Distant Voices

Nobody smiles much on the 6.55am tram.  Drawn faces and tired eyes stare out the windows at the darkness as we limp through the northern suburbs of Melbourne.  Outside, cars streams by bumper-to-bumper. Close, but still moving for now.  The world is a busy place at this hour.  Stop-by-stop, the tram fills uncomfortably.  Office managers, apprentices, retail workers, hospital staff, receptionists, the occasional suit, you and me.  All of us joined in our lonely migration and the weird silence that hangs all around us.  When we get caught at traffic lights, up and down the tram there are anxious glances at watches .  Mental calculations, consequences and responses.  We’d be on the train if they weren’t so few and far between.  Meanwhile, my phone goes off in my pocket.  My wife has sent through a photo of my young son. I didn’t get to see him again this morning as he was still asleep when I left.  Seeing his little face makes my chest feel tight.  I wonder what sacrifices my fellow passengers also make to be here on this tram every morning and I’m sure there are many who give away a lot more than me.  The unrequited nobility of work-a-day people.

We are the people who were forgotten in last week’s hollow leadership tantrum within the Gillard government.  We were forgotten by too many of our federal Labor parliamentarians in their ambition-induced amnesia, cocooned in their own mythology.  Forgotten by the virginal young turks in Ministerial offices as they spun the bottle and trembled in breathless anticipation.  Forgotten by the over-heated ideologues in the media as they clutched their loaded pens and bemoaned the lack of a money shot.

So when Labor Senator David Feeney fronts the ABC’s 7.30 program to speak on behalf of the government after the day’s pointless furies and says that now Labor can get back to its “core business” of defeating the Liberals in the polls, it is confirmed that the federal parliamentary Labor Party has become more consumed with power than with people.  So when Julia Gillard fires another cynical accusation of misogyny at Tony Abbott and then cuts support to single mothers and families with newborns, while posing for photos with vile woman-hater Kyle Sandilands, it is confirmed that this is a government obsessed with means rather than ends.  When we see our representatives more focussed on their own protection rather than ours, it is confirmed that this is government that has lost its way and drifted far from the people and values it purports to stand for.  Indeed, the idea of its re-election may now be the only thing that would crack open a smile on the 6.55am tram.

But governments never really pay their failures.  Ultimately, the joke is on us.  And this one is a joke in two parts, with a bitter punchline that will be played out with the (now certain) election of a rampant and emboldened Abbott government. A punchline set up by the failure of this Gillard government.  There is always tragedy at the heart of comedy ... [fades to static]

Blind Panic

Somewhere between being an attentive father and husband, amateur political blogger and obsessed cyclist, I find time to ply my trade as a consultant.  Through my day job, I’ve become acutely aware that, other than optometrists and soothsayers, there are only two types of people in the world who actually draw meaning from the term “vision”: being consultants and political bloggers.  While I might think that makes me a “visionary”, it actually means I’m just a strategy-geek and the rest of the world goes a little glassy-eyed every time I take to the whiteboard.  Quite rightly too. 

“Vision”, unfortunately, is a vague and nebulous concept that can hide all manner of sins. It’s unfortunate because, in a number of my recent posts, I’ve been guilty of referring to the need for governments to articulate an engaging vision for our country.  Now, for those of you playing “bullshit bingo”, you’ll note the triple word play in the preceding sentence (articulate, engaging and vision), plus the double word score for getting them in alphabetical order.  While, for those of you still reading at this point, first of all, hang in there because there’s some cool images to come and, secondly, something of a defence of the case for vision... 

Despite its limitations and connotations (or perhaps because of them), “vision” is the right word when talking about something as complex and uncertain as the future of a country.  After all, what we’re talking about is defining an overarching direction or potential image of our society with lots and lots of wiggle room.  Regardless of this ephemeral quality, “visions” are important, even essential, to the extent that they force us to think about the kind of nation we want, the kind of nation we can actually be and the challenges and barriers we face to get there.  In that sense, vision is not a “thing” or a statement or a description, rather it is a process that causes us to think about the future in a serious way.  Because the future is conjecture and assumption, and is more unpredictable than we’d like to admit, the real power of vision is most evident not in its articulation, but in its absence.  That is, it is evident in the failure to think about, describe and plan for a desired future.  It is evident in the failure of vision.

Australia suffers from a failure of vision in many areas – health, energy and education are well-worn discussion topics.  Another particularly interesting, and strangely invisible area, is our failure of economic vision.  It is interesting because we don’t have to look far back into western political history to find dramatic examples of the effects of such failures that are eerily similar, at least on the surface, to what we have here in Australia.  Examples that under-score the power of vision in its absence – where successive governments failed to prepare a nation for the future in the face of impending and unavoidable change on a massive scale.  Examples that show how a failure of vision turned the opportunity for national advancement into social conflict and turned the chance for evolution into extinction.

