Select Page

Whatever your political persuasion or predilection, this is the read so far of 2018. Chris Kenny nails what ailes the Australian political project.

What Kenny points to is the trend by the political class and the Lear Jet elites to virtue signal. That is, being seen to be high minded and doing good deeds when in fact doing little or nothing or even bad and in many instances, creating a problem where none existed or making a bad situation worse. (think energy reliability, availability and affordability) and all at great expense to the taxpayer. Education and addressing aboriginal disadvantage are two more areas of public policy exploited by gestures.
A lot of talk, a lot of gesturing a lot of workshopping and consulting, a lot of expense but no results.

The results of their whims and gestures are unimportant. The outcomes simply don’t matter as it is about being seen to gesture and about displaying deference and servility.

It is what has come to become known as “gesture politics.”

It’s about saying or doing or projecting the image that “I’m a good person” and if you don’t agree you are by definition a bad person.

A cut and paste and full column below.

“…We have safe injecting rooms for heroin addicts in which it is illegal to smoke a cigarette. We defend the rights of drug addicts on methadone to drive their cars while we intervene to prevent pensioners from obtaining Nurofen Plus from their chemist without a prescription from their doctor. And we whinge about the cost of Medicare.

We impose costly renewable energy subsidies on electricity users and then offer additional welfare to families who can’t afford their power bills. We take policy decisions aimed at ensuring coal generation and other “dirty” industries are no longer financially viable, then we lament the loss of manufacturing jobs. We look to subsidise new industries to reboot the towns and regions made redundant. And we buy diesel generators to make up the energy shortfall.

The past decade has been one of waste and dysfunction. Perhaps we are getting close to identifying the key. It is not simply left versus right, pragmatism versus ideology or even jejune fashions versus the wisdom of experience — although, in part, it is all those things. I think the organising principle here is public gesture.

Gesture politics works hand-in-hand with identity politics. They are part of the same prism where politics is about our self-image rather than about outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether a carbon tax works or not, it has done its job by providing a vehicle for its supporters to demonstrate their virtue. A gesture made is a policy goal achieved.

The disease runs much deeper. The rationale for bidding wars on education funding has nothing to do with schooling outcomes — indeed, data disproving the correlation between school spending and outcomes abounds.

Our education spending has grown dramatically over recent decades while our comparative performance has declined. From Gonski to the Orwellian jingoism of the Building the Education Revolution, the imperative has not been better educated kids but more dramatic gestures of education as a priority.

FULL COLUMN BELOW

“….We temper our expectations for the coming year because we have become inured by a shambolic lack of direction in our political leadership, public debate and media dissection. Expectations have been raised so often and so seldom met that it is difficult to discern reality from the social media zeitgeist, let alone identify the root causes of our malaise.

Is it a lack of quality personnel in our parliaments? Are we filling parliaments from a narrowing gene pool of professional politicians, turning our backs on broader experience from lives lived? Can we blame the increasing superficiality in our fractured and commercially challenged media? Or should we look to an education system driven more by fashion and progressive posturing than it is by tangible outcomes and building on our civilisational legacy? Some will blame the Balkanised feuding that infects the public debate through social media and its vicious trolls.

Have the political parties lost touch with the mainstream or has the mainstream become insular? Does compulsory voting grant a casting vote on every issue to the disengaged? Or have we turned our backs on the major parties because they have lost their way? Are the core challenges of economic management, fiscal restraint and maintaining social order too difficult for modern politicians to manage or too boring to keep them focused? Are governments trying to do too much because they can’t undertake what really matters, or are voters demanding too much from government because we have surrendered a sense of self-reliance?

In a nation as blessed as ours it is incongruous that our political/media class has an over-abundance of ambition when it comes to futile gestures that pretend to save the planet yet lacks sufficient will to control what is within its grasp by trimming spending to sustainable levels or redressing the social and economic disadvantage that still bedevils our indigenous people? Our priorities seem skewed.

We have safe injecting rooms for heroin addicts in which it is illegal to smoke a cigarette. We defend the rights of drug addicts on methadone to drive their cars while we intervene to prevent pensioners from obtaining Nurofen Plus from their chemist without a prescription from their doctor. And we whinge about the cost of Medicare.

We impose costly renewable energy subsidies on electricity users and then offer additional welfare to families who can’t afford their power bills. We take policy decisions aimed at ensuring coal generation and other “dirty” industries are no longer financially viable, then we lament the loss of manufacturing jobs. We look to subsidise new industries to reboot the towns and regions made redundant. And we buy diesel generators to make up the energy shortfall.

We build up a successful immigrant culture based on orderly migration, yet those who argue most strongly for multiculturalism push for an open-slather approach to border control that would undermine all that has been achieved. We build an economy partly based on our cheap energy advantage but decide to turn ourselves into a high-cost energy nation that exports its cheap energy and its carbon emissions overseas. Carbon emissions still rise globally, but we pat ourselves on the back.

Apart from absurdity, you will struggle to find a common thread that links these and other public policy paradoxes. Surely the biggest challenge for 2018 is to work out what is wrong with our national affairs in order to do better. The past decade has been one of waste and dysfunction. Perhaps we are getting close to identifying the key. It is not simply left versus right, pragmatism versus ideology or even jejune fashions versus the wisdom of experience — although, in part, it is all those things. I think the organising principle here is public gesture.

