Di Martin: Hello, Di Martin here with this week's Background Briefing, which has been hanging around outside shopping malls of late, asking people what they think of the state of federal politics.

Woman: I'm just sick of hearing about it, and I used to be really engaged and listen to a lot of news and radio and I've actually stopped because I'm just sick of the drama.

Man: The Labor Party to me has shifted as far to right as John Howard was. So I think for a lot of people…people can't see much of a distinction between Labor and Liberal any more.

Woman: Not very impressed at the moment.

Di Martin: Okay, so tell us what's not impressive.

Woman: They're behaving like two-year-olds, not what we expect from the leaders of our country.

Di Martin: So is this standard, par for course, or is it getting worse?

Woman: I think it's getting worse.

Di Martin: So what tells you that it's getting worse and makes you particularly unhappy?

Woman: I just really don't want to listen to them anymore, they're just not making any sense.

Di Martin: Today the program asks; are we justified to feel so miserable about federal politics? And how much of that misery is about the noise and fury of the hung parliament?

Michelle Grattan: I think it has been a quite difficult three years for the voters.

Di Martin: Veteran political reporter Michelle Grattan does say we've just endured the equivalent of a three-year election campaign.

Michelle Grattan: The fact that the parliament was hung and therefore you could always be on the brink of an election meant that we never left the 2010 campaign. The hung parliament actually did quite a lot. But it did it in a very fractured, disorganised way.

Di Martin: Michelle Grattan also says the main way we learn about politics—the media—is dramatically different; less diversity, less depth, and a ramping-up of the 24/7 news cycle.

Michelle Grattan: The media these days is much more in people's face, and the noise level of politics has just escalated dramatically. And people find that, beyond a certain point, intolerable.

Di Martin: Many agree that the look and feel of politics has changed for the worse. So does that mean there's a crisis in our system of government? Not according Michael Cooney, a speechwriter for Julia Gillard.

Michael Cooney: Politics is in much the same shocking state it has been in Australia for most of European settlement. In a sense the challenge is to persist. The challenge for politics is to work through a cycle of dissolution because I do believe that people's greatest frustration and distaste is for the way politicians speak and talk and seem to act. I don't think there is a crisis of the state or a crisis of provision of services or a crisis of economic management, and yet those things are being delivered and led by politicians, ministers and cabinets and governments.

Di Martin: But Background Briefing has found many others who are not so sure Australia is working its way through a cycle. Today we hear from people across the political spectrum who warn that effective government is being undermined by disturbing long-term trends, like opposing policy for opposition's sake. This is Tony Abbot's friend and former colleague Nick Minchin.

Nick Minchin: I frankly think opposition, whether it is Labor or Liberal, needs to examine the merits of policy and if it has merit and if it is in accord with your party's general view of the world, you should support it, or not oppose it. And I do get upset by knee-jerk opposition

Di Martin: We also hear from former Labor leader Simon Crean, on the dangers of replacing Labor's legacy with a political messiah.

Simon Crean: There was this belief that all you had to do was move to Kevin rather than address that agenda that I was talking about before…

Di Martin: So are governments now driven by a cult of personality?

Simon Crean: Well, I think there's a risk that that happens, and I think that we showed the price you pay if you fall into that cult.

Di Martin: And there's this protest about leaders quashing dissent in their parties from former Liberal senator Gary Humphries.

Gary Humphries: There are ways in which dissent can be pushed aside, can be suppressed. And it's harder and harder for debate to reflect the diversity of views in Australian society.

Di Martin: In one sense all these trends are about centralising power, how decisions about policy and strategy are increasingly made by a handful of people. It might help win and hold government, but it's also stifling and distorting political debate.

Within parties, fewer people feed into policy choices, and fewer voices debate the merits of an idea, so the flaws aren't ironed out before being announced. Once a policy is made public, it risks furious opposition based on generating fear and scoring political points.

And while there's more power than ever before in the hands of leaders, they are struggling to sell long-term reform. Take climate change; for more than a decade three different governments have failed to come up with enduring reform, yet it's an issue famously referred to as 'the greatest moral, economic and social challenge of our time'.

Terry Moran has been Australia's top public servant, and is worried about how governments are being run.

Terry Moran: Governments aren't as surefooted as they have been previously in engaging the public, the various stakeholder groups, and bringing people into the story of the reforms they're attempting and how they might be implemented.

