Tasmania’s ethical and moral political wasteland

The elimination of openness and transparency in the Tasmanian political system is not regarded as unethical or morally repugnant behaviour by Labor-Liberal politicians. It is a prized principle, an essential value and a guiding virtue.

The crass deceit of Tasmania’s Treasurer, Michael Aird, about his trip to Europe is no surprise to anyone, just another affirmation of the dishonesty at the core of the political culture of the Tasmanian ALP. The fact that condemnation from the Liberals has been muted and pathetic is testimony to their own compliance with a culture which accepts that government ministers misleading the public is simply business as usual, nothing to be fussed about.

The Liberals should be asking for Aird’s resignation, but they haven’t and they won’t.

One of the crowning achievements of the current bipartisan arrangements in Tasmanian politics has been to create a totally “dysfunctional democracy”. Yes I know the phrase is an oxymoron, but then so is the term “openly misleading”, which when it becomes the norm of political expression is just as destructive of a “functional” or a “healthy democracy” as anything else, except overt violence.

No doubt Will Hodgman is watching with interest the ramifications of Tasmanian Treasurer Michael Aird’s bare-faced triumphalism in misleading the Tasmanian people, en masse, about his absurd tax-payer funded trip to Europe. Aird told the people he was going to Europe to try to finalise arrangements for a major foreign investment which would create hundreds of jobs, but a side issue was to assist Gunns in acquiring finance for their pulp mill in the Tamar Valley.

On returning to Tasmania it became apparent that he had visited pulp mills in Europe - “one or two, three or four”. Or was it five or six? Who knows, apart from Gunns and Aird, the puppet Premier, some highly politicised and timid bureaucrats and the Labor cabinet. Aird suggested he didn’t know how many pulp mills he visited. This is not misleading. This is a deliberate lie.

Aird’s overseas visit was planned well before he went overseas. It was all planned in discussions with Gunns behind closed doors. To suggest that he was merely “asked” by Gunns to help their fund-raising as an add-on to another purpose is laughable. His trip for Gunns was no side issue. Aird did not tell Tasmanians the real reasons he went to Europe because he was using taxpayer funds on behalf of the interests of a private company.

This must have been discussed at cabinet level, and if not, all cabinet members must have agreed to allow such decisions to be made on their behalf by others, which does not absolve them from cabinet responsibility. All Labor ministers are complicit in Aird’s lie to the Tasmanian people. The puppet Premier, the now thoroughly exposed hypocrite David Bartlett, was part of the decision-making process. A secret trip for Gunns, the details of which remain completely obscure (Aird has no credibility about what he says was the purpose of his trip), involves the agreement to lie to the Tasmanian people by all Tasmanian government ministers.

This has nothing to do with the oft-abused notion of “commercial in confidence”, but it has everything to do with the nature of Tasmanian politics, the absence of honesty in government, the absence of openness and transparency, the absence of representation of the interests of the people by elected representatives, the absence of ministerial responsibility, the absence of collective cabinet responsibility, the absence of a politically disinterested public service, and the absence of a “free” mainstream popular local press.

Tasmania is a “functional democracy” or a “representative democracy” in its forms and structures, but not in its practices.

It would be regarded as intolerable in a “functional democracy” that government ministers be able to lie to or mislead the people they are elected to represent, and also to do so with impunity. Not in Tasmania.

It would be regarded as intolerable in a “functional democracy” that government ministers who lie and mislead the people they are elected to represent be rewarded, applauded or protected for their behaviour. Not in Tasmania.

We are now living in a political culture in Tasmania which is openly hostile to transparency. There are probably a number of strands contributing to this culture which have their roots stretching back generations, but there is no doubt that whatever the continuities may be, the predominant, all-powerful coterie of influence which forestry issues carry has greatly exacerbated this.

There are a whole range of State jurisdictional responsibilities where policy formulation is unhealthily framed within this dynamic, including water, all policy formulation related to rural land use, basic infrastructure development, planning, agriculture and tourism to name some. But such has been the skewing of resource distribution towards forestry interests that all other areas of public expenditure are adversely affected, including education, health and essential public services.

This has been the case for some time, but it has become exponentially more serious and divisive since the Gunns’ pulp mill development became the central focus of forestry matters, and especially since the events that took place throughout 2007.

In addition to that, we are also now living in a political-corporate-bureaucratic culture based almost exclusively on careerism and personal and private self-interest rather than altruism. Witness Lara Gidding’s public statement about serving time in the Health portfolio. A step on the ladder, soonest done, soonest quitted.

