Address by Ted Mack
29 August 1997

Original at: http://www.lisp.com.au/~ballots/mackt2.htm

Thank you Mr Chairman for that kind introduction.

I would like to speak about the need for reform of the Australian political-administrative system.

It is a heavy subject but I noticed that the Federal seat of Calare had just about the lowest informal vote in Australia over the last two elections and as the dinner is in support of Peter you are obviously a politically aware and intelligent audience!

I came to politics in 1974 having no previous involvement with any political parties or organisations.

I had worked for a living as an architect for the previous 20 years mostly on hospitals and public housing.

In fact if North Sydney Council had not annoyed me I doubt if I would ever have become involved in politics at all.

I didn't have any burning desire to change the world - just a few simple principles like the workings of government should be totally open to public scrutiny.

I considered that elected representatives should enable people to not only participate in all decisions that affected them but to ultimately find ways to have people make decisions for themselves.

I assumed that the very basis of democracy is that a decision taken by the public as a whole would be right more often than decisions taken by any elite group no matter how wise that group.

I also considered that people entrusted with the public purse should respect that trust and treat public money as they would want other people to treat their money.

You can begin to see perhaps what a collision course I was on with the political parties, their groupies and the bureaucrats.

In any case over the next 20-odd years I had the unique experience of having an independent inside view of 14 years in local government, seven in State Parliament and six in the most exclusive club in Australia - Federal Parliament.

It is, in fact, the only known case of someone being elected to the three levels of government as an independent.

It did not happen because the electors of North Sydney are all carbon monoxide affected or because I had discovered some magic secret of electoral success.

It happened through hard work and because people saw the benefits of those three fundamental principles - open government, decentralised decision-making and financial probity demonstrated in the North Sydney Council for some eight years.

The political result was that by 1990 the major political parties in North Sydney were banished and the Mayor, the State member and the Federal member were all independents.

The fact is that openness, decentralisation of power and probity are incompatible with the major political parties.

Incidentally the moral for local government everywhere is - look after all your residents. If you annoy one of them enough you never know what may happen.

Now all this is by way of background and contrast with the operation of state and federal government.

Over the last decade there have been endless calls by state and federal governments for increased efficiency, no wage increases unless matched by productivity increases, for restructuring, downsizing and deregulation in the name of increased competitiveness and facing the international community in the 21st century.

As a result thousands of jobs have disappeared for example in the steel industry, clothing, transport workers, bank employees. rural workers and of course government employees of all sorts.

Now there is little doubt some restructuring of the country is necessary it is strange that one section of Australian society seems to be totally quarantined from the need for reform - the politicians, senior bureaucrats and the structures of the three levels of government.

With breathtaking hypocrisy the three arms of government the judiciary. the executive government and the parliament are excluded from any real suggestion for reform.

Yet it is these monstrously inefficient arms of government which have become the major dead weight on the country.

In the last ten years while calling for the community to reform, tighten their belts, to get rid of inefficient management and work practices, government has simultaneously expanded enormously as have the salaries, perks and lurks of politicians and senior bureaucrats.

The expansion has been almost in proportion to rising unemployment and mirrored the increasing disparity between rich and poor.

In the recent Federal Budget most items were reduced or increased only slightly - except for one item, the cost of running Federal Parliament. It jumped by 12 percent or $50 million.

Australian State and Federal Parliaments are largely an expensive charade most of the time - Lower Houses are normally rubber stamps for whichever political party constitutes the executive government.

The lack of separation of powers in Australia between executive government and parliament, breaches the very fundamental purpose of a Lower House which is to be a check on executive government.

Yet separation of powers has been recognised as an essential part of the democratic system for over two centuries.

The House of Representatives only once or twice every 50 years or so ever makes a decision.

Virtually all decisions are made by small groups before Parliament meets and many in these small groups are not elected or accountable.

In all State and Federal Lower Houses the vote is always the same between elections, except in the rare occasions of hung parliaments or someone crossing the floor.

Even as a forum for ventilating ideas Lower Houses as they now stand they are largely a waste of time.

All the press usually reports is the bullfight of question time as entertainment and sick personality clashes.

Most speeches are the equivalent of yodelling in the bathroom and Federal Parliament at a cost of over $3 million a day, is the most expensive and unwatched television program in history.

