Last December, Next25 had 12 wishes to improve how Australia makes its future.
Almost a year later and with a federal election around the corner, the country has made depressingly little progress.
Several of our wishes concerned capability, trust, and accountability, especially in government. In particular, we wished for an independent ACCC-style body focused on anticompetitive, misleading, and deceptive conduct and structures in Australia’s political and election systems. Three failures stand out that make such a body even more pertinent today:
First, our current political system is not representative. From 1983 to 1996, the ALP formed government with more than half the seats in the Federal House of Representatives. From 1996 to 1998, the Liberals did the same (without the need of the Nationals). However, since 1998, a party has only been able to govern in its own right once (the ALP 2007-2010). This means that minor parties and crossbenchers have been able to exert out-sized influence over national policy. The most recent example is the Nationals’ effective stranglehold on climate and energy policy, despite holding fewer than 10% of federal electorates. It’s time to update our election and parliamentary systems to put the representative back in Australia’s representative democracy.
Second, parliamentarians and political parties continue to behave badly, with serious allegations of corruption, branch-stacking, and rorting – and it’s still OK to lie in politics and mislead voters in election campaigns. At a state level, the NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption (ICAC) and Victorian Independent Broad-based Anti-corruption Commission (IBAC) continue their work, providing templates for a more comprehensive approach nationwide. However, former judges and prosecutors have labelled the Federal government’s proposed Commonwealth Integrity Commission “a sham designed to hide corruption”. When only 31 out of 100 Australians say politicians act in the public interest, it’s time for parliamentarians and political parties to do more to get their own house in order.
Third, it’s hard for people outside the triopolistic party system to get into parliament. Since 2010, no more than six seats in the Federal House of Representatives (fewer than 4%) have been won by anyone other than the ALP, Liberals, or Nationals. Between 1990 and 2010, it was even lower, with an average of about two. When four out of every five Australians think politicians have a big say in setting priorities for the nation, but only one in five think they are doing a good job, it’s time to blast open the closed shop of politics and let fresh blood in.
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