Nostalgia and the grand narrative

Politics and public administration

The quality of our public administration, particularly at state and local government is appalling. The philosophy of 'new public management' has been an abject failure in execution. Witness:

• The complete inability of our defence procurement capability to purchase any materiel on time and on budget;
• The complete washout that passes for public policy on the Murray Darling Basin, and the associated issues of water allocation and environmental flows;
• The failure to redress chronic ill-health and poverty among indigenous Australians.

If, as the popular aphorism has it, a fish rots from the head, what then of our political leadership? Of most profound concern is the fact that the majority of members of the Federal Parliament came to that position through being party or union apparatchiks.

That is, from birth, they have been creatures of the party, with little or no experience of the world outside the party machine. Those that do have life experience, like Andrew Wilkie, the independent Member of the Denison, who served in the defence force and the intelligence community, are vilified for being flaky. Wilkie, and his upper house colleague, Senator Nick Xenophon, are advocates of the big bang theory of change; a model exemplified by Paul Keating. "Creeping incrementalism" says Keating, in a speech published in Afterwords: the post prime ministerial speeches, is not change. Keating's speeches are worthy of study, not as an exercise in nostalgia, but as the articulation of a countervailing point of view. Read them with the mental image of Paul Keating in lycra or budgie smugglers in mind.

Our current political leadership on all sides - principally because of the minority government - is incrementalist. Frank Furedi recognised this in The Weekend Australian recently (19 November, 2011) when he discussed how leadership is circumvented by risk aversion and the culture of risk management (which can be quite punitive). So I have another task for the Productivity Commission: What are the risks and costs associated with a culture of risk aversion in a culture and community whose future is defined by risk taking and innovation?