Cross benches key to real change in NSW

Next Saturday in New South Wales enrolled citizens will turn out to vote to elect a government.

They will vote for two houses of parliament – the Lower House or Legislative Assembly and the Upper House or Legislative Council.

The conservative metropolitan Sydney-based media – the Murdoch owned newspapers, commercial radio and television stations - forecast the Australian Labor Party - the present government with a majority in the Lower House - will be destroyed.

The progressive metropolitan media – the Fairfax-owned Sydney Morning Herald and the government-owned ABC – forecast the Greens will hold the balance of power.

Both sides of the media have dogs in the fight so it is difficult for the average voter to grasp the importance of the ballot and the consequences of their actions for NSW for the next four years.

There is a lot of bitterness about the way the government has acted during the past four years (generated mostly by 2GB's Alan Jones and the Daily Telegraph) but it is difficult to sense whether the bitterness is real or a by-product of fabricated media hatred.

Similarly, there is a level of concern among electors (generated by the SMH and ABC) that the Coalition has demonstrated little in the way of alternative leadership, innovation and management for them to be considered serious contenders to assume the burden of power.

Voters rely heavily on the media for information so that they can form opinions and make decisions.

They do not, however, always grasp the meanings being framed nor the alignments that cause the frames.

Part of the answer to the problem of the distribution of accurate and timely information on issues, candidates and processes, lies in an increased use by voters of social online media.

The Pew Research Center in the United States last week published a survey that indicated social media sites such as Twitter received a large increase in use in the 2010 mid term election campaign; 54% of adults went to the internet for political purposes.

While the same levels may not be reached in NSW there is a marked increase in the use of blogs and social media as voters work hard to find public spaces from which they can extract real and useful information.

In this, the metropolitan media in NSW has focused narrowly on the two-dog fight between Labor Green coalition leader Kristina Kenneally and Liberal National coalition leader Barry O'Farrell.

The result has been a spectacular array of newspaper photographs and television grabs of both leaders setting up permanent kennels in the western suburbs.

The other part of the problem, sadly, is that NSW is imagined as an initialism for Newcastle Sydney Wollongong.

While there is a real need to focus on the social and economic problems that have historically beset the western suburbs there are equally urgent matters across the rest of the state that have been mostly ignored by the large media companies and the main party candidates throughout the life of the campaign.

Media distillation of the campaign into a two-dog fight between Mr O'Farrell and Ms Kenneally removed any obligation to report the issues, candidates and processes that are of particular interest and importance to voters.

In defence of the media however, candidate information is not all that freely available.

Candidates do not fall all over each other in competition to provide details about themselves, their policies or their ideas for the future.

They come up with boringly ordinary slogans and grabs, photoshopped images of themselves and their loving families – tactics designed to create a false sense of belief so they don't need to reveal their true aims.

What qualifies a candidate to run for office?

Parliament is stuffed full of lawyers, developers, unionists and environmentalists.

There are now very few farmers or agriculturalists though the National Party - the Country Party as it was then known - once strongly represented their interests.

There are few industrialists or manufacturers, fewer still corporate business types – women or men – keen to represent the main sectors of investment in the state.

What type of person decides to stand for a seat in the state parliament of NSW, what qualifies them to represent their chosen constituents, and what motivates them to run either as party candidates or as independents?

Are there, or should there be, factors that qualify or disqualify the 498 candidates for the Legislative Assembly and the 311 candidates for the Legislative Council beyond being on the electoral role?

The direct democracy advocates would say there is nothing to preclude all citizens of the state from taking turns at sitting in the red and green leather benches in Macquarie Street.

Indeed, I spent the day there as part of the so-called People's Parliament in early March and being in the House creates a sense of power and occassion that is unmatched in other places.

The question though is not about power because a fixed number of candidates will take up the seats – in the Upper House there are 311 candidates competing for 21 spots.

If you subtract the 'dummy runners' – the candidates who are there to split the vote; the disaffected former party candidates who want to get back at their former 'team mates'; and the party candidates who are invested with the idea of accumulating power for power's sake, what's left over?