At present, our economy is driven by and addicted to an unprecedented resources boom.  Such is our dependency on this boom that no-one seems willing to ask the question: what happens after the rush?  Thinking beyond the boom seems to be outside the scope of our vision. It seems we are doing little to prepare ourselves for an Australia that is not riding on the back of the coal train or the iron-ore ship.  We have seen this blindness before.  While the specifics of the situations may have their differences, the similarity lays in the failure of governments to articulate and drive a long-term agenda to avoid an impending crunch point.  In this case, a crunch point where an entire industry becomes “uneconomic” – as will surely happen in large parts of our mining and resources industry in time (if it isn’t happening already).  Thus, in the following images, we may see a glimpse of our future.  Our vision if we can’t get vision right ... [fades to static]









Mandate This

Last weekend, I had a revelation.  Somewhat worryingly, it happened between the ending of an episode of The Family Guy and before the start of Doomsday Preppers.  I’m not sure whether that says more about the world at large or just my viewing habits, but it’s probably a cause for concern either way.  In any case, the revelation was that ice hockey may be the greatest sport in the world.  After watching just a couple of minutes of the Blackhawks versus Avalanches game, I was hooked. I’d love to tell you that it was the speed and skill that lured me in.  Yes, they were all part of the appeal, but let’s be honest: it’s all about the violence.

Australian politics is a lot like a game of ice hockey.  It can be brutal, it can seem chaotic and, while the objective is simply to win the game, the audience is really just hanging on the next bone crunching body-check ... and if that check takes someone out of the game, all the better.  We pump our firsts and bay for more.

Question Time in the NHL

Now, I don’t subscribe to the theory of a long-gone “golden age” of politics, when an informed and considered populace voted for well-intentioned candidates on matters of substance.  Politics has always been about conflict, it has always been personal and it has rarely, if ever, been about altruism.  Even in the “good ole days” – you know the ones before we gave the vote to women, poor people and those dark skinned chaps.  While the nature of public discourse may have changed since democracy became more, well, democratic, the fact is that more people are engaged, at some level, by the political game than ever before.  Today’s political consumers might only connect with politics at what some might deem to be a superficial level (having been encouraged by those leading public discourse to connect in such a superficial way), but they are demanding creatures nonetheless. The political consumer is a creature that has been trained by marketers, the media and even governments to expect that its expectations will be fulfilled, now.  It is an animal that does not submit to rule.

This represents a major challenge to any politician or party that still believes that winning an election actually provides a “mandate”.  Like much of the symbolism of parliament, the notion of mandate is now little more than a cute antiquity.  Today, politics exists within a frame of permission to govern, rather than mandate.  Permission is a dynamic concept, ever changing over time.  The concepts, policies and people it is attached to can reverse, resolve and reconfigure in days.  Permission is temporary and requires constant tending.  In the age of immediacy, the lumbering years-long mandate has simply been out evolved.  Winning an election no longer represents the successful achievement of a political objective.  It is the beginning, the entry ticket, to a contest with the electorate to sustain permission.

This fickle-nature of permission is not necessarily a bad thing.  It does not in itself necessitate, as some might suggest, poll-driven politics.  Rather, it requires governments to demonstrate genuine leadership.  That is, a government cannot only concern itself with the development and implementation of policy, but, quite rightly, it must also bring people with it.  It must inspire and motivate voters to come on and stay on the journey.  A different kind of communication from government is required.  It starts with the selling of a vision or, at least, a single galvanising narrative.  Governments that don’t clearly stand for something relevant, meaningful and easily articulated cannot sustain our permission, because no-one can be inspired to follow no direction when what we want is to be part of a story we believe in.  People will even make sacrifices for the right story.  But a story is an organic process – it feeds off its audience and the second it stops being told, the instant it stops evolving and moving forward, or in the moment in contradicts itself, it dies. 

Much of the criticism of Victoria’s now former Premier, Ted Baillieu, was around his failure to sell the government’s message.  Baillieu was betrayed not by his party, but by his faith is a mandate.  He wrongly believed he could quietly play a long-game – working away in the background with little engagement of the community in his agenda.  Some may say this is noble, others might point an intrinsic arrogance. The result was the same: in the face of mounting issues – economic, social and political – the unconvinced community simply took away from Big Ted its permission to govern.  The Victorian Liberal Party recognised this and had to act, in the hope that while permission had clearly been detached from Big Ted that maybe it was still applied to the party.  Only time will tell whether they were too late or not, but the signs aren’t good...

Permission must be continually earned and re-earned, and is done so through good leadership.  The principles that define successful leadership is other aspects of life apply.  From the “dry” features of planning and the ability to make good decisions, to the human elements of communication, consistency in narrative, behaviour and people, and compassion – recognising that at the centre of it all are not “agendas”, but people.  When it comes to maintaining the trust and belief of people, politicians are now only just realising what sports people – whether they be hockey players, footballers or cricketers – have known all along: you’re only as good as your last game ... [fades to static]