Most Party members usually have no idea or even interest what they are voting on except if they are one of the few allowed by the government to speak on a bill - Why should they?

If they don't vote as the Party Whips dictate they will lose their seat.

The Senate is a virtual obscenity and the previous Prime Minister Paul Keating's statement that the Senators are "unrepresentative swill" is mostly correct.

Most Senators represent no-one but their factional bosses and simply do what they are told.

Why wouldn't they - being handed a winnable Senate position is worth close to $6 million for just one Term.

The Senate is supposed to represent the States but never has. It does however on occasions play a useful role as at least some check on executive power but as a democratic institution it is a sick joke with, for example. one Tasmanian vote equalling around 14 New South Wales or 12 Victorian votes.

If the executive government controls the Senate then it is an irrelevant rubber stamp like the House of Representatives.

If the Government does not control the Senate then the Government is undemocratically frustrated. Either way it is little more than humbug.

A closer glimpse of the full horror of the Senate has been provided in recent months by Senators Woods, Colston and Crighton-Browne.

We should be almost thankful to them in a sense for showing up the system as it really is.

Yet the travel rorts, junkets to the south of France to sample cheeses with girl friends, the 46 overseas trips for Colston were all acquiesced to by both parties until the bombs went off.

The largest organisation in the country, Telstra, was privatised, not because of the merits but simply because of the ego and greed of one Senator, fully sanctioned by the Prime Minister.

So much for democracy.

Yet even this is just the tip of the iceberg.

In the first year of office the Howard Ministry has racked up 63 overseas junkets exceeding the excesses of the Hawke and Keating governments - It seems not a week goes by without another revelation of Federal and State politicians rorting the system.

A system which is not only outrageously generous even if operated with integrity, but one that is so loose that anyone on the make can have an orgy.

Recently it was revealed that five National Party Ministers spent $250,000 for air charter costs and more MPs are being investigated by the police.

One of the National Party Ministers also picked up an extra $35,000 in untaxed travel allowances, mostly for staying at no cost at his wife's unit in Melbourne at $320/night.

He also happens to be one of the richest men in Parliament which gives lie to the pathetic excuse that if you pay peanuts you get monkeys.

The truth is if you pay more peanuts you often get gorillas.

Then there is the notorious Parliament Pension Scheme totally unfunded, rum by the members who can and do extend the benefits at any time they like at no cost to themselves.

At the moment you can pay in about $75,000, retire in your 30s, and get a guaranteed $2 to S3 million during your lifetime.

The Story is consistently one of one law for the politicians and another for the public.

This principle and the perks and lurks are not confined just to Federal MPs.

It flows through in various forms to the States, to the judiciary and bureaucracy at Federal and State level and to countless semi-government bodies.

All that you can say is that we do not appear to have yet reached the level of plundering the public purse of General Mobutu, Marcos or the Suharto family although our private crooks such as Bond, Skase, Rothwell and Quinn are certainly world class.

I just hope the future does not show that our public crooks can match them all. This is not to say that there aren't a great number of honest people in politics.

Of course there am but while ever they remain silent and make no effort to advocate reform, the politicians as a whole and the political institutions will be held in contempt.

While ever there is not a genuinely independent tribunal which really reflects community values, transparently setting and monitoring politicians and salaries and perks then the rorts will continue.

Nevertheless on a wider view, what sort of future does this relatively miniscule Country of 18 million people have with nine Governments, nine legal systems, 15 houses of parliament, around 850 full-time politicians and their associated bureaucracies spewing out truck-loads of legislation annually?

A level of over-government unmatched in any comparable country.

We have almost four times the number of MPs as the United Kingdom and twice as many as New Zealand and the United States proportion to our population.

Federal, State and even Local government all too often seem to be engaged in guerrilla warfare with a Byzantine maze of overlapping functions, power struggles, empire building and character assassination of opponents, in between milking the system and overcrowding the airports of Australia for the ever-increasing overseas junkets.

In addition to the 840-odd MPs in Australia there are some 700-odd local governments and 10,000 or so local councillors mostly trying to jump on the full-time gravy-train.

In almost every area of public policy, health, education, environment, transport, etc, the story is an unbelievable waste of public money with federal, state and local politicians and bureaucrats jealousy guarding their power or seeking political advantage rather than any real public interest.

