Former politicians who spoke to The Sunday Age do not glorify political debate in their day. But they do say that conviction and courage are now rare. They say the public are fed rehearsed lines, and know it. Debate is reduced to moronic slogans. Tough decisions are dodged and deferred. Marketing techniques not only sell policies, but craft them. Independent analysts agree: if the public is cynical about politicians, tactics increasingly adopted by politicians reveal they don’t think much of voters, either. Respected pollster John Scales, who runs JWS Research, grilled a group of so-called soft voters and a group of swinging voters in Melbourne this month and concluded that something new is going on. ‘‘More than ever before there is an apparent disenchantment with politics and politicians.’’ Most voters are suspicious of Ms Gillard and distrust her motives, see her as weak and reactive and believe she presides over a government ‘‘too scared to spend any political capital for fear of attracting criticism’’.

And Tony Abbott? ‘‘When he is mentioned, the reaction from soft voters is typically one of disrespectful laughter,’’ Mr Scales says. Former Labor frontbencher Carmen Lawrence points to the media’s role in reducing political debate to trivia and personality.

‘‘There’s a dance of mutual destruction going on between the media and the politicians, and they’re both responsible for dumbing [politics] down.’’ At times, she says, political debate ‘‘gets to be moronic, it so quickly drifts into abuse, reaction, and the ‘biff’ of who’s winning and who’s losing’’. Dr Lawrence, now an academic at the University of Western Australia, says young people are frustrated and even angry that politicians and the media treat them as ‘‘gullible fools’’. She attributed the decline to a combination of factors, including the perpetual 24-hour churn of TV, newspaper and social media commentary run by sensation-seeking media. Then there is the selection of political candidates from a narrow circle of political operators — ‘‘minders, dealers and traders’’ — moulded by political parties and with limited life experience. Alexander Downer, foreign minister in John Howard’s government, also detects growing public cynicism, and sees dangers in a reliance on polling and marketing techniques to define and sell policies.

While this was an evolutionary, not a revolutionary, development in Australian politics, it was now increasingly pervasive and risked dominating decision-making. ‘‘You get the feeling that if a focus group finds that what they’re doing is not popular, it will be ditched overboard rather fast,’’ Mr Downer says. Such tactics were also shaping how politicians appeared and spoke. Increasingly, they looked as if they were repeating well-rehearsed lines. ‘‘Look at John Howard, he didn’t just learn his lines,’’ Mr Downer says. ‘‘He looked as though he was saying what he thought and believed in. ‘‘Watching the debate today, for the public, it all looks as if everyone has just learnt their lines. It looks as if the politicians are saying what they think the public want to hear, not what they need to hear, and the public know it, and they’re very cynical about it.’’

Peter Costello agrees: ‘‘We are living through a once-in-a-century boom in our terms of trade and yet there seems to be no debate about how we should save the benefits of this boom for future generations. The Future Fund [set up to fund future superannuation payments for public servants] was established back in 2006. There has been no progress in allocating funds to it or any other investment vehicle in the last four years. This is a wanton waste of opportunity.” Former Liberal Victorian premier Jeff Kennett sees a lack of conviction and consistency in national politics as part of a wider malaise, in which the country lacks a defined national agenda. ‘‘The public see that and they’re confused by it, because regardless of whether they vote left or right, the public like to have a sense of security, that they know where the country is going,’’ he says. He sees multiple causes, including the elevation of ‘‘political managers’’ to leadership positions, Labor’s lack of ideological commitment, and a media focused on personality issues, instead of political substance. ‘‘The public are waking up to the fact that we have been sadly let down by the political process and the political parties over the last few years, probably since the Howard government,’’ Mr Kennett says. ‘‘Howard stood for something: you liked him or you loathed him, but at least you knew where he stood.

‘‘Neither of the leaders [Labor PM Julia Gillard or Coalition leader Tony Abbott] are inspiring their communities, neither of them is putting a stake in the ground and saying ‘this is where we’re going’. ‘‘If you don’t have that focus, that leadership, then you start slipping down the totem pole until you reach the bottom, where all you do is try to get through the day and please the public, so you look to opinion polls and focus groups.’’ Lindsay Tanner is another former Labor politician alarmed by the dumbing down of debate. He declined to be interviewed by The Sunday Age, but he tackles the issue in his forthcoming book, Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy. In a statement last September, Mr Tanner said: ‘‘Many Australians are distressed by the relentless dumbing down of political debate. This book will explore the nature and the causes of this problem, and the threat to our democracy that it poses.’’ Former NSW Labor premier Bob Carr warns against casting a nostalgic veil over the past. There is no golden age of elevated rhetoric, he says.

But he warns that current debate has become homogeneous, with politicians forgetting they can win support by showing the courage to argue complex policy positions. ‘‘You just feel these days, and one has felt it for some time, that our political rhetoric has been rendered entirely mediocre,’’ Mr Carr says. ‘‘There is none of the lift, none of the wit that you had. There has been an homogenisation.’’ Ms Gillard herself has bemoaned what she sees as a lack of depth in modern political journalism. ‘‘Not everything can be reduced to a tweet,’’ she said in October. ‘‘We are in a media environment now where you could make a blockbuster [announcement]. As you’re doing the press conference, someone is tweeting about it. While you’re doing the press conference, a journalist is doing a stand-up using you as a backdrop.

‘‘By the time you’ve walked back to your office, journalists are interviewing journalists about what the announcement may or may not mean, and two hours later someone is ringing my press secretary saying, ‘Have you got a story for us?’’’ Social commentator Hugh Mackay believes Australia has fallen for the American model where politics is largely about marketing. ‘‘We think of leaders as brands and even parties as brands, therefore we fall into the trap of substituting slogans for proper debate,’’ Mr Mackay says. The danger is that our political leaders are diminished. ‘‘It is a very, very destructive cycle ... And one of the implications of it is we are either going to see good people in politics tarnished by it or diminished by it or we are going to attract a different kind of person to politics and political leadership — the kind of person who really does want to be a celebrity and is a media tart, rather than people who are driven by passions about making the world a better place.’’ Political scientist Rod Tiffen says the level of debate is ‘‘particularly sterile’’.

‘‘Turn on the TV and whether it’s Labor or Coalition politicians talking, it’s all the same. It’s always so predictable and cliched and I think it’s turning people off politics,’’ says Professor Tiffen, emeritus professor in government and international relations at Sydney University. Both sides appeal to populism, so that neither of the major parties will address major national challenges with policies that entail costs as well as benefits. ‘‘If you care about democracy and the quality of democracy, this matters,’’ Professor Tiffen says.



