Nations, like ordinary citizens, from time to time need to have their health checked. Who better to consult than Dr Hippocrates and his humours? In the period before Tony Abbott's deposition the choleric element dominated in Australia, full of sound and fury. This has been followed by the preponderance of the sanguine humour, expressing itself in that sunny optimism that makes light of problems.
But more recent events suggest that the humours are again in chronic imbalance. The intransigent and brutal treatment of people, including women and children, due to be returned to Nauru, is not unexpected. It confirms the same readiness to exclude people from the protection of the law and to give untrammelled power to the executive that characterised previous governments.
The choleric humour again predominated in government, although in the populace the automatic shrug of the shoulders may suggest an imbalance of the phlegmatic.
The decision of the CSIRO head to cut its research capacity to monitor climate change and to focus on mitigation, as well as the entrepreneurial language in which the decision was announced, shocked many scientists, who insisted that effective mitigation depended on knowledge.
Government silence on the issue confirmed that after the commitments made last year concern for the environment will now yield to business as usual. Such loss of short term memory and lack of responsibility may indicate the preponderance of the sanguine.
The deal done to eliminate minor parties from the Senate was a predictable response from the larger parties to protect their interests. These interests were already defended by the identification of parties on the ballot paper and in the provisions for public funding. The independent senators had been important in rejecting legislation that did not serve the common good.
Like the bottle of Johnny Walker discovered in the hospital bed of a recovering alcoholic, this narrow focus on immediate self-interest to the neglect of a larger reality suggests the predominance of the melancholic humour.
These examples suggest that the core weakness in the Australian constitution has not been removed with the accession of Malcolm Turnbull. It supports the diagnosis that Australian political life is an ethics free zone.
This does not imply that politicians individually do not consider the ethical dimension of the daily decisions they make in their lives. Nor paradoxically does it suggest that no ethical framework guides political decisions.
In fact they are controlled by the ethical principle that the end always justifies the means, and that the narrow self-interest of the party, its electability and its supporters is to be served, whatever the cost to people, the nation and the world.
By this principle it is justifiable to incarcerate innocent women and children and to multiply the horrors of Manus Island as a means to stop the boats and so win elections. It is also justifiable to ignore the claims of the environment in the interests of short term profit, and to amend voting in the senate in order to entrench party control over legislation and public funding.
The ethical principle that the end justifies the means is so antithetical to and corrosive of ethical reflection, that it creates an ethics free zone. It identifies what is right with what is in your narrow interest. It does away with personal responsibility and, when made habitual, it regards reflection on what is human, on what is right and wrong, as otiose.
In this ethics free zone any talk of values and responsibility are merely decorative rhetoric.
Initially, of course, people will respond to government initiatives in terms of their own self-interest, while accepting on trust the government's assurance that it has some ethical compass. But they soon recognise self-interest when they see it, and assume that the rhetoric of common good and national interest that accompany it are mere persiflage. They become alienated from politics.
Perhaps that is why a final health test proved so surprising. Although the Labor Party's proposal to sharply limit tax concessions through negative gearing and superannuation were widely criticised for not being in the Party's self-interest, they were accompanied by improvement in the polls. People were surprised to see ethical values actually embodied in potentially unpopular policy.
In politics ethical conversation must begin with reflection on the inherent value of each human being and the interconnectedness of human beings. It can then move on to what we can rightly expect of others and what others are entitled to expect of us.
Such conversation will inevitably place limitations on self-interest both of governments and of citizens. Perhaps that is why ethics free zones are so attractive despite being a health risk.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.
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