Di Martin: This former head of Prime Minister and Cabinet has warned about a dual crisis in democracy, first in what he calls the art of governing; crafting and then selling policy.

Terry Moran: Successful policy ultimately relies upon an informed public understanding of what is proposed, and to an extent supporting it. And it also relies upon, if it is to survive, implicit or explicit support from the opposition of the day.

Di Martin: Terry Moran says getting the public to agree to major reform is hard work. So there's a responsibility on those opposing the reform not to use scare tactics.

Terry Moran: I don't want to name names but it is the Chicken Little approach to politics where you say that everything is about to fall over in short term. I think there's a bit of the frightening coming from the business community at the moment, to be honest.

Di Martin: Terry Moran says attitudes in the business community are the second part of the dual crisis in democracy. He says business has partnered with welfare groups in the past to introduce long-haul reform like the GST. But not now. He singles out the Business Council of Australia.

Terry Moran: Recently the BCA has put out a very interesting document on future reform in the country. And it proposes, for instance, to offset a reduction in the corporate tax rate with an increase in the GST. Now, the sheer difficulty of convincing the community that they should pay more tax so the corporates pay less is frankly impressively large.

Di Martin: More from Terry Moran later.

But we begin today in a place where much of the passion, drama and spectacle of Australia's federal politics has played out over the past century; at Old Parliament House. And our visit is at that critical time for any democracy, the day we get to vote. For the first time Old Parliament House is a polling station, as historian Libby Stewart explains.

Libby Stewart: People are just thrilled that they are able to exercise their democratic right in this place that was the home of federal politics for so long. And it is now the Museum of Australian Democracy. It doesn't get much more democratic than that.

Di Martin: The walls of Kings Hall carry portraits of prime ministers past who've guided Australia through some of its most momentous events. Today they watch as their usual stately home is turned into a noise-filled hive of cardboard polling booths, impatient voters and stoic electoral officials.

Electoral Official: Have we got any more people for Fraser?

Di Martin: Fraser is one of two lower house seats in Canberra.

Electoral Official: Fraser? So you’re going to go right over to the lady in the purple shirt on the far side and line up there.

Di Martin: In most Western democracies voting is optional, so falling voter turn-outs are a clear sign that the public is less interested in politics.

Electoral Official: Your surname?

Di Martin: Martin

In Australia that trend is masked by compulsory voting. But there are other signs of voter disengagement.

Electoral Official: Your first name?

Di Martin: Diane

Like the historic low levels of party membership.

Electoral Official: Have you voted in this election before?

Di Martin: I have not

There are also around 400,000 young people eligible to vote, but not enrolled.

Electoral Official: House of Representatives ballot. Just number the boxes from 1 to 7 in the order of your preference. And this is your Senate ballot.

Di Martin: And on this election day, a record number of Australians will vote informally, nearly 6%.

Alongside the polling booths are a couple of glass showcases with some ballot papers from the very first federal election in 1901. Yet the ballots weren't discovered until decades later, as the Museum of Australian Democracy's Libby Stewart explains.

Libby Stewart: So back in the 1970s a history teacher at a school in the Parramatta area must have been down the back of the schoolyard checking that everybody was doing the right thing, and he came across some schoolboys smoking their own roll-ups. Now, being perhaps a man with an historical conscience, he looked at these roll-ups and thought this is funny pink paper, what are they? Must have unrolled it to see they were actually smoking used House of Representatives ballot papers. I don't know what was inside them but, yeah…

Di Martin: One MP who's passionate about getting people involved in politics is Labor's Andrew Leigh. He's looked closely at voter disengagement, and has written a book called Disconnected. It finds people are less likely to join any kind of organised group these days, from the Scouts to the ALP.

Background Briefing joined Andrew Leigh while he was out doorknocking.

Andrew Leigh: So if people aren't around, we leave a 'sorry I missed you' card, which has contact details and people can get in touch.

Di Martin: Andrew Leigh, how much shoe leather have you gone through this campaign?

Andrew Leigh: I do have pairs of shoes that are starting to wear down. It's making that human connection to talk about ideas I think is fundamentally what drives change. Malcolm Gladwell had a lovely piece in the New Yorker a year or two ago, saying the revolution will not be tweeted. If you actually want to change someone's mind, you want to look them in the eye.

