federal politics
12 Feb 2008
Leaving it to the Experts
The blogosphere’s response to Rudd’s 2020 Summit has been much more interesting than the laudatory media coverage, writes Mark Bahnisch
Lindsay Tanner and other Ministers involved in the distinctly unglamorous project of budget-cutting are no doubt discovering the truth of Max Weber's miserable definition of politics: "drilling through hard boards".But Weber also referred to politics as conflict between "warring gods". As well as the quotidian business of governing, politicians need to invest their arts with a certain glamour, courageously pointing a direction forward. A "light on the hill" or the "vision thing".
Kevin Rudd has certainly mastered the art of the symbolic gesture in his short time in office. Signing Kyoto and going to Bali were highly significant, and the apology to the Stolen Generations and the 2020 Summit have blazed into the heavens over the past week, distracting attention from otherwise dour economic and political news.
If considered only in public relations terms, the announcement of the 2020 Summit could hardly have been more successful. The cover of last Monday's Courier-Mail featured an almost full page Kitchener-like portrait of the PM. "This man wants your ideas," was the gist.
Although the gloss has started to come off a week later, press coverage has been overwhelmingly positive, even laudatory. The odd contrarian, like Chris Berg in the Sunday Age, might be arguing the virtues of division and argument (and he has a point, but it's not a popular one), but the talkfest is still being, well, talked about, and almost universally praised to the skies.
Interestingly, the blogosphere has provided something of an exception to this rule. And it's not just about cynicism.
Rudd's first community cabinet meeting demonstrated his intention to avoid being perceived as out-of-touch, which plagued the Howard Government in its final term. It's a play straight from the Peter Beattie textbook, and one so successful that politicos were quick to point out that Steve Bracks did it too, and one of Rudd's colleagues in the Goss Government, Tim Grau, felt sufficiently moved to dispute Beattie's ownership of the idea.
But there was a striking contrast in discussion of the community cabinet and the 2020 Summit in two threads at Larvatus Prodeo. Many commenters downplayed the meaningfulness of public meetings and direct involvement by voters, inclined to dismiss it as a stunt and an opportunity for cranks to have their say. Leave governance to the experts, was the theme. Intriguingly, many of the same folks were over the moon at the prospect of 1000 selected experts descending on Canberra and putting the country to rights over the course of a weekend.
There were in fact two contrasting ideas of governance being played out in the blogosphere on these two issues. One sees it as important to tap the lived experience of individual citizens, and believes that there is something profoundly democratic about the idea that people, sufficiently empowered, can suggest solutions to their own troubles which won't have occurred to policy wonks. A lot of what was good about Mark Latham's leadership tapped into this vein of sentiment.
One thrust of criticism from this group was the exclusionary nature of the 2020 Summit - the fact that summiteers are to pay their own way was highlighted.
The other perspective suggests that policy dilemmas are so intractable and complex that expert and trained minds need to get on with the business of sorting them out. There's a strong sense that such expertise often bangs up against political ratbaggery, and the Howard Government was correctly reviled for putting populism above policy purity.
It is, of course, possible to combine both - as Tim Dunlop, a blogger who also has a political science doctorate in deliberative democracy, has suggested - and the 2020 Summit seems to gesture to both poles, as more information about how it will work becomes available. Glyn Davis will be selecting some participants off his own bat, but choosing others on the basis of self-nomination. So citizens who think they're among the "best and brightest" will get the chance to push their claims. And we're assured that it won't be a corporatist gabfest dominated by "the representatives of large organisations".
So, what's not to like?
It's here that Weber returns to the picture. The great German sociologist was one of the deepest thinkers about the nature of modern politics. In a complex society, he feared, government would be reduced to the "administration of things" - to borrow a notion of Karl Marx's. Putting the demos back in democracy implies a vigorous contest of ideas, sure; but ideas about ends, not means. Unless there really are some brilliant gems to be sifted from the 2020 Summit, it may well end up being about technocratic tinkering.
This leads to two questions, one of which Kevin Rudd has answered. The first - and most obvious - is why the existing sources of expert advice to government are inadequate. Rudd's response is that the public service was demoralised by the Coalition's 11 long years. So the 2020 Summit is, on one level, a way of geeing up the bureaucrats to get on with some genuinely fresh thinking. There's something to this, and it's of a piece with Rudd's praiseworthy action in declining to throw overboard senior public servants closely identified with the Howard regime, and his restraint in foregoing administrative re-organisation in favour of putting the governmental machine to work and getting on with the job.
But the second - and more important - question is: what are the Summit's goals? Is there such a thing as non-partisan "ideas for Australia" or do all solutions carry with them an ideological component? To adopt a Kevinism and answer my own rhetorical question, I come down on the latter side of the divide. The notion that ideas alone will suffice, if enough experts can be locked in a room and told to get on with it, is unsatisfactory from a democratic perspective. It plays deeply to the tune of managerialism so beloved of left-of-centre parties over the last couple of decades. No one ever accused Margaret Thatcher of being short of an idea.
