Tasmania’s ethical and moral political wasteland

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.