Di Martin: Do you think people are becoming more disengaged? Is that a trend that you see?

Andrew Leigh: The Roy Morgan poll on ethics and honesty of politicians did take a down-tick in recent years. I think 14% of Australians rate politicians high for ethics or honesty. That's a real problem.

Di Martin: That lack of trust, I think it was John Faulkner who talked about it as being utterly corrosive to the process and the practice of democracy.

Andrew Leigh: It's a challenge in terms of doing long-term reform, because long-term reform invariably involves trade-offs. Most important reforms have some people who miss out. So when we cut tariffs, that had an adverse impact on some Australian manufacturers. When we built Medicare, that meant that some people had to pay more taxes. Now, Medicare is a great reform, but you needed…you do need a bedrock of trust in order to do some of these important reforms.

Di Martin: Later in his office, Andrew Leigh talks about politicians being their own worst enemy in getting public support for long-haul reform. He gives the example of playing to people's fears in the cost of living debate.

Andrew Leigh: Every politician is scared of being the one who says to voters you've never had it so good.

Di Martin: This former economics professor says cost of living fears are unfounded. And instead, a cynical bid for votes has undermined people's willingness to support expensive but far-reaching reform.

Andrew Leigh: So you have seen significant increases in incomes and you've got inflation which is by historic standards very low. And actually we have the scope in Australia to make long-run reforms like pricing carbon, and investing in infrastructure. We don't just have to have competitions over cash handouts.

Di Martin: As a Parliament House clock steadily marks off the seconds, Tony Windsor enters his office for one of the last times. Inside, his staffers are busy packing boxes for their retiring boss.

After 22 years in politics, unshackled by a party line, Tony Windsor is known for speaking his mind. He sees politicians failing a number of challenges. Especially those who indulge in fear campaigns.

Tony Windsor: If we create fear in the minds of people that this country is going broke, for instance, that creates enormous issues out there because some people actually believe it. And if they believe that sort of nonsense they suddenly start to become disenchanted with the process, and they don't want to participate within the system, they just want to criticise it.

Di Martin: Some of that fear mongering has spilled over into Tony Windsor's private life, with death threats not only aimed at him.

Tony Windsor: We've had circumstances where private detectives have had to have been at dinners and things because of a threat that one of the family was going to be killed that night, those sorts of absurd issues. We've had The Australian newspaper, for instance, where my son is farming, having people camped out there checking with business houses whether their accounts have been paid, looking for dirt on the Member of Parliament so that they could actually destroy the hung parliament by destroying one of its members. That's fair game for me, but they should be nowhere near my family.

Di Martin: Tony Windsor hasn't spoken to The Australian newspaper for two years. He says it's one of the many choices that people have; to change our choice of newspaper, or, for that matter, our local representative, and not just follow a party line.

Tony Windsor: In our Constitution the word 'party' is not mentioned. So this nonsense about how you've got to have one or the other…we are all representatives. We are supposed to come down here to actually work together for the betterment of the nation.

Di Martin: Tony Windsor says voters are frustrated for many reasons, including the growing lack of choice offered by the two major parties.

Tony Windsor: They've virtually got to create differences now. The philosophy of politics has virtually disappeared in my view. We've got two management teams competing to manage the nation. Not essentially to govern it. We had all of this nonsense on Gonski, for instance, one of the greatest reforms that we will probably see in education in the last 50 years, and they argued over the minutiae of that for months and months and months just to create the political division, and then both sides agreed going into the election campaign. What's the point of all of that? It is to create that political difference where there is none.

Di Martin: Tony Windsor says majority parliaments play safe politics, and often avoid difficult long-term reform. He says it was a hung parliament that finally passed law on issues like the Murray Darling agreement.

Tony Windsor: The normal process of executive government was never game to deliver that issue because they believed that they would lose seats. The NDIS for instance, why hasn’t that happen 20 years ago, 15 years ago? Why didn't Peter Costello do it when he had all the cash from the mining boom? Why didn't he do that rather than develop a middle class welfare and start paying people to have children and all of the consequences that we've seen of that.

Tony Windsor: Tony Windsor is not the only politician worried about Australia's well developed sense of entitlement.

Nick Minchin: The focus on medium to long term big issues facing the country, I think that's getting more and more difficult. The current generation are saying, 'What are you going to do for me today? I'm not really caring about something ten years down the track.'

