Sideshow: dumbing down democracy

By Lindsay Tanner

‘After spending much of my life dedicated to the serious craft of politics, I have to admit that I am distressed by what it is becoming. Under siege from commercial pressures and technological innovation, the media are retreating into an entertainment frame that has little tolerance for complex social and economic issues. In turn, politicians and parties are adapting their behaviour to suit the new rules of the game — to such an extent that the contest of ideas is being supplanted by the contest for laughs.’

‘The two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics are: (1) Look like you’re doing something; and (2) Don’t offend anyone who matters. These imperatives are a direct consequence of the interaction between media coverage and political activity — the aggregated outcome of countless individuals acting rationally in pursuit of their own interests. The sideshow syndrome, the overall result of these actions, is a direct threat to the nation’s well-being.’

When Lindsay Tanner resigned in 2010 as the ALP’s federal minister for finance and member for Melbourne, having had an 18-year career as an MP, he notably managed to retire with his reputation for integrity intact. In Sideshow, he lays bare the relentless decline of political reporting and political behaviour that occurred during his career. Part memoir, part analysis, and part critique, Sideshow is a unique book that tackles the rot which has set in at the heart of Australian public life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribe Publications
• Release date: May 2, 2011
• ISBN: 9781921753794

Lindsay Tanner

Lindsay Tanner was the minister for finance and deregulation in the Rudd–Gillard governments, and held the seat of Melbourne for the ALP from 1993 to 2010. Having retired from politics at the 2010 federal election, he is now a special adviser to Lazard Australia, and is a vice-chancellor’s fellow and adjunct professor at Victoria University. Mr Tanner is the author of several previous books, including Politics with Purpose (2012) and Sideshow (2011), also published by Scribe.

Book preview

Scribe Publications

SIDESHOW

Lindsay Tanner was the minister for finance and deregulation in the Rudd–Gillard governments, and held the seat of Melbourne for the ALP from 1993 to 2010. Having retired from politics at the 2010 federal election, he is now a special adviser to Lazard Australia, and a vice-chancellor’s fellow and adjunct professor at Victoria University. Mr Tanner is the author of several previous books, including Crowded Lives (2003) and Open Australia (1999).

For Nardia, Mary, and Anthony, who helped me navigate my way through the sideshow.

Scribe Publications Pty Ltd

18–20 Edward St, Brunswick, Victoria, Australia 3056

Email: [e-mail]

First published by Scribe 2011

Reprinted 2011 (twice)

This edition published 2012

Copyright © Lindsay Tanner 2011, 2012

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the prior written permission of the publishers of this book.

National Library of Australia

Cataloguing-in-Publication data

Tanner, Lindsay, 1956-

Sideshow: dumbing down democracy.

New ed.

Includes bibliographical references.

9781921753794 (e-book.)

1. Mass media–Political aspects–Australia. 2. Mass media–Moral and ethical aspects–Australia. 3. Communication in politics–Australia. 4. Journalism–Political aspects–Australia. 5. Press and politics–Australia. 6. Government and the press–Australia. 7. Australia–Politics and government.

324.73

www.scribepublications.com.au

Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1 Distinctions without Differences

2 The Games People Play

3 Whatever Happened to the Issues?

4 Shattered Media Slammed in Scandal

5 The Power of Choice

6 Celebrity Sludge

7 Politicians Fight Back

8 Politicians as Brands

9 Emotion Takes Charge

10 Why Now?

11 People Live in Their Hearts

12 Where to Now?

Afterword to this edition

Notes

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the following people for their assistance: Nardia Dazkiw, Michael Griffith, Tony Douglas, Alan Kohler, Nicholas Gruen, Mary Day, Marg Gott, Anthony Baker, Simon Kosmer, and Tim Naughtin. Thanks also to those who agreed to be interviewed for this book. And special thanks to my wife, Andrea, for her insightful assistance and tolerance. Final thanks to Henry Rosenbloom of Scribe, whose first attempt to publish my work in the 1970s didn’t quite happen. I hope that this book turns out to have been worth the wait.

Introduction

After spending much of my life dedicated to the serious craft of politics, I have to admit that I am distressed by what it is becoming. Genuine public input into political debate is shrinking, and the notion that politicians are engaged in legitimate democratic decision-making that is fundamental to the nation’s future is being bartered away. Under siege from commercial pressures and technological innovation, the media are retreating into an entertainment frame that has little tolerance for complex social and economic issues. In turn, politicians and parties are adapting their behaviour to suit the new rules of the game — to such an extent that the contest of ideas is being supplanted by the contest for laughs. While its outward forms remain in place, the quality of our democracy is being undermined from within. One of its critical components, a free and fearless media, is turning into a carnival sideshow.