Gesture politics has become the cancer of our system. It is running rampant now because social media has become to the media/political class what steroids were to sport. The digitalised media has become the short-term artificial performance enhancer of politics that has broken records and thrilled the crowds but has destroyed individual participants and, unchecked, will eventually kill the entire contest. Fuelled by instant social media adulation or admonition, our politicians, commentators, academics and analysts focus increasingly on gestures rather than outcomes.

Public figures such as these devise, support, endorse, enact and prescribe policies based not so much on their likely effectiveness but on what they demonstrate about the intentions of their proponents. Hence you back a carbon tax not because it will save the planet but because supporting it identifies you as someone who wants to save the planet.

Gesture politics works hand-in-hand with identity politics. They are part of the same prism where politics is about our self-image rather than about outcomes. It doesn’t matter whether a carbon tax works or not, it has done its job by providing a vehicle for its supporters to demonstrate their virtue. A gesture made is a policy goal achieved.

Business is not immune. Banks ban investments in projects or sectors — often related to coal — not based on financial fundamentals but because of what the investment will do for the image of the bank — and to inoculate against a looming social media campaign if they back the bottom line.

This triumph of gesture over judgment is the only way to explain our national obsession with climate-change policy. Surely even our Greens MPs can’t be deluded enough to think Australia’s emissions reductions can have any discernible impact on the global environment. And no one could deny the increased costs forced on to domestic consumers and industry. Families face financial hardship and people lose jobs in coal-fired power stations, mines, manufacturing or myriad associated small businesses in order to make a national gesture.

Both major parties are committed to the Paris Agreement emissions reduction targets, despite the US abandoning them and most countries — in particular China — being asked to do nothing. Malcolm Turnbull and Bill Shorten never tell us what their climate policies will achieve for the climate or the planet — policy outcomes are superfluous; they just tell us they will meet their Paris climate objectives. The gesture is everything.

Workers can lose their jobs and pensioners can struggle to pay their power bills while politicians get to identify with ill-defined but fashionable campaigns to save the planet — while global emissions rise. Having severely distorted our energy market with mandatory renewable energy targets, the proposed solution from the Coalition is to impose a national energy guarantee, which is a market intervention that imposes an obligation to provide the reliability of supply that has been undercut by the previous intervention.

Of the three stated energy imperatives — reliability, affordability and emissions reductions — only two have practical necessity. We need affordable and reliable power but those requirements are compromised by the aim of reducing emissions. Our pragmatic needs are made hostage to a climate gesture that can have no beneficial impact on the planet (we are reducing our 1.3 per cent of global carbon emissions to about 1.1 per cent while the global total rises). Yet the domestic economic harm is demonstrable.

No goal is achieved except that of demonstrating global warming awareness to a domestic political audience and a global diplomatic coterie. Gesture politics.

Pressed for any economic advantage the proponents are left with an embarrassing line about “first-mover” advantages that doesn’t withstand scrutiny. If renewable and battery storage technology is advancing as rapidly as the proponents like to suggest, then the smartest thing for Australia to do would be to sweat our carbon-fuelled energy assets and stall our new generation investments until we can go straight to a proven and cheap renewable-storage model. But there is no gesture to be had in prudent inaction.

Still, the disease runs much deeper. The rationale for bidding wars on education funding has nothing to do with schooling outcomes — indeed, data disproving the correlation between school spending and outcomes abounds.

Our education spending has grown dramatically over recent decades while our comparative performance has declined. From Gonski to the Orwellian jingoism of the Building the Education Revolution, the imperative has not been better educated kids but more dramatic gestures of education as a priority.

We pay extra taxes so the politicians can parade on street corners like the Pharisees.

Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey foolishly broke a “no new taxes” promise by introducing a temporary debt levy. Was it designed to fix the budget? Of course not. It was a gesture to demonstrate their desire to spread the pain of fiscal repair. It was designed to mollify the left and spectacularly misfired. Now Labor promises to reimpose it permanently as an additional “tax on the rich”. The Coalition would have done better to have the courage of its low tax convictions, and its claim that the government has a spending rather than a revenue problem.

State governments and supermarkets ban plastic bags not because it will end litter but because it provides them with an opportunity to posture about their opposition to litter. Local councils used to get above their station by declaring themselves nuclear-free zones, now they dabble in the global tinderbox of the Israeli-Palestinian imbroglio by flirting with the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement. Clearly they do not do this because they believe they can help resolve the conflict but because they want to make a gesture about their own sensibilities. Most of us hate cruelty to animals but how on earth can you demonstrate such virtue and appeal to like-minded people on Twitter and Facebook? Perhaps by banning the live cattle trade or scrapping the entire greyhound racing industry. Gestures of rare genius.

Don’t like obesity and want to make a sanctimonious gesture? Trumpeting a sugar tax is for you. Oppose litter but are worried people don’t know you always put your rubbish in a bin? Join the campaign to outlaw helium-filled balloons for kids. Or devise a return-and-earn scheme for drink containers. No policy is worth backing unless it gives you a platform to signal your virtue.

One day we will get over this stuff and focus on core policy objectives along with competent implementation. Sadly, I don’t think this will be the year…” The Cancer of Gesture Politics