By Lenore Taylor
There's an arresting advertisement for the Museum of Australian Democracy in old Parliament House. The image is the face of a woman with terrified eyes and smudged mascara, her mouth gagged by a large dirty hand. The caption reads: ''Imagine you can no longer speak your mind.'' Beneath is ''Don't take democracy for granted''.
Unlike the thousands killed and the hundreds of thousands who took to the streets during the Arab Spring, we don't have to risk personal safety to fight for democratic freedoms. Our dilemmas are, by comparison, minor.
Lenore Taylor article.Credit: Rocco Fazzari
But there is a growing dissatisfaction with what our democracy is delivering us, with the hollowness of our political debate, the way it strips away nuance, is bored with detail, inflates the trivial into allegedly serious news, ignores contradictions, confects disagreements and produces leaders who feel like actors because they can talk only from a script.
We live in a world where a senator miaowing at another senator is seen as more important than the biggest contraction in the economy for 20 years, an incident that was admittedly interesting in passing, but was not followed by much real discussion of the issue (sexism and poor behaviour in politics) because of first one ''look over there'' accusation to distract the cameras (the Coalition saying that Labor says mean things too) and then another by Labor (the Prime Minister saying Tony Abbott privately thought the mean thing she said about his colleague Christopher Pyne was really great). And then the ''debate'' moved on.
Lindsay Tanner reckons it's all the media's fault because the politicians need to serve up the tosh we want in order to get their faces on telly, a criticism that is justified in part.
But this somewhat self-serving argument surely ignores one big source of the problem.
It can't be entirely our fault that politicians increasingly say things that don't make sense, or just aren't true, or contradict what they have previously said that they stood for.
David Roberts, who writes for the Grist blog in the US, calls the malaise ''post-truth politics'' - a world where a politician's rhetoric doesn't have to have anything to do with their actual policy agenda, or bear any relationship with the slogans or agendas they were running yesterday, or in some cases any relationship with the facts.
His argument appears directed only at the Republican Party and he takes it further than could be justified in Australia. But there are plenty of people aghast at how fast we are heading in the post-truth direction.
Over coffee last week, the new chief executive of the Business Council of Australia, Jennifer Westacott, for example, was almost lost for words in describing the ridiculousness of the Gillard government's new ''sustainable population'' strategy.
The strategy was supposed to be the explanation for Julia Gillard's rejection of Kevin Rudd's ''big Australia'', a volte face that occurred even though the policy settings behind Treasury projections of Australia's population remain unchanged when she changed slogans. She jettisoned the slogan because urban voters don't like the idea of more people when there aren't enough roads and schools and trains for the people we have already got. To better plan for the roads and schools and trains that will be needed in the future, we need to know how many people there will be. But because the voters of today are still scared, the strategy didn't say.
Westacott, who has headed state government planning departments, was aghast at the circuitous post-truth silliness of it all.
''We need moderate population growth … but to plan for population growth you have to have some scenario about the number of people and their distribution, and that's what is missing from the government's strategy … how do you tell treasuries to start planning for infrastructure or land use in 20 or 30 years if they have no idea how many people there will be … so it will still be post-factor planning, which is too late, which is exactly why the community is already frustrated,'' she says.
Even the Liberal senator Nick Minchin, about to end an 18-year political career during which he earned a reputation as a particularly tough political operator (just ask Malcolm Turnbull), was recently moved to pen an essay in which he warns colleagues not to err too much on the side of populism at the expense of policy.
When he said the same thing in the Coalition party room, as the Herald's Phillip Coorey reported, Abbott's response was that in a choice between ''policy purity and political pragmatism, I'll take pragmatism every time''.
And he sure has. Minchin's party-room remarks came during a debate about the Coalition's decision to oppose fuel excise reform which they had themselves proposed in government, but which now risked muddying the ''no new tax'' mantra. But it could equally have applied to the Coalition's pragmatic silence on recent developments in industrial relations, which is now officially a no-go policy area, despite the chapter in Abbott's book Battlelines entitled ''Work Choices wasn't all bad''.
It could also have applied to his recent support for tougher anti-dumping laws (isn't this supposed to be the anti-protectionist party?). And a growing number of Coalition members think it also applies to the debate on climate change.
Yes, oppositions both Labor and Liberal have run campaigns against new taxes, and this one has been particularly effective. And yes, Labor brought some of it on itself with its own post-truth performance during the election campaign with its utterly confused policy and Gillard's ''no carbon tax'' promise.
But listening to Tony Abbott talk day after day about the ''toxic tax'' that will wreak devastation on the economy but do nothing for the environment, it is easy to forget that his party promised an emissions trading scheme in 2007, that his own ''direct action'' policy proposed a ''review'' in 2015 which shadow ministers told business leaders could well lead to a promise of a future carbon price, that Tony Abbott's policy has the same environmental goal as Labor and that this is the party that is supposed to believe in small government and free markets.
Listening to him talk about how angry the Coalition is about the tax's impact on the struggling manufacturing sector, it's easy to forget his own policy is to cut $500 million from grants already factored in to the operating budgets of the car makers.
Listening to the National Party rail against the government's carbon farming bill on the basis that it will eat up agricultural land with tree plantations, it is easy to forget that the Coalition's ''direct action'' plan envisages tree planting on 10 times more farm land.
Some of Abbott's colleagues are saying he should be positioning himself just a little bit for the possibility that all the huffing and puffing might not blow the government down, for the eventuality that a carbon price might pass Parliament and might not precipitate the end of the world, and that he might then have to explain how he would repeal it and the associated tax cuts, particularly through a Greens-controlled Senate - and how his alternative policy would actually work.
The debate within the Coalition has been wrongly viewed through the prism of leadership tensions and the present internal bickering, but in fact, like Minchin, the people who are most worried are those who are strong Abbott supporters.
In any case, as Labor found to its enormous cost, thinking that you can abandon policy principle in the interests of pragmatism and then fix it all up by changing leaders is a very, very big mistake.
On climate policy, Labor's earlier post-truth efforts have left it with no choice but to argue through a difficult, detailed and unpopular long-term reform.
Despite making up some ground and gaining a bit of confidence this week, with the pro-carbon pricing ad campaigns, the third-party endorsements and the rapid government responses to statements from Abbott that are patently untrue, Labor is still struggling. It's pushing the line that it has stopped the rot, but there is not much evidence that this is actually true.
And the notion that it will all get easier for Labor when the detail of the climate package is known may not be true either, because the detail is - by necessity - so incredibly complex. (Think John Hewson, the GST and the birthday cake.) At that point last time, the Coalition kept asking for ''guarantees'' about how the compensation package would cover the personal situation of tricky case studies, like a pensioner with a big heating bill because she lives in Cooma.
For Abbott, the question is how far post-truth can go and for Labor, on the climate issue at least, whether it is in fact possible to combat it. For voters, safe in a country where they can speak their minds, the question is what to do about a democratic debate that is hollowing out from within.
Peter Hartcher's column returns next week.