Like what you've read?

On Line Opinion is the only Australian site where you get all sides of the story. We don't
charge, but we need your support. Here�s how you can help.

  • Advertise

    We have a monthly audience of 70,000 and advertising packages from $200 a month.

  • Volunteer

    We always need commissioning editors and sub-editors.

  • Contribute

    Got something to say? Submit an essay.


 The National Forum   Donate   Your Account   On Line Opinion   Forum   Blogs   Polling   About   
On Line Opinion logo ON LINE OPINION - Australia's e-journal of social and political debate

Subscribe!
Subscribe





On Line Opinion is a not-for-profit publication and relies on the generosity of its sponsors, editors and contributors. If you would like to help, contact us.
___________

Syndicate
RSS/XML


RSS 2.0

The erosion of checks and balances

By Tony Kevin - posted Friday, 17 March 2006


The Howard system of governance is a dynamic, not static, organism, and is best understood using a biological or ecological model, rather than the traditional mechanical balance model. It continues restlessly to probe for areas of weakness in all countervailing institutions, which it might then exploit to expand its powers. As they weaken, it grows in strength. So, the loss of opposition senate control is quickly leading to erosion of senate investigative powers. Senator Heffernan’s disgraceful attack on Justice Kirby, initially condoned by Howard, almost led to the loss of this key independent judge. In any case, as the years pass, the government’s power to fill retirement vacancies moves the courts towards greater conformity with the political centre.

Just as a free market system risks sliding into monopoly if one firm becomes too dominant, so a political system of checks and balances can gradually slide into a hegemonic system, if the will to expand the centre's power is there, and if opportunities present. There is no accepted doctrine of limits. Border protection and the War on Terror were providential opportunities to extend the centre’s powers that Howard exploited to the hilt - and still does.

In such an analysis, one must also look beyond formal areas of governance. The tentacles of Howard’s army of unaccountable political minders and culture warriors now reach out into key institutions of civil society. Quietly networking in universities and think-tanks, distributing grants and consultancies, vetting appointments and promotions, this hidden army of persuaders is at work in strategic areas of civil society - mainstream media, the Internet, culture and academe. Dissenters are identified, and their personal vulnerabilities filed - ready for co-ordinated attacks when the time is right, with the aim of discrediting and marginalising their voices. In this way, cultural pluralism is suppressed and social consensus around the political centre is strengthened.

Advertisement

If these are “culture wars”, they are very unequal wars, fought between isolated, outnumbered and unfunded individual guerilla fighters, and a well-briefed, well-funded army of pro-government “Thought Police”. Many dissenters retire hurt from the fray. Government resources seem inexhaustible.

Australian-ness is being re-defined in these Howard years, to mean assimilation to a conformist set of so-called “Australian” values. Democratic pluralism, a multiplicity of values and voices sharing the fruits and civic protections of one liberal society, is no longer legitimate. The War on Terror has become the vehicle of a repressive climate of social and cultural conformism, more and more fascist in spirit, even if its proponents do not yet acknowledge the similarities. If one re-reads Martin Krygier's 1997 ABC Boyer Lectures on civil society, Between Fear and Hope. Hybrid thoughts on public values, one finds a great deal of the healthy democratic pluralism he described there has already departed from Australian civil society. Fear has supplanted hope.

Public language has been perverted in true Orwellian style - mendacity is everywhere and hardly worth remarking on any more.

John Howard’s agenda-setting power as Prime Minister gave him the ability over these past ten years to gradually re-shape the national agenda around his expressed preferences and prejudices (as a small, but telling example, recall how so many felt obliged to respond to his mischievous remark that many Australians find Muslim female dress "confronting"). Opposition leaders and mainstream media editors now perforce inhabit a world whose language and frame of reference Howard’s rule has largely defined. Real dissenters in the opposition and media are ridiculed and pushed to the margins of relevance. A few illustrious names are left to work in place, as token demonstrations that the right to dissent still exists.

Occasionally, public scandals flare up, like the Rau-Solon migration abuses and the AWB corruption issue. However many issues of gross misgovernance - for example, SIEV X in 2001, the DFAT negligence towards Australian holidaymakers’ safety in Bali in 2002, and the illegal secret ADF invasion of Iraq on March 18-20, 2003 - are simply ignored by mainstream politics and media. They are considered too dangerous to tackle.

Howard Inc. is now a lot larger and more formidable than John Howard the man. It is a powerful corporate entity and needs to be recognised as such. A good place to start is the Australian Financial Review magazine's 2005 “Power” issue, which offered a rare insider’s view into how the Prime Minister’s office works day-to-day.

Advertisement

Another productive way of looking at the Howard years is as a history of failure of nerve by Australia’s managing elites. Many thousands of politicians, officials in various agencies, business leaders and civil society leaders, have periodically failed at crucial moments of moral choice during the past ten years to exercise their powers and responsibilities in what used to be a pluralist system of checks and balances - children overboard, SIEV X, Iraq War, Bali Nine, Mamdouh Habib and David Hicks in Guantanamo - to denounce or to simply say “No” to the latest demands of Howard Inc. With each such successive failure, Howard Inc. grows in power and ambition - and is harder to stop the next time around.

To me, this history of the past decade is not about a more passive, selfish society. A society that by democratic majority vote has accepted what is being done to our country as the necessary price for our economic and political security. That is the more comfortable, complacent view. To me, this history of the past decade is much more disturbing, because it is about a betrayal of values by many in our political and corporate elites, who should have known better, and the gradual lulling of our people into helpless acceptance of things we should not be accepting. It is about the concentration of power, and it is about le trahison des clercs. (Julian Benda’s 1927 essay on the European elites' acquiescence in the rise of European fascism).

Here is the real story of the Howard years. We no longer live in a healthy, self-correcting democratic system of checks and balances. We live now in an expanding, albeit still “soft-authoritarian”, system of growing corporate national power. While leading elites remain mostly quietly complicit, dissenters look on in horror as our national pride is devalued and our freedoms dismantled.

Some of us, thankfully, are still fighting back.

  1. Pages:
  2. 1
  3. Page 2
  4. All

Article edited by Shevaune Espinos.
If you'd like to be a volunteer editor too, click here.



Discuss in our Forums

See what other readers are saying about this article!

Click here to read & post comments.

43 posts so far.

Share this:
reddit this reddit thisbookmark with del.icio.us Del.icio.usdigg thisseed newsvineSeed NewsvineStumbleUpon StumbleUponsubmit to propellerkwoff it

About the Author

Tony Kevin holds degrees in civil engineering, and in economics and political science. He retired from the Australian foreign service in 1998, after a 30-year career during which he served in the Foreign Affairs and Prime Minister’s departments, and was Australia’s ambassador to Poland and Cambodia. He is currently an honorary visiting fellow at the Australian National University’s Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies in Canberra. He has written extensively on Australian foreign, national security, and refugee policies in Australia’s national print media, and is the author of the award-winning books A Certain Maritime Incident – the Sinking of SIEV X, and Walking the Camino: a modern pilgrimage to Santiago. His third book on the global climate crisis, Crunch Time: Using and abusing Keynes to fight the twin crises of our era was published by Scribe in September 2009.

Other articles by this Author

All articles by Tony Kevin

Creative Commons LicenseThis work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

Photo of Tony Kevin
Article Tools
Comment 43 comments
Print Printable version
Subscribe Subscribe
Email Email a friend
Advertisement

About Us Search Discuss Feedback Legals Privacy