LEIGH SALES: The former finance Minister, Lindsay Tanner, was one of the so called "Gang of four" who ran the Rudd Government. He quit at the last election, citing family reasons. Caucus minutes leaked last year claim that he was opposed to Labor's dumping of the emissions trading scheme.

Now Mr Tanner has written a book called 'Sideshow: Dumbing Down Democracy'.

Lindsay Tanner, in your new book you write that Australia and its people deserve much better than the carefully scripted play acting that now dominates our nation's politics. What do you mean?

LINDSAY TANNER, FORMER FINANCE MINISTER: We got to a situation where spin, robotic scripting, all of the things that you've heard lots of complaints about over the past few years I think have seriously distorted the picture of politics even more distorting than usual, that is conveyed through the media. I've tried in this book Sideshow to ask why is this happening. The answer is politicians are reacting to how the media portrays them. They're getting more and more defensive because of "gotcha journalism" and more and more are drifting into a world of flimflam and stunts and gimmicks, announcables and spin, both to protect themselves and also to stay in the media. So you get a toxic interaction between politicians and the media that is driving the Australian political process further and further away from issues, from the national interest, from serious political debate.

LEIGH SALES: But that casts politicians in a pretty passive position.

LINDSAY TANNER: Look, they're not entirely passive, that's true, and certainly responsibility for these problems is, I think, ultimately shared between politicians, media and the people who vote for them and who watch and read and listen to the media, the whole community. It is possible that a big political dividend will come to somebody who decides to try to break out of these shackles, but there are endless examples of where distortion, trivialising, misrepresenting by the media sends signals to politicians about what they'll get punished for and what they'll get rewarded for.

LEIGH SALES: It's hard to not trivialise or mock something like moving Australia forward, that the slogan your party took to the last election.

LINDSAY TANNER: Oh, true, and I agrees with you, but you have to ask yourself where did that slogan come from, and it came from a context where all of the rewards for politicians are in blanding things to a point where they are meaningless, in avoiding offending anybody and trying to look like they're doing something without actually seriously tackling problems.

LEIGH SALES: Even if I take everything that you're saying at face value that the media is sensationalising things, trivialising things, politicians are reacting to that, could you really imagine Bob Hawke, Paul Keating or John Howard rolling over and saying that's the environment we live in, we'd better not to do serious reform?

LINDSAY TANNER: That's an interesting question. It takes you to the wider context in the community. 20 years of no serious economic downturns, I think the other factor apart from the national complacency and if it ain't broke don't fix it mentality that I think is rampant at the moment, the media has changed, the leeway that political leaders have to do tough serious things has diminished substantially, the extent to which the media goes looking for aggrieved people and magnifying and distorting their complaints out of all proportion has increased. The degree of serious analysis and coverage of issues and major proposals has diminished, and the desire to trap politicians, to demand that they guarantee that no worker will be worse off or that nobody will pay an extra cent, all of these kinds of things, put politicians into a corner in ways that didn't happen to anywhere near the same extent, for example, in the 1980s. So you've got this vicious circle of politicians being more and more backed into this bland, don't do anything, don't say anything and just manage things for tomorrow kind of corner.

LEIGH SALES: Do they just lack guts to do it?

LINDSAY TANNER: I think that's really a matter of opinion. I don't necessarily think that's the case. It's interesting to speculate how somebody like Paul Keating, with a sort of crash through, I'm going to make you listen and make you agree with my argument kind of style would have prospered or not prospered in the current political environment and media environment. I think he would have found it much, much more difficult because of just the intense focus on entertainment, on trivia, on trapping politicians, on broadcasting people comparing people with Colonel Gaddafi and all this sort of stuff, on big debates about whether Julia Gillard cried or didn't cry after the Queensland floods, as if that matters to anything. I think that very different media context would have made life a lot more difficult for people who were strong reformers in their day. I don't know for sure, but I think there is a different context.

LEIGH SALES: You had a very low profile during the past election campaign. In the context of what you're saying, what did you make of that campaign on both sides of politics?

