It’s been a grim year in federal politics. Anyone watching knows it. Voters surveyed for the last Guardian Essential poll of 2017 gave politics an emphatic thumbs down, and they weren’t hopeful 2018 would be any better.



Tired of banging on about the symptoms of dysfunction in my own ecosystem, I wrote a long essay in the middle of the year in which former protagonists, politicians and staff told their stories in candid but not self-pitying terms. The object of the exercise was to tell the real story of what it is like to be a professional politician in the current era.

In journalism you always strive to unearth the truth but it’s hard, because the narrators are unreliable, and because facts are often refracted through self-interest. But with this exercise, I felt as though I’d touched down, briefly, in truth.

But to what end? The dispiriting thing in this case is truth isn’t catalytic. No one will call for a royal commission into contemporary political life, no one will set up a Senate inquiry, because what would be the point?

There’s no easy fix and the root causes are complex. What is broken can’t be fixed with a couple of top QCs, some searing testimony and a bit of introspection.

When people outside politics ask me to explain what is going on, I generally start by saying the political and media class didn’t all wake up one day and just decide to be hopeless. There are seismic things going on.

Technology has disrupted the media cycle, with massive impact. Instead of amplifying long cycles of deliberation –deliberation being the central business of politics – the waterfall news cycle now gobbles up and spits out short cycles of outrage, posturing and contention.

Everything has speeded up to the point where there now seems to be an inexorable obsolescence about everything in public life. Debates get old before they start. Leaders are cannon fodder in this febrile, fretful, environment. Australian prime ministers have become biodegradable courtesy of the coup culture.

So far, I’m in reasonably familiar territory. Readers who have been with me throughout the year will know I try to turn these issues around in my mind in different ways to see if there’s some mysterious code we might be able to crack.

Thus far I certainly haven’t cracked it. But in the spirit of the festive season I thought we might end 2017 with a lighthearted thought experiment rather than talking ourselves relentlessly into a funk.

Regular readers will know I care a lot about climate change and I’m moderately obsessed with energy policy.

Knowing something of my professional obsessions, a friend suggested to me that we might be able to fix politics by bringing the approach economists bring to wicked problems such as climate change. Economists talk about pricing negative externalities.

But before we get to pricing externalities, let’s set the scene. Let’s start with an assumption that politicians are rational actors, responding to clear incentives. (Don’t laugh, bear with me.)

Let’s also acknowledge that we in the media like to have everything both ways. We moan constantly about how crap everything is while the beast we feed 24/7 sends a very different set of messages.

The contemporary media cycle rewards politicians who emote (thinking in the current period really is strictly optional, how else do you explain Donald Trump?), disrupt (the contemporary currency of everything) and go negative – or even better – go full ad hominem (because it works more often than it should).

Voters say they are repelled by negativity, and I think some people genuinely are, but it cuts through. While I was sitting in Canberra bemoaning the cartoonish debate playing out about whether the Labor senator Sam Dastyari was a double agent, wincing about a serious issue being reduced to a potboiler, Labor MPs were telling me they were being approached in their electorates about Dastyari being some new cold war operative.

Clearly it gripped. So if an issue grips in an environment when others struggle to gain traction, a rhetorical arms race develops, where the language becomes more and more shrill and reckless – never mind the long-term implications.

So now we’ve arrived at the need to price negative externalities. Let’s understand the concept by thinking about our climate change example.

Externalities occur when the costs of some action are not borne by the perpetrators but instead fall on to others. Carbon emissions are a textbook example. Rising emissions contribute to climate change which will impose costs on future generations. When businesses aren’t forced to bear these costs, they will produce an environmentally damaging level of pollution, because it serves their short-term interests.

It’s a form of market failure which economists would say justifies regulatory intervention to shift the costs on to the emitter, so that their incentives become aligned with the wider social good.

In politics, by analogy, negative attacks, short-termism and appeals to sectional interests are imposing social costs, eroding the public’s trust in politicians, damaging the health of our democracy and acting as a barrier to the pursuit of reforms in the national interest.

So when you think about it, politicians are a lot like polluting businesses, responding to incentives in the political marketplace.

If there’s no obvious penalty for bad behaviour (apart from a few political commentators rolling their eyes and firing off a scarifying hot take – which will be replaced in five minutes by a puff piece from someone else), then people will go on doing it.

Given the conditions we’ve just mapped out, economists would conclude we need some sort of regulatory intervention.

So let’s think of a scheme, which just for fun, we can call the short-termism tax (in honour of Tony Abbott, the patron saint of yolo). Let’s call our tax the Tony.

The design of our scheme is simple. We would impose a cap on bad behaviour in politics. We can allow a bit of it but not enough to cause serious harm; and any belch of short-termism above the cap attracts a penalty.

After a bit of head scratching, I fancied the penalty might be a subtraction of votes from the last election. Every time a prime minister, minister, opposition leader, shadow minister makes an obvious foray (and they are always obvious) into short-termism, a percentage of their personal vote gets subtracted.

If we were being generous, we could also create a system of positive incentives. When politicians do something courageous, something in the national interest, they could get a top-up of votes, giving them more of a buffer in their seat.

Back when John Howard kicked off the carbon pricing debate, his government used to talk earnestly about the benefits of first-mover advantage and interlinking. So Australia’s short-termism tax (the Tony) could perhaps be exported to the rest of the democratic world.

Obviously Australia isn’t the only country with a busted political system, so we might see similar schemes pop up around the globe. A flourishing international market could develop, where countries trade credits to ensure short-termism in politics is reduced at least cost.

While the vote currency seems an easy metric for politicians, and one likely to influence behaviour, I don’t have an obvious penalty concept for journalists and media outlets who live to amplify stupidity and commoditise conflict as a method of driving reader engagement.

Perhaps readers might send me some thoughts about that over the Christmas break?

Speaking of breaks, I’m off for a few weeks to lie down in a dark room.

Let me take this opportunity to thank the readers who have been with me and my wonderful politics team in Canberra through every step of a gruelling year – particularly the readers supporting our work by taking out Guardian membership.

You guys are the best. Have a restful festive season. See you in 2018.