It seems impossible for most politicians to consider any issue except in terms of partisan or personal advantage.

Government seems to consist of two mafia families seeking control of the public purse for distribution to themselves, supporters, the special interests who find them and for buying votes at the next election.

Instead of any attempt at reform, we see a series of unbelievably expensive Royal Commissions, inquiries, Ombudsman's and Auditors' reports in all states showing mismanagement and corruption.

It is far more than just a case of a few rotten apples. It is the system itself.

The lack of faith in public institutions translates into a siege mentality by governments and harassment at every turn.

Governments become moribund and get replaced but the cycle just begins again.

We are massively over-governed and badly governed.

That is why we have such a plethora of ombudsmen, auditors, royal commissions and inquiries of almost every conceivable variety - all of which are an enormous overhead.

While there are many people of goodwill in the system, they are trapped by the failure to adapt our organisational structure to change since Federation - our administrative structures were formed a century ago in a vastly different world.

Our Constitution, while having many good points, is and was largely a parochial compromise between the State politicians of the day.

It was patched together with bits of the British and American systems and served reasonably well for about 70 years.

The States were separate colonies with largely arbitrary boundaries drawn up in London.

In the 1895 even separate railway systems in each state made some sense as did the roughly Westminster form of government before it was overwhelmed by the modern political party system.

The founding fathers could hardly have envisaged the world of today with say the paralysis of nine impossibly expensive adversary-based legal systems and a continuous "Balkanised" warfare among the states and the Commonwealth, let alone the problems of internationalisation.

Faced with this chaos and frustration many call for the abolition of the states.

However we need state or regional government.

There are national, regional and local interests and each should be represented.

However there is an overwhelming case for a massive reform and rationalization of functions between the Commonwealth, States and Local Government based on decentralisation of decision-making to the lowest level possible.

Some reform has started but it is proceeding at a glacial pace as you would expect when bureaucrats trade power.

There is a strong case for more state or regional governments.

Australia probably needs up to 20 states or regions based on community of interest rather than the present arbitrary nineteenth century state boundaries but they don't need Westminster systems of government.

They could have single chamber parliaments at proper levels of representation, ie. around 50,000 voters per representative, directly elected administrations removed from parliament in a non-adversarial system, together with the people having the right to initiate referendums.

This would go close to halving the number of MPs in Australia.

Limitation of terms of office is also necessary for all elected positions.

Local government, in comparison with the other two levels of government, is structurally not all that bad.

Not that that is saying much.

But there is a certain truth in the cliche that local government is closer to the people.

Certainly councillors generally reflect the community better than state or federal representatives particularly as they are less captive of party powerbrokers.

Councillors are usually more diverse with higher proportions of women and a wide range of ages and occupations.

I admit that local government usually appears to be more rat-baggy, but that is because it is more representative of the community.

After all at least ten percent of the community are off the planet to some degree and they are usually represented by one or two somewhat mad councillors.

The lack of separation of powers between governments and parliaments along with the lack of fair proportional voting are the major defects of the Australian system.

After all the voting system is the foundation of democracy, yet ours is a winner take all system where the Majority of votes don't count.

The Queensland and Western Australian Royal Commissions identified the dominance of the Executive Government through the lack of separation of powers as the major cause of corruption in those states in the 1980s.

Ominously Victoria is presently showing every sign of reinforcing their conclusions.

After all, you can hardly call yourself a democracy if you can't vote directly to decide the government and voting is not based on one vote one value.

Far from the Prime Minister's constitutional convention, carefully confined to relatively minor issues, we desperately need a new Constitution and political restructure for the 21st century.

Whether the head of state is changed from the Queen to an appointed or elected Australian is hardly vital to the country.

It is a little like deciding the merits of a car by discussing the shape of the hub caps rather than the engine or suspension.

I suspect many people who feel passionate about it are really operating from historical sectarian or racial prejudices.

Their avoidance of any real constitutional issues and concentration on a type of ethnic cleansing and crushing of the cultural values of a sizeable proportion of Australians by most in the Republican movement is, in my view, very ugly.

Of course we will dispense with the Monarchy in the fullness of time as the final act of obtaining full independence - but it is a minor matter compared to all the other reforms needed which directly affect every single person.