It might be retorted that social democratic parties achieved their major goals - a welfare state and universal provision of public services - in the post-war era. It's often been observed that the failure of these initiatives to bring about the millennium led not just to the rise of neoliberalism but also to an exhaustion of left-of-centre thinking and a defensive posture on the part of social democrats. But this is to fall into the trap of believing that there will ever be a utopian end to politics. The task of social democrats is constant vigilance to ensure that true equality of opportunity can be secured in order to maximise individual liberty.
One criticism that has been mounted of the 2020 Summit is that it lays bare the lack of the vision thing on the part of the Rudd Government. That's slightly unfair - before the election there were occasional flashes of social democratic light among the soundbites, memorably from the PM's own pen in his piece on Boenhoffer in The Monthly. But much ideological differentiation was sacrificed to the vital task of winning power.
It may well be that the 2020 Summit is designed to shift the public debate and put some wind behind the sails of social democracy in the service of navigating the electoral waters towards a second term. That, in my view, would be a good idea, but it would be an even better idea if Kevin Rudd were to articulate his own vision in advance of the Summit to give it a clearly defined ends.
I could, of course, be wrong. But I'd hate to see the fruits of this Summit being a disconnected grab bag of micro-solutions mixed up with motherhood statements signifying not very much. Among other things, that would be a very bad result for democracy. The administration of things isn't much of a vision.
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"Leave governance to the experts…"
But the world is stuffed to the gills with experts! Perhaps that’s one of the reasons why it’s so chaotic, so conflicted, so close to the edge of extinction.
www.dangerouscreation.com
Mark,
I had a piece in The Age last week lambasting the 2020 summit. I don’t mention this out of pique but because I believe the issue I raised is important and you don’t mention it here.
My issue is that I find it absolutely gobsmacking that anyone could put together 10 topic areas for discussion about future directions and not include Education! It has been included only as a question under the topic area The Economy; "How do we get more quality teachers for our kids?" I offer some answers in the piece, namely that we could start by treating schools and schooling as if they mattered and were actually amongst the top ten topic areas for the future. Why would the best and brightest want to go into a profession that is relegated to such minor status?
I suspect this ommission sends a clear message that controversial and emotional topics are to be avoided in the summit, which leads me to expect that it will indeed be a feel good gab fest.
The link to The Age piece is below
www.theage.com.au/news/opinion/education-must-be-on-the-2020-agenda/2008…
I’m sorry to have missed your article, Jane. I’m from Brisbane so I don’t buy the dead tree Age. I normally look at the op/ed pages on line but I was away in Sydney from Wednesday and had no regular internet access. I agree wholeheartedly with what you say regarding how crucial education is, and the structuring of the agenda and discussions will be a very important aspect as to whether anything particularly positive does come out of it. On balance, I’d be surprised if much does.
There’s actually a lot that could be said about the summit - including the topic selection - but space, as you’ll appreciate, is limited and I wanted to concentrate on a particular theme. But I’d very much welcome the widest possible discussion on all aspects of it, including the important points you raise.
Using feedback from a blog to support a premise would seem to me to be a very dubious proposition, one without much credibility.
Some blogs, deliberately perhaps, attract a very narrow range of commenters, folk who seem more interested in refining the art of sledging and trying to show how clever they think they are than looking for answers to problems.
www.dangerouscreation.com
One could hope that the Talk Fest would be something more than that, but the fact that every participant has to pay their own way ensures that only the relatively rich get there.
And one knows that the rich have a very narrow field of view, generally encased in concrete, and totally involved in making profits for themselves. I sincerely doubt that this thing is really meant to do anything other than add some more Rudd flim-flam.
The Stolen Generations Apology was a nice touch, and I agree with it, but at the same time, Mr. ‘me-too’ Rudd is sticking to the Invasion of the NT in present form, within only slight adjustments, and this will cause long term damage which is going to cost a damned sight more to fix than to do something now. Individual lives, and personal pride in self, do not seem to matter too much to this PM, when it relates to Aboriginal peoples. The effects of the ‘Invasion’ will be long standing and cause bitter recriminations, in sections not so much concerned with actual assistance to mothers and children. This should have been attended to immediately on coming to power, not allowing another 6 months to fester.
Dazza.
For a more satirical take on this issue, I refer you to this 1999 piece from The Onion:
"Nation’s Experts Give Up: ‘From Now On, You’re On Your Own,’ Say Experts"
WASHINGTON, DC—Citing years of frustration over their advice being misunderstood, misrepresented or simply ignored, America’s foremost experts in every field collectively tendered their resignation Monday.
"Despite all our efforts to advise this nation, America still throws out its recyclables, keeps its guns in unlocked cabinets where children have easy access, eats three times as much red meat as is recommended, watches seven hours of TV per day, swims less than 10 minutes after eating, and leaves halogen lights on while unattended," said Dr. Simon Peavy, vice-president of the National Association of Experts. "Since you don’t seem to care about things you don’t understand, screw you. We quit."
http://www.theonion.com/content/node/29351