We are living in a culture which openly promotes the denigration of participatory democracy as political extremism, which openly condemns or ignores independent analysis, and is rigid in its adherence to conformism. It is a culture which fears and detests diversity or difference, and therefore uses all means at its disposal to attack critics, which unfortunately, in the case of Tasmania, is assisted by an acquiescent, complacent and mediocre print media, in the main uninterested in the real significance of the notion of “press freedom and responsibility”.

Cultures encompass. We can’t escape. We are all entrapped, whoever we are, whatever our organisational constructs and defences. This is part of the human condition. Nevertheless, promotion of conformism as a virtue, without examination or analysis, and condemnation of difference as unacceptable, or as heretical, which is endemic in Tasmanian political culture, is driven by the same sort of narrow-minded bigotry which characterised the McCarthyist era in the 1950s in the United States, or which characterised Hansonism in Australia in recent years.

It is important to understand that the elimination of openness and transparency in the Tasmanian political system is not regarded as unethical or morally repugnant behaviour by Labor-Liberal politicians. It is so ingrained that it is de rigueur, a prized principle, an essential value and a guiding virtue.

As such, it is the prism through which they view the decision-making process. It defines how they work and it defines how the links between the political-bureaucratic world and the corporate-business world of large private companies, (some) unions, GBEs and other NGOs with strong vested interests in political outcomes, all work together.

Put that together with a rigid and authoritarian caucus system dominated by a hierarchical leadership team (the mini-cabinet of the cabinet), the ossification of party branch structures and conferences, a politicised bureaucracy and the replacement of policy platforms with cult of the leader, and what do we get?

It is not participatory democracy, and nor is it intended to be. Nor is it representative democracy, which it was intended to be, but it is not because most members of Parliament (especially those in the Labor and Liberal Parties) identify their representation in terms of certain narrowly identified sectional interests, not in terms of the interests of the constituents who elected them.

Any political system which stultifies openness is attempting to make itself unaccountable to its own people. The dangerous flipside is that where accountability is diminished or eliminated, there is no imperative to act on behalf of the best interests of the people. The removal of accountability ensures that democracy and justice are weakened.

But when the absence of openness and transparency is an essential defining characteristic of the system in operation, as it is now is in Tasmania, and is worsening incrementally, there is an on-going tearing away of ethical and moral standards of governance. Each new tear into the fabric produces a new, but lower norm of acceptability, a new benchmark for lowering the bar further … and then a new lower norm … and then another.

The breakdown in governance leads back to forestry, much as carving rocks did on Easter Island, or building pyramids did in ancient Egypt. Societies going nowhere, uselessly expending resources and energy to construct their own destruction, in the interests of a self-interested, self-centred, wealthy and insular political status quo, desperately determined to resist anything and anybody which threatens that.

The rotten Pulp Mill Assessment Act (PMAA) is the legislative precedent which articulates the current Tasmanian norm. It is a building block for similar legislative action in the future, and it is a law which can be applied to the construction of a pulp mill anywhere in Tasmania. It is there in black and white. A precedent has been set which can now be followed, the precedent itself being used as justification for that.

It does well to remember that if the PMAA had been passed by the Commonwealth Parliament, rather than the State Parliament, it would be open to challenge in Australia’s High Court as a breach of the Australian Constitution.

But more than that. We have already seen by a decision of the Tasmanian Supreme Court that the PMAA contains within it exact and precise provisions to ensure that requests for transparency and openness are not permitted under the terms of the Act. That formed the substance of Justice Evans’ judgment in July this year.

But more than that. We still do not know what happened between late February (or perhaps earlier) and the early weeks of March 2007 which produced the essential features of the PMAA, features which replicated much of the existing law pertaining to a development of “State significance”, now transferred en bloc to a development which had withdrawn itself from the assessment process (RPDC assessment) applicable to such projects.

These are just some of the easily identifiable examples of how democracy in Tasmania is now being incrementally ruined from within, but these are symptomatic of a much larger malaise, a malaise which sits at the centre of how Tasmania’s whole future is being determined - not just matters of governance and social justice, but the shape of the whole economy, the shape of the whole social landscape, rural and urban, and the whole nature of the environment we live in and leave as our legacy.

There is an important principle here which can bear repetition. Transparency in the political system is an essential requirement for a democracy in action. Secrecy, decisions in camera, deals behind closed doors, group-think caucus conformity, “commercial in confidence”, lies and deception all weaken democracy because they create distrust and suspicion of all those involved, and of the political processes followed and of the institutional structures and the organisations.