What ails good governance in Australia?

Commuters in many of Melbourne’s outer eastern and south eastern suburbs have suffered a lot because of the erratic public transport in their areas.

Melburnians don’t have an appetite for the administration’s spin. They can easily see that despite the claims made by the government, work on the ground is seriously lacking.

Crimes and violence being committed on the trains is yet another issue that the Brumby government has failed to address. The severity of the problem can be demonstrated by the attacks on Indian students and the way crime stories have been reported by Melbourne’s The Age and The Herald Sun.

Another critical area that the government has ignored at its peril is the construction of new road infrastructure. The Brumby government’s failure to fulfil its promises to ease the traffic along the Melbourne’s main freeways and its denial in acknowledging the problems plaguing public transport have cost the ALP a major defeat in the Victorian elections, where the Liberal Party and its leader, Ted Baillieu, saw a 6.5 per cent shift in votes in its favour.

Just like the outgoing Brumby government, the administration of Prime Minister Julia Gillard, too, has made big promises and, so far, there is no reason to believe they will be fulfilled.

Across Australia, the administration of good governance and reform have been stalled mainly because the federal and state governments are now increasingly relying more and more on putting a professional spin on their failures, rather improving on governance.

Post 2007 federal politics and policy making, have well and truly been a clear reflection of what has been happening across Victoria and the New South Wales. Paul Keating once remarked that the federal ALP always follows the footsteps of the NSW ALP. He was right.

Since 2007, the NSW has seen much political instability; it has had three premiers and many more cabinet re-shuffles, all happening in the shadow of constant reporting of the increase in corruption in NSW state institutions.

In fact, a cursory look at the premierships of Nathan Rees and Christina Keneally gives more telling accounts of how similarly have the senior officials of the federal Labour and the NSW Labour managed different crises in their respective political jurisdictions.

Political instability, the ALP’s strong reliance on spin, its lack of clear vision about Australia’s future and its genuine inability and unwillingness to work dedicatedly towards harnessing this nation’s immense talent, potential and resources are the main factors that have hindered the administration’s ability to undertake long-standing reforms - the kind of which we had seen during the Hawke, Keating and Howard years.

The general failure of the ALP governments to invest in higher education, the economy, public infrastructure (the NBN being an exception), health care and long term policy making, clearly suggests that the current generation of government officials have failed to heed the important lessons from the Hawke-Keating era, especially the latter’s recession “that we had to have”.

According to Paul Keating, very high wages and interest rates, along with the lowest unemployment rates in 18 years does not bode well for the economy: it is pushing inflation up and is having an adverse impact on the already strong Australian dollar which could hit some of Australia’s export industries very hard in the future.