However to get things in perspective we need to realise that democracy is a relatively new method of government in the world's history.

It has only seriously been pursued since the 18th century and it must be admitted it has made very slow progress.

Today about 30 - 40 countries could be called faintly democratic our of the 200-odd that now exist in the world.

None is fully satisfactory but all are continuing to develop in various ways.

We certainly will not be still voting for tweedledum or tweedledee every three years in fifty years time.

Most of the English speaking world, excluding the United States, has struggled along with the representative-adversary model of government for about 200 years.

By representative government I mean the system whereby we elect representatives for three years or so and delegate all our power to them and then pass judgment on them at the next election.

However we should realise that this is only a very primitive and unsatisfactory form of democracy.

There is now little need to delegate our rights.

It's not much good taking revenge on your representatives one or two years later at the next election if they have voted contrary to your views or put you out of a job.

It is the specific decision that people are interested in and we should all have a right to participate in all decisions which affect us.

We need to move on to participatory and direct democracy and dispense with formal oppositions in government and their pathetic reversals of policies depending whether they won or lost the last election.

It is not only unnecessary to have formalised oppositions in Parliament, they are mostly counterproductive.

Just look at the failure of attempts at say, constitutional or tax reform over the last 20 years.

Both the Swiss and American systems do not have formal oppositions.

While they are far from perfect they are more advanced models of democratic structures.

Unfortunately America's democracy is substantially destroyed however, by its reliance on vast quantities of bribes euphemistically called campaign donations as well as its voting system.

We are also well down that road.

As things stand the rigid Australian Two Party system, has centralised Power to a very high degree and has totally overwhelmed whatever merits existed in the Westminster system in 1901.

Both our legal and political systems are based on the adversarial method.

The fundamental flaw of this method is that it is morally corrupt in that truth is irrelevant - winning is all that counts and winning generally depends on money.

The legal system and the political systems have now become largely self-serving institutions with diminishing public credibility.

The legal system is now so horrendously expensive that even a pretext of justice is only for the rich or those using other People's money.

Quite obviously given the number of People acquitted in court either the police arrest many innocent people or the courts set free many guilty ones.

The party-political system has corrupted parliament to the point where many members often vote against what they, or even what their electorates, believe in on a regular basis.

After a few years many do not believe in anything.

It is therefore easy to advocate any position you like depending on the supposed advantage to the party at any particular time.

That is why the community has little faith in mainstream political institutions leaving the way open for extremists.

The bottom line is that the traditional representative government system is no longer adequate and we really do need to evolve a better system.

The case for representative democracy as we know it, in contrast to democracy, was definitively made by Edmund Burke in Britain shortly after his election to the Westminster Parliament in 1774.

Shortly after he was elected he told his electors that he would use his judgement in making decisions for the benefit of the whole community rather than sacrifice that judgement to the views of his electors.

That view is regularly echoed around Australia in editorials today.

It is the justification for breaking election promises and for the theory that governments need to take the hard decisions for the benefit of the country or state or municipality soon after an election so that the electorate will presumably have the time to forget about it by the next election.

It shows a basic contempt for the electorate and it is founded on the very elitist view that what the public wants will invariably be wrong.

In my view this theory is not only morally wrong but in practical terms only leads to public frustration and apathy and is the fundamental reason why government and politicians are held in such low regard.

Incidentally Edmund Burke was thrown out of office at the election following his speech.

Most elected representatives, when first elected, vow to faithfully represent the people. Once elected however it is usually a different matter.

The great expertise of bureaucracy at all levels of government is in seducing elected representatives whose main purpose is keeping the system accountable and being accountable themselves.

Elected representatives soon become enmeshed in complexities and self-importance and seem to love the drama of dealing with confidential matters in secrecy.

In Canberra all the staff of Parliament House are trained to always call members by name and people are actually employed to open doors for you.

With free cars and overseas junkets and a host of personal benefits always on tap, it is very easy to develop an inflated sense of your own importance.

It is easy for representatives to forget that by entering into secret discussions a climate of corruption is created and those the representatives are supposed to represent are betrayed.

Representatives who go into closed meetings are destroying public faith in the institutions of government, avoiding accountability and exposing themselves to corruption charges.

They are really being fools or knaves as there is no such thing as secrecy.

