Larvatus Prodeo

The Sydney Daily Telegraph, a newspaper which likes to see itself as some sort of courageous voice of the people, has been losing readers hand over fist, and more recently, an editor. The paper is also running a campaign for the NSW government to sack itself. It’s impossible to read any article in the online version on state politics without intrusive links in the middle of the story directing readers to its petition, and a plethora of other anti-Rees widgets, rants and commentary.

But in the parallel world where the fixed four year term is decried as the fountain of all evil, it seems to me something odd is going on. Paul Kelly traces the constitutional change back to the Greiner regime, but downplays the fact that the movement towards fixed terms in the early 90s was part of a range of managerialist measures and an overarching approach to governance which argued – reasonably explicitly – that political accountability was an annoying obstacle to “reform”. This was an era when all manner of measures – privatisation, purchaser/provider splits, downsizing the public service, closing schools and hospitals and competition policy – were trumpeted by elites as necessary but largely rejected by public opinion.

Indeed, there’s a residue of this managerialist politics apparent in the Rees government’s fetishisation of the state’s AAA credit rating.

However, the managerialists of yesterday are the populists of today. But I’m completely puzzled by Paul Kelly’s logic here:

He means a device to enable an election to be held mid-term to save NSW from a truly disastrous government, such as the present administration. The point is that in a globalised world, guaranteed political tenure is a fatal flaw. The NSW experience shows that the fixed four-year term model is a fraud on the public interest.

We are losing the political culture that surrounds the Westminster model. Its flexibility, depicted as a problem, is a virtue. It means that pressure can mount on bad governments for an election and that strong governments, when they need a new mandate to confront a crisis, can seek that mandate.

The inability to procure an election in NSW at present does not help the people of NSW. It assists only the Labor machine that tries to run the state in its own interest.

Continue reading ‘The NSW government, the media and four year terms’