If your image of ideal public life is steady as she goes, the big stories of the last two weeks will have been disquieting. They have told of fragmentation, unpredictability and disruption. These qualities are characteristic of times when established institutional processes are breaking down.
The G20 meeting received most attention. The agenda of the conference was carefully controlled to focus on economic growth and to make broader issues like climate change marginal. The Australian Government clearly hoped that the meeting would also give some legitimacy to its budgetary measures.
To these plans and hopes, the unexpected agreement between Presidents Obama and Xi Jinping on climate change, and Obama’s reference to the defects of Australia’s approach to climate change in his speech to students in Brisbane, caused massive disruption. Domestic and international attention was turned away from the central business of the meeting, which was the need to address climate change. When Prime Minister Abbott met French President Hollande a week later, both men sang from Obama’s hymn book.
The following week senators unaligned with the major parties struck down the financial services regulations introduced by the Government. These were seen to favour the big financial players, whose reputation for benefiting themselves at the expense of small investors was already becoming noxious. The unexpected rebellion by the senators was yet another disruption of the Government’s economic policies. It also spoke of the fragmentation and fluidity of the Senate and of the obstacles it put in the way of the smooth implementation of government policy.
These events might be seen to be unrelated. But I would see in them a common theme. They both challenge the belief that agendas can be centrally controlled and that good governance is constituted by discipline and sole ownership of the agenda. They suggest that the ability of political parties to impose their ideological agendas without testing them against the human values they embody is breaking down. The problem does not lie in the disruption but in the way governments act when allowed to have their way.
If this is so, we should ask how we should read the signs of these choppy times. First, we should insist that governments reflect on what matters in governance and not simply on how to govern efficiently. What matters is the human good of people living now and in the future, and particularly of people who are disadvantaged. The problem for the Australian Government is that it is perceived to neglect what matters and to act unfairly. Its policies have removed protection from people who have reason to believe that large financial firms will exploit them. They have also subordinated care for the environment to short term profit. The Senators recognised that the financial regulations did not serve humane values. President Obama called the Government on the values behind its climate policy. Both disruptions pushed the Government back to reflect on what matters.
Second, when people lose their trust in governance, many voices need to be heard, particularly the voices of those deliberately excluded from the conversation. The senators’ disruption to the Government gave a voice to those who have been treated badly by banks and financial agents. Obama’s disruption gave a voice to the future generations of Australians and to the world community whose voices the agenda of the G20 meeting was designed to mute. In both cases we are entitled to feel satisfied that the Government’s agenda was disrupted.
Third, timely symbols are powerful. Critics often contrast them with actions that make a practical difference, and deride them. But the emission agreement between the United States and China and Obama’s speech placed climate change firmly on the international agenda. They also signalled that crude forms of climate change denial could no longer be taken seriously. If, as many forecast, an El Nino rules Australian climate in the coming years, the challenge of dealing effectively with climate change will return also with some urgency to the political agenda.
In Australia, disruption of government business as normal is not the problem. The problem lies rather in areas where Governments can walk over vulnerable groups with impunity and without fear of disruption. The cruel and secretive mistreatment of asylum seekers and the Western Australian Government’s plan to rip the guts out of Indigenous communities and dump the people in townships come to mind. If these activities are the mark of governments in control of its agenda there is much to be said for disruption.
Andrew Hamilton is consulting editor of Eureka Street.