Probably a handful of individuals across a range of ages and capabilities who would bring to the parliament a different perspective.

It's unlikely to happen though given that those individuals are not well-funded nor do they have time to think up and fabricate campaign events and stunts.

Fabricate events and stunts are part of the game.

The parties spend millions of dollars devising stunts because they know at the end of the campaign, when they get their candidate elected, they will recoup every dollar of their large investment through public campaign funding.

This savage division between the parties and the rest of the candidates – the naïve independents, the groups forming as parties to remove parking meters and to get voting squares above the line – preserves the parliamentary status quo because the parties know their advertising investment will be refunded.

Not so the hapless losers – and there will be many given that in the upper house alone there are 311 competitors for 21 prizes.

In the lower house there are 498 candidates competing for 92 spots on the green leather.

The losers will get nothing from the public purse, no refund from the generous taxpayers they so eagerly wish to represent.

The spoils, as they say go to the victor and the victors under the present voting system are always the parties.

After March 26 the Liberal National coalition may become the home team and the Labor Greens coalition the visitors but that's about all that will change.

The clue to real change for NSW lies in transformation of the voting system so that political parties compete within the same arena as anyone else seeking to do their civic duty.

Equally, it lies in the need to reconnect the major cities with their economic, cultural and geographic heritage beyond the Blue Mountains – the sandstone curtain that divides urban and regional NSW.

Major transport routes south and north – the Hume and Pacific highways have done much to create a reconnection.

It's now time to build the Bell Freeway linking Windsor with Lithgow and to rebuild the Newell into a superhighway from Victoria to Queensland with Dubbo as the pivotal industrial base.

Neither the Liberal National coalition nor the Labor Greens coalition are going to support such an important reconnection because they are busy looking after the inner city constituents who demand more bicycle tracks and more bus lanes at the expense of motor vehicle drivers.

Indeed, there is a good argument for cycleways and bus lanes, but not at the expense of equally important parallel transport links.

One would be forgiven for thinking the junior Liberal National coalition partner would push hard for such large scale development as a super Newell instead of promising one or two overtaking lanes.

Not so. National party members and candidates have been busy lying low making themselves into small targets rather than battling with their biggest competitor, the noisy junior partner in the Labor Green coalition.

The irony of this is that both junior coalition partners have plenty of really good ideas that could benefit the renewal of NSW.

Their problem is that they believe they are in oppositional ideological positions and that they can't be seen publically to agree on anything.

This is one of the most destabilising political arguments imaginable.

Both sides have been ideology-free since the end of the 20th century.

Both sides – Greens and Nationals – have created for themselves 'adopted positions'.

Much like the idea of 'strategic emotion' which is trotted out every time a politician sees a television camera, adopted positions make the Greens and the Nationals look very ordinary given that they have similar sustainability goals.

An adopted position requires a politician or candidate to be proscribed by whatever it is the party says they believe in.

There is no margin for tolerance, no shifting of position.

Within this adopted position frame the only thing that changes is the parties on each side of the house.

Citizens of NSW are presented with a jamboree of events and stunts reflected back to them by the media over and over so that they believe the party leaders when they both say they are renewing and changing things.

The voting process is such that the mirroring of events and stunts translates into votes for the two major parties.

Voters get caught up in the hoopla of the jamboree and are unable to extract themselves to ask serious questions of the party leaders.

Metropolitan media support for the hoopla and fluff anchors the process.

Even the ballot paper, especially for the upper house, is strategically set up to favour parties and groups who are elevated to a position of importance above the line.

Yes Dorothy, there is a wide black line on the Legislative Council ballot paper demarcating those who get special treatment and those who must appear to be lesser candidates, ungrouped below the line.

The ungrouped rabble below the line still get to pay $500 each to nominate and to go through the campaign process albeit with different levels of expertise and energy.

But for the most part, they don't get their money back at the end of the dog fight.

Ends. words 1730

• Richard Stanton, a political communication lecturer at the University of Sydney, is one of the ungrouped independent candidates below the line on the Legislative Council ballot paper.