Can Australia’s political system address long-term policy problems?
Can Australia’s political system address long-term policy problems?
In this UTAS Open Day public lecture, Associate Professor Richard Eccleston explores the ability of the Australian political system to deal with long-term policy challenges such as climate change.. He also discusses globalisation, the media and the existing party system. This lecture is presented by the UTAS Faculty of Arts.
Text from slideshow:
The nature and limits of contemporary politics
- The achievements of liberal democracy
- The problem of rising expectations and relative depravation
- The political challenges of globalisation
- With rising expectations lead to more complex policy challenges (global warming, financial regulation, social disadvantage etc)
- The short-term bias of democratic politics
Possible factors limiting political capacity and performance (short-termism) …
- Actors and leadership (agency)
- Media
- Formal political institutions
- Political parties and the party-system
Parties are perhaps a necessary evil
Key functions include:
- Nomination and recruitment
- Campaigning and fund raising
- Mobilisation
- Aggregation, integration, brokerage
- Governing and co-ordination functions
- Policy and issue development
Some basic typologies of parties
1) Mass Parties
- Broad base, large membership, strong organisation
- Strong platform, coherent constituency
- Programmatic agenda, strong values and convictions
- ‘Bottom-up’ processes – expressive, reformist
2) Catch-all Parties
- Large, yet diverse membership – deep links to civil society
- Strong organisation although top-down
- Flexible program but with ideological underpinnings reflecting base (responsive)
- Requires strong leadership for success
3) Cartel Parties
Characteristics and consequences of ‘cartel parties’
- The major parties tacitly combine to exclude rivals
- Cartel parties become professional organisations which are agents of the state or elites, not citizens
- Parties have weak links to civil society and lack of coherent policy agenda – key difference to catch-all parties
- Become extremely reactive to public opinion and dependent on the techniques of modern campaigning (voters don’t know what they stand for)
- Become extremely vulnerable to the media and news cycle – limits capacity for long-term policy
- Ideological convergence principal symptom
- Does this describe the Australian condition?
The Australian evidence
There is clear evidence of:
- Massive decline in party membership and engagement
- Increasingly voters can’t identify clear differences between the parties
There is also (albeit subjective) evidence of:
- Increasingly reactive policy from government
- Increasingly opportunistic policy from the opposition
- This is classic ‘cartel’ behaviour and further limits the capacity to develop long-term policy
- Forthcoming article ‘The Henry Tax Review, Cartel Parties and the Reform Capacity of the Australian State’ makes this argument in detail
What is to be done?
- Academics tend to better at critical analysis, generating ideas for reform
- Clearly awareness of the internal problems within parties (internal reviews etc)
- Can major parties aggregate interests in a more pluralistic and dynamic polity?
- Interest groups and movements are the preferred form of political engagement but (I believe) they perform a different role
Conclusion
‘Devising and implementing the institutions of liberal democracy was the great achievement of the 20th century, adapting these institutions to address contemporary problems is the challenge of the early 21st century’
