Play on, Pied Piper, play on

A leader is a sort of Pied Piper, though contrary to the hero in Robert Browning's poem leaders are not necessarily motivated by the prospect of material rewards.

We would be well advised to heed Browning's message. Great leaders may take us on a course that leads us out of some dangerous or delicate situation but they may also plunge us into another, perhaps even worse situation. We need to be beware of their power and remain constantly on our guard.

A leader's mission is conjunctural in nature and not structural, as some would have us believe. It becomes evident at some point of time that the leader has either accomplished his task or he has not. Some leaders outstay their usefulness. They take advantage of the power bestowed on them and fail to relinquish it long after their task has been completed or should have been.

History is full of examples of political leaders who fall Into this category: Genghis Khan, Qín Shǐ Huángdì, Alexander the Great, Julius Caesar, Napoleon, Mao Zedong, Stalin, Hitler, to name just a few. Others relinquish power either by choice or obligation, sometimes in dramatic circumstances: George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Mahatma Gandhi, Winston Churchill, Charles de Gaulle, Martin Luther King, Nelson Mandela and Frederik de Klerk, for example.

There are also religious leaders and so-called leaders of opinion such as the intelligentsia and various celebrities, members of the media and so forth. These are all individuals who capture the minds of people who allow themselves to be influenced by them for one reason or another. This includes either real or mythical characters such as Confucius, Lao Tzu, The Buddha, Abraham, Moses and Jesus of Nazareth, Paul of Tarsus, Muhammad, Jehan Cauvin, Martin Luther and media moguls such as Rupert Murdoch, Kerry Packer and Ted Turner, among others.

They are to be found in all walks of life down the ages. Some of the first leaders appeared during the time of the early human migrations, about 1.8 million years ago when Homo erectus moved out of Africa and populated the rest of the world. There is still an estimated nomad population of about 30 to 40 million people in the world today, in addition to a growing population of displaced persons due to armed conflicts. The early explorers from the Western world such as Christopher Columbus, Vasco da Gama and Ferdinand Magellan, who circumnavigated the earth that everybody thought was flat, were all pioneering leaders in the early tradition.

There are nevertheless domains of human activity where leaders are rare if not totally absent. This is the case wherever innovation, creation and invention are involved. Artists and scientists are not leaders. Whoever invented the wheel in Mesopotamia in the 4^th millennium BC did mankind a great favour but he was not a leader. Beethoven, Mozart, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Cézanne, van Gogh, Picasso, Newton, Darwin, Louis Pasteur and Einstein were not leaders.

The economic world, of course, abounds with would-be leaders. Most are, in fact, simply managers. Leadership has nothing to do with the hierarchical relationship of subordination within organizations. Leaders appear in horizontal relationships among equals where duty of obedience is absent. It is doubtful that certain business magnates and so-called captains of industry and finance such as Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Warren Buffet and George Soros should be considered as leaders, simply because they have been remarkably successful in their particular fields of activity.

An important question citizens of democratic nations arefaced with today is how to choose their leader at the highest level, president or prime minister? Should candidates for public election to the highest post be pre-selected in private by their political parties as they are today in most democratic countries? The notable exception is the USA where the first statewide primary election was held in 1899 in Minnesota. The first presidential primary election was organized in Florida in 1901. The primary election process transfers the power to select candidates from political party chiefs to ordinary citizens.

Graham Young observed in a recent article in "What the people want," thata Newspoll survey carried out for The Australian revealed that a majority of respondents preferred Labor's Stephen Smith to Julia Gillard and Liberal's Malcolm Turnbull to Tony Abbott. This tends to suggest that had the leaders been appointed through a primary election process instead of by party caucus, the choices may have been quite different. Perhaps we would have had the benefit of national leadership instead of national governance.

The French socialist party successfully organized an open primary election recently to choose its candidate for the up-coming presidential election. It is expected the right wing parties will follow suit, not at this election but at the next, as the incumbent president, Nicolas Sarkozy, is expected to stand for reelection in 2012.

Closer to home in New South Wales, both the Liberal and Labor parties are planning to hold primaries before the next federal election. The Nationals already voted in a successful trial primary election in Tamworth last year.

It seems that popular democracy is on the move and that the Pied Pipers of this world have a bright future ahead of them. The paternalistic methods of party politics are at last on the wane. Play on, Pied Piper, play on!