Back in 1991, when I was preselected as Labor’s candidate for Melbourne, Australia was in deep recession, communism was collapsing in Europe, and many big issues were being fought out on the national stage. John Hewson was soon to launch Fightback!, the most comprehensive policy manifesto ever produced by an Opposition in Australia. How things have changed.

The media were central to national politics then, but they are much more dominant now. The creation of appearances is now far more important for leading politicians than is the generation of outcomes. This produces a good deal of deception, and an approach that I call ‘the politics of the moment’. Winning today’s micro-argument is all important, and tomorrow can look after itself. This breeds a collective mentality of cynicism and manipulation. Policy initiatives are measured by their media impact, not by their effect.

The symptoms of this shift are on full display. A dramatic growth in pork-barrelling, driven by back-benchers hungry for positive local media coverage. Growing misuse of parliament for juvenile stunts that are designed to win momentary television coverage. Political leaders gatecrashing light-entertainment shows on radio and television. Meaningless media constructs like the concept of a government’s first hundred days influencing serious decision-making. Scare campaigns about higher taxes, boat-people, and working conditions paralysing informed debate. Emotional display displacing genuine leadership as the key quality required of political leaders. Mounting distortion of facts to maximise the impact of a story.

It is no surprise that over the twenty years since I was preselected, the number of former journalists and public entertainers assuming political leadership positions has grown significantly. Over the past decade, half the states and territories have been led by former journalists: Bob Carr, Mike Rann, Clare Martin, and Alan Carpenter. Brian Burke had an unusual background when he went from journalist to premier; now it’s common. The last two leaders of the federal Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull and Tony Abbott, are both ex-journalists. Maxine McKew, Pru Goward, and Frank McGuire are other recent prominent examples of journalists becoming politicians. Even Peter Andren, the only independent MP with no political-party background to have been elected to the House of Representatives in living memory, was a television journalist.

Mediathink is taking over politics. When the MySchool website was launched, it received a flurry of favourable coverage focused on the enormous number of hits it received. It was widely hailed as a success, and Labor caucus members were delighted. Did these millions of hits mean that any children changed schools? Or that any schools lifted their performance? We probably won’t be able to assess that for some time. Yet in the land of the politics of the moment, that’s irrelevant. Genuine outcomes are completely swamped by transient appearances.

Labor politicians often talk of the ‘Tele test’, as if there is no political reality in Australia outside the pages of the Daily Telegraph. The fact that it sells a lot fewer papers than the Melbourne Herald Sun, and that only a small proportion of marginal seats are located in the paper’s heartland in western Sydney, doesn’t seem to matter. The idea that a Labor government may want to achieve serious things in the face of strident opposition from such newspapers rarely surfaces in discussion.

In 2009, Labor backbencher James Bidgood sparked outrage by offering to sell photos of a disturbed man trying to set himself on fire outside parliament to the media for $1,000. I felt sorry for him. Although his behaviour was obviously wrong, he was merely imitating the norms of media behaviour that have completely overwhelmed our politics and public life. Had he been an ordinary citizen, he would have been bombarded with offers. The prospect of a story about a politician misbehaving trumped the possibility of a good photo story about a desperate asylum-seeker.

My departure from politics was made a great deal easier by the descent of our public life into the artificial media world of virtual reality. It’s a lot easier to sacrifice family relationships in pursuit of big ideas and crucial reforms than for announceables and soundbites.

During the interminable discussions within the government around presentational issues, I sometimes joked with colleagues that we should experiment with governing well: maybe that would go down well in the focus groups and the polls. The Rudd government did introduce many very substantial initiatives while I was a minister. Pursuing them through the endless storm of media excitement was always challenging, and the urge to respond to short-term sentiment expressed in the highly artificial environment of focus groups was always very powerful.

Outside the period of the global financial crisis, the most powerful message coming from these groups was their concern about the cost of living. Inevitably, the truth beneath such concerns is very complex and difficult to deal with. The most important contributions that governments can make to reducing these pressures — aside from not increasing consumer taxes — are indirect and complicated. Productivity improvements driven by regulatory reforms, infrastructure investment, and skill formation will eventually deliver higher living standards. But because this is difficult to explain and doesn’t satisfy momentary demands for action, other approaches have to be pursued. These initiatives will usually only have very marginal effects, but they generally sound good. To a hard-pressed person who doesn’t follow public affairs very closely, it looks like the government is doing something.

No one in the Labor government, or indeed in the Howard government, should be blamed for surrendering to these pressures. If we had taken a purist approach, we would have left ourselves naked in the middle of the media storm, defenceless against the irresistible commercial pressures on the mainstream media to sell newspapers and win ratings.