In any meeting of two or more people the smart money can always find out what went on.

Only the Public is kept in the dark.

Secrecy is in fact an essential component of moral and financial corruption.

The only defence is openness and accountability.

Because bureaucracy tends to be expert and specialist it inevitably develops its own jargon, its own view of the world and set of values.

It is inherently elitist.

But values are not a matter of expertise - only the community has a right to determine values - not the bureaucracy.

Not the politicians.

Not the lawyers or academics.

It is not that people directing bureaucracies and elites are malevolent, it is just the natural order of things to be cynical about the "great unwashed" - the public - let alone their supposed masters, the elected representatives.

The Yes Minister series on television is deadly accurate.

The fact is bureaucracy and the public, do not usually have a common interest.

If they did we would not need elected representatives or elections.

One of the great traps for elected representatives is to accept the proposition, often proposed by the bureaucrats, "look we are all here to work for the community as a team".

Any government. that accepts this proposition soon ends up in a state of siege with the elected and the bureaucrats inside the fort with an angry public galloping around outside, screaming for blood.

There should always be two teams.

There must always be a clear separation between the elected and the bureaucracy if the organisation is to be accountable.

Since the Second World War elitism in public decision-making in democracies around the world has become an increasing problem.

It has grown with the complexity of society and the explosion in bureaucracy and academia.

Directions of public policy, not only technical decisions, but values have been imposed on the community.

Social engineering has been rampant.

This is not to say that what the elite have imposed has been right or wrong, but it has been forgotten or not realised that in a democracy the public must accept decisions and understand them.

Many elected representatives and governments have paid the penalty for their failure to understand this.

For example it took several years of meetings and experts to convince Margaret Thatcher to institute a poll tax and it cost her the Prime Ministership.

In Canada the government imposed a GST and went from 150 seats in their parliament to just two seats at the following election.

The French Government recently paid the cost for listening too much to the elite in the European Commission and ignoring the public.

There is no question that through the 13 years of the previous Labor Government, elitism dominated in policy areas such as economic rationalism, immigration and multiculturalism and Aboriginal affairs and they paid the electoral penalty.

Any questioning of the elite views on these matters was generally stifled by personal vilification.

It was inevitable that this attitude would eventually create a Pauline Hanson.

A great deal of elite opinion in the media, academia and from Labor Party partisans who cannot accept that they lost the last election, is now quite hysterical.

Many journalists, particularly at the ABC and the Sydney Morning Herald, have done the community a great disservice by attempting to legitimise vilification as a means of arguing public issues.

I say that having been a lifelong supporter of the ABC and a reader of the Sydney Morning Herald.

They do not appear to have realised that no amount of character assassination of Hanson and those attending her meetings as uneducated rednecks, Luddites, fascists and racists will do any good.

We must deal with the specific issues and there are certainly many aspects of public policy on economic rationalism, immigration, multiculturalism and Aboriginal affairs with which a wide range of the community feel dissatisfaction.

I am confident, however, that extremist views will only ever be supported by a small minority.

It is tempting to say that politicians who wrap themselves in the flag and appeal to patriotism should not only be reminded of George Bernard Shaw's statement that "Patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel", but should also realise that patriotism and nationalism must be approached with some caution.

It has been the most evil force of the 20th century, killing many millions.

In summary what I am saying is that the traditional way of making political decisions by getting the numbers, winning in court, trampling people's values or humiliating opponents does not work in the long run. If you leave bitter sections of the community as losers who feel they did not get a fair go they will come back to bite you.

The process of arriving at decisions must be transparent and fair and be accepted as such.

Bad ideas can never be banned or be beaten by screaming abuse.

They can only be defeated by a better idea.

Unfortunately political parties, as they now exist, can never reform the system.

Not the Labor Party, not the Liberals or Nationals.

Really they are now all just self-serving branches of the same party, the Laberal Party or to revert to Mafia allusions - the Syndicate.

It is impossible for them to consider almost anything except in terms of Partisan advantage.

They are in fact the heart of the Problem and the biggest obstacle to reform. Real reform, and reform of the parties themselves, can only occur when they are rejected.

Fortunately there is every sign that the political duopoly is slowly being deregulated and for that reason alone Peter Andren and people like him should be supported.