Last week, chatting with the Queen at Government House, Tony Abbott commented that in Australia, we play our politics tough.
Certainly, Abbott seems to: he remarked, testing the boundaries of how to converse with royals, that the Queen had outlasted many Australian prime ministers and might get to outlast a few more yet. The Queen replied diplomatically that minority government must present special problems.
Australian politics these days is brutal, but was it always so?
I have adult memories of Australian parliamentary politics back to Menzies. I worked as a public servant under the McMahon, Gorton, Whitlam, Fraser, Hawke, Keating and Howard governments.
For all the political passions of the day, the Whitlam and Fraser years were civil compared with now. Under Hawke and Keating, things went downhill: we regularly saw the ruthless baiting and derision by a triumphalist government of a hapless, divided opposition. Today, the boot is on the other foot.
There is a deeper issue here than ups and downs of parliamentary style and culture. Parliament is a team sport, and you barrack for your team. But what we see now raises some basic questions about civility and demagogy in Australian politics.
'Civil' is a rich word. Civil affairs relate to government; civil liberties to the people. To be civil is to be polite or courteous. When social philosophers use the term civil society, the adjective conveys all three meanings: a civil society enjoys a government which respects the civil liberties of the people, and which functions in a polite and courteous way.
By this definition, Australia has a way to go to being a full civil society towards Aboriginal people. We took a turn for the worse in the 1990s when governments began treating asylum-seekers in cruel discriminatory ways. After 9/11, the civil liberties of all Australians came under attack from a fearful and angry government. These days, a fragile balance has returned in these areas.
According to the Macquarie Dictionary, a demagogue is 'a leader who uses the passions or prejudices of the populace to further his or her own interests'. Demagogy pretty much describes the style of Opposition politics these days.
We see tactics designed to bypass Parliament, to exploit and mobilise the passions and prejudices of the people, to make parliamentary law-making seem transitory and irrelevant. Parliament, especially Question Time, has become a theatre for verbal violence, aimed at influencing public perceptions through dramatic media coverage of personalised confrontations.
We see persistent efforts to cement in the public mind a perception of the present government and leader as hopeless, 'dysfunctional' and 'toxic'.
Such tactics, sadly, work. There is a remarkable disconnect between public judgements as to the policy achievements of the present government, and as to the quality of its leadership.
Two recent Essential Polls found that large majorities of voters — between 51 and 89 per cent — are satisfied by current government policies on a range of important matters that affect our daily lives, such as health funding, pension increases, managing the economy to keep interest rates and unemployment down, GFC stimulus spending, and abolishing Work Choices.
Only on asylum seekers and carbon pricing — the issues where parliamentary demagogy is most sustained — is Labor losing the policy argument. Yet on two-party preferred, Abbott leads Gillard 58 per cent to 42 per cent (or more) on polls taken around the same time.
This is worrying evidence of the success of a demagogic style of politics. That said, polling experts note that such large contradictions usually lessen come election time, when voters make more serious choices between parties and leaders. For Julia Gillard's sake, I hope so.
Much has been written this past year on what ails our politics and political coverage. Who is to blame for declining parliamentary standards — politicians, the media or the people? I suggest we all are.
The media encourage head-bashing politics, because civil politics is boring. The people have become less forgiving and more openly emotion-driven, and maybe expect politicians in their own image; dignity, compassion and restraint are out of favour. Many politicians, though they know better, are giving the people and the media what they want: rancorous confrontations and barbed insults.
Most of the people in our Parliament are well-educated in manners. When they choose to set manners aside, it is deliberately calculated. Part of being 'a good parliamentary performer' is the ability to put the other side off their stroke, make them miss the ball.
The 'tough' way in which Australian politics is now played corrodes civility and potentially erodes our democracy. It reduces public respect for Parliament and makes people feel that Parliament is failing. It could tempt people to more extreme street politics. All these things have happened before in Europe in the 1930s. Verbal violence desensitised people, and real violence followed.
Some of the rhetoric in the recent carbon tax debates, in Question Time, in censure motions, and outside in the public galleries and streets, was pretty frightening.
Civility in politics might be a bit boring, but a lot of Australians would dearly wish to see its return.
There are still many role models of a civil style in politics. Tony Windsor, Bob Brown, Christine Milne, Malcolm Turnbull, Simon Crean, Stephen Smith and Greg Combet spring to mind. They make their points quietly and in balanced ways.
Parliament needs to rediscover its classic role as a venue for civil conversation among intelligent people of differing views, united in a search for public-interest solutions to national problems.
Tony Kevin is the author of Crunch Time, a book exploring Australia's inadequate policy responses to the climate change crisis.