What matters for the country is not that differences of opinion exist in political parties, but how those differences are managed

While political autobiographies are full of former politicians telling of their private bravery, and no doubt the coming decades will be full of mea culpas from MPs wishing their private urgings had delivered more to tackle Indigenous disadvantage, rising inequality and climate change, Australian political culture means that those in power are not just required to vote for legislation they oppose, but to publicly attack advocates they agree with.  

Some may remember that Paul Keating once failed to convince his party to adopt a GST and then proudly destroyed John Hewson’s proposal to deliver Keating’s preferred tax reform. Peter Garrett once ran as a candidate for the Nuclear Disarmament Party but subsequently made the case for the expansion of uranium mining when he was a Labor minister. In the words of Kevin Rudd,  

Any political party … contains within it a whole range of views which we formalise through democratic processes … And guess what? Not everyone always gets their own way — I don’t get my way on everything — I understand that. Therefore, it is our job, however, to take our unified message out to the Australian people. 

Peter Garrett subsequently wrote that supporting Rudd was the biggest mistake he made in his political career. 

And more recently, Senator Penny Wong spent years strongly arguing against the right of same-sex couples to marry, including on the basis that “cultural, religious, historical view … this is an institution that is between a man and a woman”.  

To be clear, when Penny Wong told us she opposed same-sex marriage she was doing her job of supporting current Labor policy whether she supports it or not, a job she clearly doesn’t resile from. When Senator Fatima Payman quit the Labor Party on the basis she could not vote against a motion supporting Palestine, Senator Wong said, “We understand the importance of caucus solidarity. It is very rare for a Labor person not to respect that. It’s a principle which has served us well.” 

The problem is not that politicians openly support policies that they disagree with and attack advocates outside their party they do agree with, it’s that our public debate takes the arguments, and attacks made on others, seriously. To be clear, at the same time centrists in the media and pragmatists in NGOs are supporting government policies as the best available option, some of the ministers promoting those same policies, and mocking those with greater ambition, will almost inevitably have spoken against those same ideas in the party room and in cabinet. How can we have serious debates about important issues when many of those involved are obliged to keep their thoughts to themselves and demean those they agree with? 

No wonder people are losing faith in democracy. We have built a system where party control supersedes personal conscience, and worse, a system where those MPs who are seen to have integrity on an issue are more likely to be used as battering rams against their external allies while privately supporting ideas and values they publicly deride.  

It is no coincidence that the number of Australians voting for independents and minor parties is rising so rapidly. The problem for major parties is not that their candidates are bad people. The problem is that, given the option of representatives who simply parrot the party line and those who can say what they genuinely believe and vote according to their conscience on every issue, voters are increasingly choosing independents. The problems for major parties are particularly acute when they try to convert questions of morality into a centrist compromise. While moral gymnastics and strict adherence to agreed talking points might keep a large party room together, such centrist compromising often leaves voters cold.  

Richard Denniss is Executive Director at The Australia Institute. This is an excerpt from his Vantage Point essay, Dead Centre: how political pragmatism is killing us.