Honestly, Kernot could make Prime Minister yet

If you ask a group of citizens what they would like most in their politicians they would tell you that they want them to be honest. If you then ran a candidate for office promoting them as honest, that candidate would most likely be ridiculed. While we all want honest politicians, a claim by most politicians to be honest will actually undermine their credibility, such is the perceived gulf between the ideal and the real.

Our society is ambivalent about honesty. While it is a virtue to be honest, it is only a virtue to be strategically honest. The concept of the white lie lubricates social intercourse, placing absolute truth below pleasing or placating others. Ambrose Bierce’s definition of diplomacy as "The patriotic art of lying for one's country," hints at the ethically defensible lie. In the Judaeo-Christian world lying has never been absolutely unethical. The 10 commandments contain a lot of Thou-shalt-nots, but apart from bearing false witness against a neighbour, lying is not one of them.

Today, the liberal agenda has brought forth a new paradigm in politics and issues management which favours higher levels of honesty, yet many politicians and commentators have failed to recognise this. The Enlightenment project to build a society based on consent between freely associating equals implies the sharing of information. As the only information worth sharing is accurate information, it also implies honesty in government.

Sharing that information has also become easier. The invention of the printing press combined with the Industrial Revolution gave people the means and the time to access information that was once the preserve of a tiny privileged elite as well as the discretionary wealth to fuel a boom in the generation of even more information. Radio, television and the internet have accelerated that trend.

In part this is one of the reasons why politics has become more volatile. At one time the decision of how to vote was driven much more by socially distributed information – what friends and family said. Now, other sources of information provide alternatives and have weakened the hold of traditional social networks.

As a result, politicians who can demonstrate honesty are in demand. That is one of the qualities that drives the very volatile Pauline Hanson phenomenon. For a lot of One Nation voters it is not so much what Pauline Hanson says, but that she has the courage to come out and say it, that wins their vote.

But being uncritically honest can be just as big a problem as being dishonest. The Australian Labor Party currently offers a study in the rules of what to do, and what not to do.

Cheryl Kernot wrote an opinion piece for The Australian on 9 April. In it she contrasted the "dream team" – the new Australian Democrat leadership of Stott Despoja and Ridgeway – with the "boring suits" who run the major parties (including hers). She also passed unfavourable judgement on the "ritual stag fights and scalp hunting" which dominate our democratic processes, and provided some analysis as to likely Democrat strategies and the ways in which the established parties were failing to promote younger members. Media coverage of the article treated it as a gaffe. However the article was actually a good exposition of how to play the new information-driven political paradigm.

The first rule in political honesty is that it will resonate most strongly about those things that are obvious to all. In this article Kernot is stating what the majority of us believe. Most people do find politicians boring, and we hate the adversarial system. It will resonate even more strongly if the statement appears to be generous and even-handed. Again, Kernot’s article passes this test. Not only does she praise the new leadership (despite a public history of competiton between her and Stott Despoja), but she offers some criticism of her own party.

Another rule is not to be honest in a way that will lose votes at the next election. In fact, if you must be absolutely honest, avoid critical policy areas altogether. Again, Kernot obeys this rule. She is commentating on personalities and approaches, not policies.

Much of the media criticism that Kernot attracted was fuelled by internal ALP politics. Kim Beazley seemed uncomfortable when defending her while backgrounding rivals had no compunction in inserting the knife. This is not surprising. Political parties have not adjusted their structures to the more open society. They are tribal and power tends to accrue to those who possess information. There is little premium to sharing it around. Group loyalty, the mother of the white lie, is more important than individual preference and integrity.

To be fair to the ALP, they are much more open and tolerant of dissent than the Liberal Party. While the Liberal Party does have public intellectuals (Tony Abbott being the latest to tread this path) they are much less likely to flout the party line in the ways that Mark Latham, Lindsay Tanner and even Duncan Kerr (see article this edition) do. Still, when it comes to front benchers being honest Labor is sensitive.

This sensitivity must have been increased by Simon Crean’s gaffe when he mused that compulsory superannuation contributions might need to be increased from their current level of 8% to 15%. But Crean broke the rules. In the first place there is no unanimity that compulsory super is a good thing. Business resented its original implementation, and workers might well prefer to have another 7% in their pocket than have it locked away in superannuation until they retire, especially those who are having trouble making ends meet. He also bought into a larger economic argument as to whether the country currently needs more saving or more spending.

In the second place Crean is being honest about policy in a way that might impact on the next federal election. It is a truism that governments lose elections, oppositions don’t win them. Despite the Government’s trying to pry out details of ALP policy with the accusation that it is "policy lazy", Labor needs to keep its policies close to its chest. If it doesn’t, then the government will make Labor the issue, and Labor could lose the next election. This is not to suggest that politicians should be dishonest about their policies, but another rule in being politically honest is that it is not dishonest to hold back details if people aren’t asking for them. In this case there was no public debate about compulsory super, let alone a demand for more details.

Kernot is not the only exponent of political honesty in the ALP. Peter Beattie just won an election in Queensland on the basis of his honesty. Not only does this illustrate another of the rules – if you are caught out, own up – but it shows that a reputation for honesty can be heightened by a history of opposing your own party. When Beattie said he knew nothing of the rorting uncovered by Shepherdson, even cynical journalists believed him because he had a history of being at odds with his party if he believed they were wrong.

Kernot should keep this in mind. Her public reason for leaving the Democrats was that she wanted to be able to make policy as part of a government, not merely to moderate it as part of a balance of power party. She wanted to be part of a ministry, and anyone who is ambitious enough to want to be a minister must also, at the back of their mind, entertain the possibility that they might one day become Prime Minister. If Kernot wants that higher prize, then she will have to brush aside the comments of her new comrades and stick to her guns.

Upsetting the Labor Party will elevate her status in the public mind. When Kim Beazley goes there is no clear line of succession. Despite the fact that Kernot is not an outstanding parliamentary performer, how the public perceives politicians is more important than how their peers do. It’s just possible that the Labor Party will one day wake up and look around and find that there’s just no alternative to Cheryl.

Even if Kernot never becomes PM one thing is certain. If the major political parties are to continue to dominate, they will have to find more ways to encourage honesty while not endangering the aims of government. It is easier for balance-of-power parties to be perceived as honest than the major parties. They do not need to speak to the whole electorate, but a more defined subset. That subset will have a narrower range of belief to which politicians can appeal, so they can be blunter, and bluntness is often interpreted as honesty.. The growth in the vote of those parties, and the decline in that of the major parties, can partly be explained as a result of a perception by their constituencies that they are more honest than the major parties.

But any politician embarking on a career in honesty should take note of Richard Whately’s aphorism – "Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man."