Politics is a dirty word. Politicians are all as bad as each other. Power corrupts. Cynicism towards politics is as old as politics itself. But I am increasingly concerned about the form of political cynicism that comes disguised as idealism: that politics is dirty, corrupting, and ineffective, but it can be perfected with “independent” and, apparently, unbiased processes.
Fri 22 May 2026 12.45 AEST
Photo: AAP Image/Lukas Coch
Politics is a dirty word. Politicians are all as bad as each other. Power corrupts.
Cynicism towards politics is as old as politics itself. But I am increasingly concerned about the form of political cynicism that comes disguised as idealism: that politics is dirty, corrupting, and ineffective, but it can be perfected with “independent” and, apparently, unbiased processes.
This school of thought elevates “policy” as the only valid political consideration. Voting based on any criteria other than a party or candidate’s policy platform is shallow.
The ACT and Tasmania ban political signs near voting booths, for fear that sober policy considerations will be driven from voters’ brains if they lay eyes on a convincing slogan or winning smile. In more radical models, all negative “attack” advertising would be banned.
Democracy would be better if voters paid more attention to policy. But it would also be better if voters knew more about candidates’ track records, priorities, affiliations, and values.
The job of a politician is not to faithfully implement policy platforms.
That’s only one of their varied responsibilities.
Politicians are community representatives, so their ties to community matter.
They compromise and extract compromises, so their personal networks and personality matter.
They respond to changing circumstances, so their priorities and instincts matter.
Governments select ministers from among the pool of elected representatives – so judgement and administrative skill matter too.
To vote solely based on party platforms is to misunderstand their purpose. They are political and campaigning documents, not binding contracts, and too high-level to be reliably operationalised.
Even a politician with every intention of implementing their policies needs to exercise judgement and make trade-offs:
A politician’s legislative skill depends on personality, experience, moral code, and priorities, and cannot be inferred from their policy positions.
Even attack ads have a legitimate democratic function, because a politician’s history is often a better predictor of their performance in office than their announced policies are.
Any observer of Tony Abbott would have a better sense of whether he would cut ABC and SBS funding than a fact-checker tallying up his pre-election promises.
Likewise for Peter Dutton’s short-lived promise that if Australians voted down the Voice referendum, he would hold a new referendum to recognise Indigenous Australians in the Constitution. The measure of the man was his boycott of the apology to the Stolen Generations 15 years earlier.
People change, but often not as quickly as policies do.
I return often to the words of writer Dennis Glover:
“In a democracy, contesting power is a legitimate vocation.”
Something is lost when contesting power is treated as illegitimate or unseemly: when elections or parliament are seen as an impediment to good government. The public contest of ideas is critical for a democracy.
The case for four-year election terms is that an extra year between elections would allow more time for sober policy deliberation. But more frequent elections make politicians defend their record, prove their mettle, and put forward popular policies.
Restricting political donations is meant to reduce undue influence on politicians. But replacing personality- and issue-based fundraising with taxpayer funding has shifted the power dynamic within political parties – and not always for the better. Individual MPs, with their particular and local connections to voters, supporters and, yes, donors, have lost power to the party machine, while corporate interests remain powerful.
“Ship jumping” laws would expel from Parliament any MP who quit their party. The rationale is that the MP was elected on a shared party platform. But sometimes defectors are a truer representation of the will of the people than the party under whose brand they were elected. Look at Bob Katter’s long stint as member for Kennedy after leaving the National Party.
For similar reasons, I am sceptical of citizens’ juries and other “mini-publics” that would replace parliamentary decision-making with deliberation by members of the public. My own time as a citizen’s juror convinced me that political deliberation is a skill not learned over a few weekends.
For all its faults, our electoral contest – with attack ads, low-information voters, three-word slogans and spats at polling booths – is the best way of selecting decision-makers who meet the requirements of office: experience, virtue, connections, wit, and ideology.
And the cut-and-thrust of a democratic Parliament, with the lobbying, dubious donations, compromises, defections, broken promises, and backflips, is the best method yet for settling complicated, shifting policy disagreements.
You cannot have a democracy without politics or politicians. Take the politics away, and the policy debate becomes purely theoretical.
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There is a deeper discontent in Australian society than the version One Nation is currently exploiting. What we might call an egalitarian anger exists too, a sometimes inchoate sense that the economic transformation of the last fifty-odd years has created such a concentration of wealth that the “fair go” we once saw as defining has gone forever.
While Labor gained seven seats, their first-preference vote was actually 2.5% lower than the 40% they had achieved in 2022. Labor won over 70% of the seats on a preference vote of almost half that, 37.5%. This is thanks to single-member electorates.