I am not necessarily any purer than my former colleagues on these matters, but sometimes I felt like I was talking a foreign language in internal government discussions. In the end, I was quite content to leave. I did some worthwhile things, and fought a few good fights. I am very pessimistic about the future of Australian politics, as the sideshow syndrome seeps ever more insidiously into every tiny corner of government. Australia and its people deserve much better than the carefully scripted play-acting that now dominates our nation’s politics.

Not surprisingly, many Australians sense that there is something wrong with our political system. Sure, there will always be a large number of people who think the system is failing, and you might expect such concerns to be fading at a time of unprecedented prosperity and good fortune in Australia. Yet they’re not. Instead, cynicism and despair about our democratic processes seem to be growing. The 2010 federal election campaign exemplified this trend: a widely derided campaign produced a result in which Australians effectively voted for ‘none of the above’.

The sideshow syndrome is eroding public faith in democratic politics. As political coverage gets sillier, politicians are forced to get sillier to get coverage. The antics, hyperbole, and spin that have eventuated now alienate many voters.

The role of the media in modern western societies has been the subject of much research and commentary since the 1960s, and elements of the sideshow syndrome have been variously noted and analysed over the past two decades or so. This book tries to draw these narratives together with the first-hand experience of a senior politician who was forced to ply his trade in the sideshow. It seeks to understand the origins of the problem, and to consider emerging options that may help to ameliorate it.

I don’t seek to allocate blame. Proprietors, editors, journalists, politicians, bureaucrats, and voters are all contributing to the degrading of democratic politics. Yet, in doing so, they are all acting more or less rationally and reasonably in response to the pressures, rewards, and punishments that govern their behaviour. While Sideshow cites many examples of the actions of journalists and politicians contributing to the sideshow syndrome, this is not intended as criticism of particular individuals or media outlets. As someone who has been part of this process for a long time, I’m in no position to criticise. And I know that many of those mentioned are just as concerned about the problem as I am.

The media are an absolutely critical component of our democracy, because genuine democracy requires an informed electorate. It doesn’t have to be perfectly informed, just reasonably so. And without the active participation of the media, that’s impossible. So when the serious content of political decision-making gradually fades from our television screens, newspaper pages, and radio programmes, democracy is undermined. The forms of democracy remain, but the substance melts away. Our democratic process is at risk of returning to the patterns of the early nineteenth century, when very small elites totally dominated public decision-making. In those days, formal wealth, income, and status barriers excluded the mass of the population. Now, new barriers to participation built on ignorance and distraction are beginning to emerge.

Given the sideshow syndrome, I know that most political journalists will quickly scan this book, looking for shock revelations about the inner workings of the Rudd government. They’ll search for attacks on my former colleagues, and they’ll look for diverting anecdotes from inside the cabinet room. I can save them the bother: they’ll find none of those things here.

The relatively small number of journalists who read this book will search for someone to blame for the problems it reports. Somehow or other, they will be looking to create a headline that begins with ‘Tanner attacks …’

One or two will engage with the argument in the book, given that it is largely about the media. They will probably write intelligent critiques and contribute significantly to the debate. Unfortunately, the market doesn’t really value such contributions. Personal attacks and salacious revelations seem to sell well; abstract discussions about the future of democracy don’t.

I’ve accumulated the material presented in this book over a number of years of close observation of the media’s portrayal of politics. I haven’t gathered it by any scientific process, and it inevitably reflects the media — such as the Age and the Australian — that loomed large during my career. It has a strong emphasis on newspapers, which effectively set the agendas for political coverage. It also draws a good deal on parallel examples from the United States and Britain, societies whose culture and media heavily influence ours.

I’m well aware that this book is a work of opinion and analysis that is open to challenge from a number of angles. I have tried to organise my opinions into a coherent, properly researched argument on an issue that I feel passionately about. I sincerely hope that others will do likewise.

The two key rules that now govern the practice of Australian politics are: (1) Look like you’re doing something; and (2) Don’t offend anyone who matters. These imperatives are a direct consequence of the interaction between media coverage and political activity — the aggregated outcome of countless individuals acting rationally in pursuit of their own interests. The sideshow syndrome, the overall result of these actions, is a direct threat to the nation’s well-being.

I’ve written this book in the hope that I can help raise awareness of this problem, and to stimulate debate about possible solutions. Given that the origins of the problem are structural, fixing it will not be easy; it could even end up being a reality of modern society that we can do little about. Yet, after spending my entire adult life engaged in serious political pursuits, I’m not prepared to give up without a fight.

CHAPTER ONE

Distinctions without Differences

The 2010 election campaign was widely derided as the worst in living memory. Commentators almost universally decried the lack of vision on display, and the banal slogans, robotic delivery, and trivial policy announcements deployed by both major parties.