Di Martin: Nick Minchin was finance minister under long-running Liberal PM John Howard. A senator from South Australia, Nick Minchin says nowhere near enough is being done to prepare Australia for the huge costs of an aging population. Instead, both major parties are too busy trying to buy voter allegiance.

Nick Minchin: Both sides have been guilty of creating expectations, and this is the trouble with…you know, this is the fatal flaw I suppose in democracies, that every election becomes a Dutch auction as to how much of the Treasury can each party promise to win the votes.

Di Martin: But how do you change that dynamic considering it is promises that politicians have used ad infinitum to be re-elected?

Nick Minchin: I'm not saying there's an easy answer. I think particularly in most Western democracies they are going to be mugged by the reality that Treasury has run dry.

Di Martin: Nick Minchin says politics wasn't always played like this. He was in Opposition when Labor introduced tough and far reaching reforms to reduce tariffs and open up the economy back in the 1980s and '90s.

Nick Minchin: What was achieved in the 1980s when the then coalition Opposition supported the big reforms, which to their credit the Hawke and Keating governments introduced, seems a very difficult thing to replicate these days. And that does concern me because I think Australia does face some pretty big economic and social challenges. And getting that political consensus I think is getting harder.

Di Martin: Nick Minchin acknowledges criticism of the Abbot-led Opposition, that it opposed policy to score political points. But he says Labor is not guilt free on this front. And all parliamentarians have to work harder to find consensus on important long-term reform.

Nick Minchin: I would like to see more of that and I think there are occasions when oppositions need to support government moves that make sense and not retreat to a knee-jerk response. I remember in one of my last party room meetings getting quite agitated sitting on the back bench because the Labor government was introducing reforms to the taxation of transport fuels that were entirely in accord with the policy of the Howard government, and we were being asked in the party room to oppose it. And I stood up and said this is ridiculous, this is Howard government policy, we should be supporting it. And I was effectively howled down on the basis of, oh no, this is going to hurt some people, and we are the opposition and should oppose it. That was one of the most depressing days of my parliamentary life.

Di Martin: That's former Liberal senator Nick Minchin

You're listening to ABC RN, the Background Briefing program. This week, a stocktake on the state of federal politics as a new government settles in to running the country. I'm Di Martin.

The public service is the largely unseen force of governing. It provides independent advice and costings and then implements government plans. But it's long struggled with a reputation for being bloated and wasteful, making it an easy target for political comedies like The Hollowmen. In the episode 'Fat Chance' a senior public servant tells Tony, the prime minister's private secretary, it will take 18 months to draw up a major plan on obesity. This is Tony's response:

Tony: Biggest Loser get it all done in 10 weeks

Phillip: I think we might be talking a few more stakeholders in a major policy initiative like this.

Tony: They start with 20, Phillip, and they still get amazing results.

Phillip: All right. We've got a choice here.

Tony: Do we?

Phillip: We can come up with a serious policy framework, incorporating all the latest science…

Tony: And that's the 18 months one.

Phillip: Or we can take the populist route; superficial responses to the latest whims of the general public.

Tony: Just for interest's sake, how long would that take?

Di Martin: A former head of Australia's public service says while The Hollowmen might give bureaucracy a hard time, it's even harder on political advisors.

Terry Moran used to head Prime Minister and Cabinet, and rarely gives interviews. He's worried about the growing number of political advisors and their role. Terry Moran wants a legislated code of conduct to keep them from overstepping their bounds.

Terry Moran: That they can't imagine that they can have the ability to go around leaders in departments and agencies and give directions to public servants. They are bound to be truthful in their dealings with people, that they are bound to pass on advice to the minister that in good faith public servants have given them to pass on to the minister, that sort of thing.

Di Martin: Political advisors aren't subject to the same scrutiny as public servants, and Terry Moran wants that to change. He also says that ministers are cutting themselves off from independent advice by getting rid of senior bureaucrats.

Terry Moran: We've moved in recent times to the position where there were hardly any senior public servants of seniority and standing in many ministerial offices, and it's happening enough now to cause public servants and former public servants like me some concern.

Di Martin: Terry Moran is one of a number of former prime ministers, premiers and senior bureaucrats who are featured in a new report. Released by the Committee for Economic Development of Australia, or CEDA, the report finds problems with leadership skills, the media, and what it calls a paucity of good ideas.

