Typically I avoid remarking about politics in other countries but I found this op-ed by former Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd in The Sydney Morning Herald very interesting:
Beneath the sound and light show that passed for Australian politics last week, there is a much deeper question of what underlying forces have been at work that have brought us this low. The uncomfortable truth is, since the coup of June 2010, Australian politics has become vicious, toxic and unstable. The core question is why?
There have been many factors at work. First, the histrionic politics of climate change dividing the nation for more than a decade – we have lacked the national political maturity to just get on with it, despite Australia being the driest continent on earth.
Second, the cult of opinion polls, leaving the political class in permanent fear of losing their jobs if they actually acted on long-term policy.
Third, the juvenile culture of much of the “Young-Labor/Young-Liberal” generation of child politicians, who have never done anything else but politics, who see politics as a game of shafting people, as in their student days, and little else.
Does any of that sound at all familiar to you? It seems to me that our political dysfunction has echoes elsewhere, likely for the same reasons.
The balance of the op-ed is a diatribe against Rupert Murdoch. I refuse to believe that one man if the efficient cause of political acrimony on two continents, thinking that is far more likely that he is just making money by capitalizing on the forces that are already at work.
In the case of the States I would add the 24 hour news cycle to the list of factors.
I think that there are a number of reforms that we could and should put into place. We should abolish pensions for elected officials. We should impose term limits. We might consider imposing controls on opinion polls in the days before an election (as Germany has done).
At least in the United States acrimonious politics goes back to the very foundations of the republic. “Hollywood for ugly people” has higher potential rewards and lower barriers to entry than just about anything else so it tends to attract a certain sort of low individual. When every man, woman, or child is carrying a video camera and the images can be blasted all over the world in seconds, it becomes darned hard to conceal just how low they are.