During the campaign, whichever way you turned, it was impossible to avoid the scathing critiques of the two leaders and their parties. Social researcher Hugh Mackay called it ‘a slow-motion, soft-focus campaign, sustained by a steady drip of daily announcements and devoid of any coherent narrative’. He denounced its ‘contrived, controlled, photo-opportunity driven character’.

Former Liberal leader John Hewson lamented: ‘While the electorate is basically concerned about service delivery and outcomes, they were swamped with spin and slogans, and subjected to campaigns so controlled and risk-averse it was almost impossible to determine the real character of the leaders, and what they actually stood for, let alone their capacity to govern.’

Prominent economist Ross Garnaut attacked ‘the renewed influence of special interests, short-termism, poor leadership and an electoral politics that prioritises focus groups before national interest policy’.

Leading journalists joined the chorus of complaint. Paul Kelly described the election as ‘a new trough in Australian politics, with the near death of substantive issues and the coalescing of Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott around the same slogans and positions’. Geoff Kitney called it ‘a sterile, narrowly focused, defensive and dispiritingly negative shadow of campaigns past’. Condemning ‘the art of making distinctions without differences’, Geoff Barker observed: ‘Dependent on pollsters and marketing gurus, political parties craft policies with only cosmetic differences to reflect majority attitudes’.

Almost halfway through the campaign, the Australian described this malaise in stark terms. Its editorial damned ‘the exhaustion of contemporary politics’ and ‘the triumph of the political class over the national interest’. It claimed the campaign reflected ‘the realm of virtual politics, where the message becomes an end in itself’.

Think-tank leaders criticised the lack of substance in the campaign. Working journalists complained about the absence of real debates. Even advertising gurus got in on the act. Phil McDonald, of George Patterson Y & R, complained that ‘voters have been treated like emotionally void school children’. ¹ Coming from an ad man, that’s a low blow.

The suggestion that this election campaign represented a new low in Australian politics, with substance almost completely eclipsed by spin and marketing, seems almost universal. And there is some objective evidence to support it, such as the dramatic increase in the informal vote, which rose by almost two percentage points to 5.65 per cent. ²

Yet it’s important to pause before leaping to this conclusion. Most of the public critics need exciting, stimulating campaigns in order to do their jobs. If you write about big national issues for a living, you’ll be biased in favour of election campaigns that focus on big national issues. John Hewson ran the ultimate high-risk campaign in 1993, and paid a high price for it. He’s not exactly a disinterested observer in this debate. And advertising gurus will invariably have something critical to say about other people’s campaigns.

The refrain about boring, superficial election campaigns isn’t exactly new. In 2007, 3AW talk-show host Neil Mitchell denounced ‘a year of empty debate and image advertising’, and concluded rather emphatically: ‘This election campaign is empty. Take the lid off and have a look. There’s nothing there. Everybody is so busy not saying anything wrong they are not saying anything at all.’ ³

In retrospect, it’s a bit hard to see how anyone could describe an election focused on WorkChoices, Iraq, and climate change in this way. So are the complaints of 2010 merely a predictable whinge from people who want elections dominated by profound ideological clashes and fundamental national choices?

At first glance, the evidence does suggest that something was amiss. Election slogans are rarely insightful or uplifting, but the slogans of the major parties in 2010 set new records for banality. ‘Moving forward’ was a cliché from corporate-speak that would have irritated anyone who had spent much time with second-tier business executives, who tend to use it to great excess. It provoked obvious questions about where and how, and provided no hint of any direction for the future.

‘Standing up for Australia’ was just as bad. Against what? Or whom? With what purpose? The Coalition slogan was just as devoid of meaningful content as Labor’s.

Both sides’ campaign announcements were hardly inspiring. Micro announcements designed to win favourable coverage without committing the incoming government to do very much were prominent. A feasibility study into a very fast rail link is a commitment of sorts, but it doesn’t carry any passengers. A receipt outlining where your taxes are going doesn’t change how much you have to pay. Sure, there’s no particular reason why major policy initiatives have to be announced during election campaigns, but that’s not a reason for manufacturing micro announcements.

Much of the campaign was dominated by intrigue about leaks from the Labor camp, intense focus on former prime minister Kevin Rudd, and endless manoeuvring about leaders’ debates and public forums. Other than a couple of days on the subject of broadband, driven by Tony Abbott’s decision to announce his substantive policy relatively late in the campaign, there were few major engagements on big issues.

Julia Gillard’s announcement in the middle of the campaign that she was going to abandon spin doctors and marketers, and bring ‘real Julia’ into play, was a telling statement about the nature of the campaign. It underlined the contrived nature of the presentation of the two party leaders, whether in the form of her front-cover appearance in the Women’s Weekly or Tony