Terry Moran says part of the problem is the growing power of the prime minister, and he disagrees that Australian politics is becoming more presidential.

Terry Moran: I think it's a nonsense to say that we are going towards a presidential system. The office of prime minister, although not mentioned in the Constitution, has become by practice vastly more powerful than the office of the president of the United States.

Di Martin: Terry Moran says the US president's decision-making power is largely confined to defence and foreign affairs, and the position has many more checks and balances than apply to the Australian PM.

He says the prime minister here on the other hand has huge institutional power, and generally wins through on most legislation, appointments and decisions.

Terry Moran: Really since the '50s we've seen this incremental increase in the power available to an effective prime minister to exercise. Some might say that the greater concentration of power is not a good idea, and there have been prime ministers in recent history that have been happy to go with a more dispersed use of power within a Cabinet. Bob Hawke would be an example of that. I think that that style of running a government is in the long run safer for the country, safer for the parliament, and safer for the government.

Di Martin: Why is that?

Terry Moran: Because it's harder for one individual to make too many decisions that are unchecked and unchallenged by peers.

Di Martin: There is a growing chorus of political voices that agree with Terry Moran.

First, former Labor leader Simon Crean.

Simon Crean: Collective ownership, collective responsibility, developing the agenda that people, if you like, have a say in and therefore own, they become the strongest advocates. And I think that where the leader moves in the direction of taking decisions on their own without proper consultation, that is where the message starts to fall down. The leader alone can't do this.

Di Martin: Are you referring here to Kevin Rudd only?

Simon Crean: No, I'm not.

Di Martin: Simon Crean says Kevin Rudd, for example, failed to sell the education message well. He says the prime minister focused too much on job creation to spruik the $16 billion Building the Education Revolution program. And the message that the reform was also an investment in kids, the economy and the country's future was lost under a fierce Opposition attack.

Simon Crean: We got spooked because of the campaign that was run along the lines of waste and mismanagement.

Di Martin: When you say that Labor got spooked, how did that manifest?

Simon Crean: Timidity, it leads to timidity, it leads to trying to avoid the discussion, it leads to allowing others to frame the debate and you not framing it. There is an obligation in leadership and in particular in government that if you're going to make the hard decisions you've got to build the case, you've got to bring the constituency with you, and you've got to fight it every inch of the way on your terms.

Di Martin: Simon Crean says Julia Gillard also faltered in her leadership, most obviously in framing and selling the carbon tax.

Simon Crean: Identifying that it was shared with the Greens, rather than it being Labor, was wrong. I also think that not making the distinction between a tax, if you like, without explanation, versus a fixed price being the mechanism to move to a floating market price, that also was a failure of communication.

Di Martin: For the first time in 20 years Simon Crean watched a federal election from the sidelines. He resigned after a disastrous attempt to end the toxic leadership battle that he says ultimately cost Labor government.

Simon Crean watched dismayed as Labor sidelined its legacy of minimum wages, health and superannuation, and instead gambled everything on a cult of personality.

Simon Crean: We showed the price you pay if you fall into that cult. It's up to the Caucus, it's up to the Cabinet to seek to assert itself. And I hope, and I certainly believe this to be the case, even though we went through a hell of a time over the last three years, many people have learnt the lesson. And they've said to me they are not going to let it happen again.

Di Martin: Simon Crean.

As Background Briefing discovered, the issue of centralised power is not only biting the Labor Party. This former Liberal senator from Canberra says dissenting voices have been muscled out on both sides of politics.

Gary Humphries: Inner cabinets have more control over cabinets, and cabinets have more control over outer ministries, and when all of the members of a ministry rock into a party room and they are all committed to a particular position, it's very rare for that position not to be persuasive to the rest of the joint party room or the party room. So there are ways in which dissent can be pushed aside, can be suppressed.

Di Martin: Gary Humphries was destined for an Abbot ministry until a factional fight saw him lose his position on the ACT Senate ticket. He says central control does make governing easier. But voters feel less confident in the system.

Gary Humphries: We become a less open society. And it comes at a cost to the frankness and diversity of views that people expect to see exhibited in our national parliament.

Di Martin: The Liberal Party has a long tradition of allowing members to cross the floor. But Gary Humphries says that rarely happens these days, and is frowned on when it does. He describes crossing the floor during John Howard's government, which had moved to overrule an ACT law on same-sex unions.

