astonishing passivity in the citizenry in this country and other countries. I… I mean this is a minor thing, but I have to say I was completely outraged by the use of taxpayer’s money to advertise work choices which went on and on and cost tens of millions of dollars and I couldn’t work out why it was that no-one seriously suggested withdrawing a certain proportion of their taxes, the proportion that was being… it would have been a small amount but with the GST it would have been very easy for citizens to stage a kind of revolt and to say, if you take taxpayers money to advertise in order to win the next election, we won’t pay it. But anyhow that… I… you know, probably would’ve been arrested if I’d written the idea (audience chuckling) and it didn’t happen but I do think I agree with you, that is one of the deepest problems in our democracy is I think citizen passivity. Putting up with things that sort of everyone knows or very many people know to be wrong but they think that’s the way it happens and even small acts of, you know as it were, non-violent disobedience of that kind we no longer contemplate and so I’m very sympathetic to your question, you know in not answering letters about something as serious as Iraq is a case in point.

Audience member:

[Unclear] make some comment about how we can as individuals then strengthen the democratic process through our local member? For example, when we got our new local member I wrote a… who was imposed rather than come from the ground up, you write a letter, say about something you’re concerned about and they sent back a… the position of the party and I sent back an email saying, I’m asking you, as my local member to represent my position not just the party position. But are there any other ways we can access our local members more effectively as individual citizens?

Malcolm Fraser:

I … I think there are. I don’t think you have a right to say I want you to represent my view, but you do have a right to say, you’re elected to exercise your judgement, that does not mean… or it means much more than just doing the party position on an issue and this is just a, if you like a small example of how I say, you know party discipline, the party machine has taken initiative away from members of parliament, I think to such an extent that a lot of people who would be a bit independent of mind, won’t stand for pre-selection. In… .in Higgins the other day, which should have had 20 people standing for it, there was one good candidate and one not so good candidate and everyone else, who might have been good was bluffed by two people not to stand. Now, that… how can two people get such power, such dominance, maybe it’s weakness in the others but also to question the other good candidates who might of wanted to stand, if I can put it in a colloquial way, so they just… if that’s the sort of shit that goes on in parliament, I don’t want any part of it.

And in the days when… and again, the fear thing comes here. There was a real stimulus in the ‘50s for people on both sides of politics to join in politics because they wanted to fight for something. Now, the fear is no longer there, so somebody who might have been public spirited said, oh I might as well stay out of politics and make a lot of money instead and have a better life for my kids. So, in other… neither of the major parties have really, I think given much thought to how do we really attract top flight good people to stand for parliament? One I know stood for Wallum the other day but he hadn’t gone up through the party machine and while he performed very well on the pre-selection day and he came second, he didn’t get the ticket, somebody who was much more closely attuned to the party got the ticket and I… you know I thought that was going to happen and I thought it was a pity. But a lot more could be done and… and this goes through to conscience votes and the way people look upon individuals who might want to oppose a party line but they’re the people who at the end of the day, are going to contribute something really worthwhile and most… most of the… to me, most of the faults of the system begin with the pre-selection processes in the … in the major parties. So, how to get a better person, a better type of person, I mean if you don’t get the support you want out of your local member, well you’ve got something. Right, I and all my friends are going to vote against you at the next election and you’ve got to be prepared to take that sort of stand, make them fear for their seat (audience chuckling). That’s a wonderful medicine for a politician (audience chuckling).

Audience member:

I’m very concerned about our democracy because it would seem that politicians are only interested in spreading their time and money in swinging seats. I’ve heard it said by people in the country that really it’s no good them doing anything unless they can actually vote for their opposition party, so as it looks like they mightn’t be in. We see that this government is so happy with itself, with climate change and the power to do something about our water, our people to the North are completely disenfranchised, they’re being treated like the people of the Ukraine. We read, and I don’t read many papers that Goulburn Valley and now Swan Hill and many South Australian areas are being forced to shut down their growth of our food. This is a serious matter, our government is concerned with giving us 155 litres a day, when in Queensland which is a much hotter climate, people could exist on 128 litres a day. I find that they are…

Robert Manne:

Is … is there a question? We are running out of time.

A:           … loathed to make decisions. Why can’t someone in our parliament move to give us perhaps more food areas rather than sub-dividing non-irrigated areas around Melbourne? Perhaps… why can’t somebody say, use 30 less litres a day? And why are we going on bringing in nearly 2,000 people a week into Victoria where water is a problem, food will be a problem and the need to export more coal because we have no other way of earning money now, why can’t somebody just postpone immigration for the moment?

Robert Manne:

Well, I’m going to take that as a statement, I think we’ve got to end soon, maybe just one more question and then we’d better, there are many people that would like to… I can’t judge who… I think we’re meant to finish at 1:30 and we’ve already gone past that time, so I can only… I’m very sorry, I can only take one more question.

Audience member:

This is not a statement, it’s a question. I’m curious about what either of your views are the recent discrimination legislation that has let go, and who’s democracy are the looking after? Either the religious lobby group or the people who will be able to be discriminated against?

Malcolm Fraser:

Well, basically I’m against any discrimination and you know that… that applies across the board. There’s been a recent fuss in the Catholic church because they asked to be exempt from the Victorian Racial Discrimination Act and as a consequence of that they were unable to use the provisions of that act to… in a way they might have been able to use it, when a different issue arose over abortion, wasn’t it?

Barry Jones:

Yes, yes.

Malcolm Fraser:

So, you know there are some complex issues in relation to discrimination when it does affect religion, there have been some ways around it, but on that particular instance I think the Catholic church probably didn’t serve itself very well.

Robert Manne:

Unfortunately I do have to end it now; we’ve gone over time already. Can I thank you all very much for coming along, it’s seems to me that the kind of discussion from the floor shows how much desire there is for public forums of a political kind to talk about these things together and to me it’s very inspiriting that there’s been so much liveliness of all sorts this afternoon and I’d like you on my behalf to thank both Malcolm and Barry for… (audience clapping). So, thank you all for coming (audience clapping). Thank you.

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