LINDSAY TANNER: To me the great lesson of the campaign was in the big surge in the Green vote. There wasn't a surge in the Liberal vote. In fact, the Liberal vote picked up only 1.5 per cent, or something like that. The Greens added four per cent. In my view, that wasn't predominantly a bunch of people attracted to the Greens' policies or necessarily supporting them playing a bigger role in the political system. I think that was basically educated, politically aware voters who are mostly Labor voters and maybe mildly sympathetic to the Greens saying we don't like being talked to like children, and the major parties more and more, in my view, largely because of the way the media portrays politics, are talking to the community as if they were eight year olds. The Greens may be whacky, but they're never going to be the Government and at least they talk about serious stuff.

LEIGH SALES: Were you behind the scenes making that point to your own party?

LINDSAY TANNER: Oh, internally in discussions, yes, I would always try to put the focus on the merits of the issue and to try to at least keep all of the focus groups, spin, presentation, look like you're doing something, announceables nonsense at arm's length, accepting it's a reality that will always be part of the political landscape, but at times I felt overwhelmed. I sometimes felt like I was talking a foreign language.

LEIGH SALES: Within your own party?

LINDSAY TANNER: Yes, within the realms of the Government. It was almost as if I'd come full circle. I started out in politics as a teenager in student politics, that's where I ended up. That's not the fault of anybody, it's not the fault of individual media outlets, individual politicians, it is just where the game is drifting.

LEIGH SALES: To try to give an example of what you talk about in terms of the superficiality overriding policy, I want to talk about one particular policy area around climate change. We know that Labor dumped the ETS when polling got a little bit rough. Was that the right decision in a policy sense for our nation?

LINDSAY TANNER: Oh, look, I'm not going to enter into a commentary about wider contemporary politics and whether things have been done right or wrong.

LEIGH SALES: But this is actually a very important policy issue that goes to the very heart of the sorts of issues that you're raising.

LINDSAY TANNER: You can't cast judgment on these things when they're part unfolding. The story is yet to be completed, and so we do not know yet what the final outcome will be of this big public debate. It is the most complicated and challenging public policy issue that I've ever seen, so never underestimate the degree of difficulty here.

LEIGH SALES: Is it accurate that you opposed dumping the ETS?

LINDSAY TANNER: Look, there's been a lot of stuff on the public record about what occurred in that process. All I'm going to say is that I have no dispute with anything that's on the public record about that, but I'm not going to add to that public record.

LEIGH SALES: Do you think that the carbon tax is good policy?

LINDSAY TANNER: I'm not going to comment on that. I'm now a private citizen. I've put out a book that talks about a particular issue. I'm certainly going to comment on that. But I'm not going to comment on contemporary issues of the day. I'm no longer an elected person, I'm not a Labor Party spokesperson.

LEIGH SALES: You were an integral player in pretty momentous political events, some of the most momentous we've seen in recent decades. Those events do help inform things happening still today. The public wants to understand what's going on. Do you not think it's fair enough that you should answer some questions about some of these issues?

LINDSAY TANNER: No, I think it's entirely a matter for me as to what I wish to talk about or don't wish to talk about. I'm not a kiss and tell kind of guy. As far as I'm concerned, the issues that we dealt with and some of the internal discussions, they will stay internal and in part I'd have to say because I'm not confident that anything that I said would be accurately and fairly portrayed in the media. It would be on your program, but where it would end up after that, who knows.

LEIGH SALES: Let me just ask you on the record because I think viewers would want me to ask you, regardless of whether you wanted to answer it or not, do you think the Labor Party made the right decision in dumping Kevin Rudd and replacing him...

LINDSAY TANNER: Again I'm not going to respond to that. I think the view that I took at the time as a member of Caucus was in the public domain and it was accurately reported, but I'm not going to engage in that discussion or any kind of retrospective on that, and my private views will remain my private views.

LEIGH SALES: Lindsay Tanner, thank you very much for joining us.

LINDSAY TANNER: Thanks very much, Leigh.