Gary Humphries: He called me to his office, he attempted to dissuade me from taking this course of action. Of course at that stage no other Liberal senator had crossed the floor in the life of that government. But when I went back and I did in fact cross the floor there was enormous sympathy and support from other Liberal senators who were anxious to encourage one of their number to keep the tradition alive, pats on the back and shakes of the hand, but obviously from the very senior levels of the party that wasn't the message I was getting.

Di Martin: Gary Humphries says both major parties are guilty of ramming through policy without debate.

Gary Humphries: The example of the Rudd government's announcement of its changes on asylum seekers and the Caucus was pressured very heavily I understand to go along with that and not to speak out about it. And I have to say as well that the paid parental leave policy that Tony Abbott announced a couple of years ago was also pretty much his decision which he went back to the party room and sought approval for. In fact at that time he said sometimes it's better to seek forgiveness than approval.

Di Martin: Is there a way of turning that around, of having more inclusive debate within Cabinets or party rooms for that matter?

Gary Humphries: It really is a matter for prime ministers to set a lead and to be open and accepting of a diversity of points of view.

Di Martin: This interview was recorded before the election, when Gary Humphries' Canberra office was in the barely constrained chaos of a move. He's a Liberal moderate who lost his Senate position just before the election to a right-wing ambush. As fewer people turn up to party meetings, branches become vulnerable to hijack by those who don't necessarily represent the bulk of supporters.

The number of Independents elected reveals the extent of voter distaste for the major parties. But it's the Labor Party that finds itself in the most critical trouble. It recorded its lowest federal House of Reps primary vote in a century. The ALP is struggling on several fronts, but most especially to remain relevant in a changed world.

The city of Lithgow is a couple of hours drive to the north west of Sydney. The birthplace of Australia's steel and iron industry, it's a city built on black coal. Here iconic Labor prime minister from the 1940s, Ben Chifley, could be seen speaking in local parks, including to this man Background Briefing found on his way to do some evening shopping.

Man: In my young days people like Ben Chifley and them fellas would come and talk in the park. The people could get up and ask them. Now they go on television and they write down what questions they want to be asked.

Di Martin: Are you a Labor man?

Man: Yes, yes, yes, when you're born and you work in the coal mines, and in my day as a young fella, to see the men that were coming out of them mines fully dusted, couldn't breathe, and would live till they were 59, 60, never got any retirement or anything. And all they had to do, the companies, was to increase the volume of air into the mine to take the dust away. But it was too much cost on the profit of the coal.

Di Martin: This used to be a real Labor town didn't it?

Man: Oh Labor yes, yes, yes. Well, mining town, see.

Di Martin: It seems like Lithgow is no longer a Labor town.

Man: No, not now, no. The young people that come into the mines after, they got all the conditions that them men fought for. They just thought that all those things that they got when they went into the mines was just the boss giving them those conditions, but those conditions were fought for for years and years. But that's my opinion.

Di Martin: Lithgow miners and blue-collar workers now vote overwhelmingly for the Nationals.

Here's the local ALP branch secretary, Matt Martin.

Matt Martin: I think there's been a change in who's working in the pits, in the coal mines. There are a lot of blokes who come off farms and they are interested in going to work, earning the big money that can be earned in the mining industry and getting on. And it's not just miners, but you see a lot of people now out here who own not just a place in town but they might own some acres outside of town, two or three cars, they go on holidays, big houses, they extend their houses and things like that, so there is an increasing level of affluence in a part of the community.

Di Martin: So what do you see as the key political drivers for those people?

Matt Martin: Income. This is not permanent work. You're seeing a drop-off in the mining boom. So I suspect that people are not as comfortable as they were, they are not as secure in their employment, and so their greatest concern is who they think will run the economy better. And that is partly, in my view, because people have now got lifestyles that they need to maintain that perhaps wasn't a problem in the 1970s, '80s or before.

Di Martin: Matt Martin has never done an interview before. But he's so worried about the party, and how politics is being played, he's decided to speak out. As he walks along Lithgow's main street, Matt Martin says a key problem for the ALP is a confused message.

Matt Martin: So often we react to short-term media cycles. A good example are things like the asylum seeker debate or, at a state level, law and order issues, which revolve around us making ourselves seem more right-wing than the conservatives. And it's not a thing we can ever win. We can't out-Tory the Tories.

Di Martin: State issues have also hit Lithgow's Labor vote hard. It's a power station town, and locals are angry that an ALP government decided to privatise the electricity sector. Then came revelations of high level corruption in New South Wales Labor. At the last state election, Matt Martin says the local Labor vote suffered one of the highest swings in Australian electoral history; 37.5%.

Matt Martin: I was handing out how-to-votes at the biggest booth in Lithgow. And normally you get a reasonable response, you're handing out your how-to-votes, people will talk to you, people I've known all my life, I've lived in Lithgow all my life. But at this election nobody would look at me. It was like I wasn't there to them.

Di Martin: Matt Martin says this mostly rural electorate has always swung between the conservatives and Labor. The margins, at a state and federal level, are just getting bigger as rusted-on voters fall away.

Matt Martin: Parties are breaking down and we're getting much more of a personality politics. Currently the seat is held by the National Party with a 25% margin. But when we held it in the preceding terms, we held it I think with 17% and things like that. So it's got a lot to do with the popularity of local members too.

Di Martin: With an arctic wind blowing outside, we retire to a cafe. Matt Martin says the Lithgow ALP branch has just done an in-depth review on how to start turning around its fortunes.

Matt Martin: It's about making the party more open, making the party a place where people are interested in politics, can see it as a forum to express their views, but also making greater use of things like social media, and beginning to go back to local shows, local events, so people actually see us in the community, see us as part of the community as one of the groups next to the SES, next to Fourth Lithgow Scouts or whatever it is, it's just that basic grassroots stuff. Parties have got to become reconnected to the communities they seek to represent.

Di Martin: But Matt Martin says change in Lithgow won't make a blind bit of difference unless the whole Labor party gets its act together, which means giving power back to the members and party supporters.

Matt Martin: Inside political parties the centralising of control into the hands of a few people, about who gets what seat and what policies go through the national conference, it's one of the things that strangles off the membership. People don't participate if they think all they are are fodder to hand out how-to-votes.

Di Martin: Labor elder Simon Crean agrees. He recommends far-reaching reforms for the ALP, saying branches have be rebuilt and given a greater say.

Simon Crean: Their strength is in their diversity, but you've got to use it, you've got to tap it. You can't take it for granted and you can't control and dictate through the factional warlords.

Di Martin: So how does that change then?

Simon Crean: You've got to democratise the show more, you've got to open it up. We now have rank-and-file ballots for preselections in Victoria. What we have got to do is to open up that democratisation. I think we have to go to more effective rank-and-file ballots for our Senate candidates. There's a big debate going on now about minor parties but I think the major parties, ours in particular, has to give the rank-and-file more of a say. We've certainly got to try and make it easier for people to join the party, those that express a conviction, a commitment to their values, and there must be a greater preparedness now to allow…whether you call it conscience votes or free votes, let the debate run. Let's identify the issues and have the openness of debate.

Di Martin: Whether the ALP heeds the call for reform this time is yet to be seen.

Any opening of debate will be welcome news to many current and former politicians who see their profession veering off course. There are those who say there is no need for despair, even if we don't like the look and feel of politics.

Julia Gillard's former speechwriter is Michael Cooney.

Michael Cooney: There is a contest within politics, between Labor and the conservative side, and so politics is inevitably a site of conflict, over means as well as over ends. And so the idea of a better politics is kind of a bit of a weak one in my view because it's a bit like saying you want a better kind of warfare. I think we have to accept and understand that in a good society politics is a means to an end, and I personally don't want a good politics, I want a good society.

Di Martin: Yet retiring independent MP Tony Windsor says he's not sure the system is so robust.

Tony Windsor: Democracy is a very special arrangement, and it's a very fragile arrangement. You need people to have confidence in the system.

Di Martin: Tony Windsor says all players need to try harder; the media, the politicians, and the voters.

Tony Windsor: Have a look at the people that you're voting for. Don't just accept that because you have voted Liberal or Labor all of your life that that's the only way you can do it. Put some pressure on these people. Get involved in the political process. The world is run by those who turn up. If you don't bother to turn up, you will end up with a world that's created by those who do bother and who want to take advantage of it.

Di Martin: Background Briefing's co-ordinating producer is Linda McGinness, research by Anna Whitfeld, technical production by Steven Tilley, and Chris Bullock is executive producer. I'm Di Martin.