To get your head around how it all works, I’d strongly recommend reading Stephen King’s post at CoreEcon.

(Oakeshott’s candidature also produced a number of articles in News Limited papers explaining why an Independent could not be independent as Speaker, and discovering hitherto unknown virtues in such previous partisan incumbents of the Chair such as Ian Sinclair and Leaping Leo McLeay. But that’s another story…)

Crikey has a liveblog, and ABC News 24 and News Radio are carrying Bob Katter’s press conference live.

Update: Bernard Keane summarises Katter’s press conference.

Update: Tony Windsor supports Labor.

So this is the last call for any haruspices, augurs, tarot-card readers or other diviners!

The response I received from the I Ching On Line perhaps cautions against divination itself!

THE JUDGEMENT

Keeping Still. Keeping his back still
So that he no longer feels his body.
He goes into his courtyard
And does not see his people.
No blame.

THE IMAGE

Mountains standing close together:
The image of Keeping Still.
Thus the superior man
Does not permit his thoughts
To go beyond his situation.

NB: Wish someone would do a more gender-neutral I Ching translation…

Funny how political philosophy is being invoked in an actual political context.

And it was funny to hear Rob Oakeshott skewer the piffle on Edmund Burke served up by Professor Kenneth Wiltshire in The Australian yesterday.

You really wonder what purpose these op/ed pieces serve; except maybe to annoy the people they’re supposedly addressing.

Just by the by, while we’re on the topic of News Limited’s partisan campaigns, does anyone expect “ELECTION NOW!” to carry on if the Independents support the Coalition (which, it goes without saying, Goddess forfend!)…

almost unreadable week

Shorter Penbo: narrative broken, must push for Restoration.

But he’s not alone in being all at sea.

A plethora of furphies have been repeated endlessly by the media – one of the most common being that the rural Independents represent “naturally conservative electorates”.

Oh, really?

The Nationals are well aware that the electors of Kennedy, Lyne and New England have made a positive choice not to support them.

And Bob Katter shot a hole in this meme very early on – pointing out that Kennedy had always been held by Labor except when he and his father were on the ballot, and that 4 out of 6 state seats in his electorate have ALP members. Kerry O’Brien appeared dumbstruck. That news had been slow to reach 7.30 Reportland, apparently.

If we think about Lyne and New England, these two seats are experiencing the same sorts of demographic and economic change as the nearby seats of Page and Richmond, once safe Country and then National party fiefdoms, now both held by Labor.

That’s all nicely captured in a great post by Possum, who estimates that 40% of Rob Oakeshott’s voters in Lyne are former Labor supporters, outnumbering the ex-Nats.

Go read.

I’d thoroughly endorse some of the arguments made in that post about the narrow limits of the field of political contestation, and the way it’s skewed towards a neo-liberal consensus where many questions just don’t get on the agenda for what passes for public debate. Where I’d take issue with Dr_Tad is the claim that process isn’t political. It may well be the case that none of Bob Katter, Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor have either a particularly coherent ideological position or an intention to fundamentally transform our politics. But that’s not quite the point – political shifts are very often unintended, and extend beyond the desires of political actors.

That’s potentially the case with the call for a “new politics”, I think.

It’s been interesting this week to see some serious debate about our participation in Afghanistan, questioning about why on shore processing of refugees is so verboten, and around issues to do with rural health and the decline of particular non-urban cultures and modes of economic sustainability. We don’t normally talk about these things – that is, the politico-media complex doesn’t open up a space where such questions can be politicised.

Obviously, I’d also like to see us talking about social mobility, distributional justice and a vision of social justice which transcends what I’ve called, in a piece for The Drumroll, Gillardism. I have some hope that The Greens can stimulate a real debate on such questions, as well as one on those issues which are totemic for the party. But, even in the absence of such a focus from Greens MPs and Senators, the shift of the centre of political discourse and the fracturing of its points of unanimity can only be positive for those wishing to move on those issues, and one hopes, might also bear fruit in something of a revival of social movements.

We’ll see. But I do think that any “rupture in the political fabric” presents new possibilities.

Guy Rundle put it very well indeed when he observed that “the economic question” has been taken off the table in recent decades, and “the political question” displaced onto culture wars. His article for Crikey yesterday discusses these issues more eloquently than I am doing, so I’m taking the liberty of reproducing it in its entirety over the fold (with permission).

You can tell that something that resembles politics is happening in Australia now, by the chorus of derision that professional insiders are directing at the three rural independents, and any suggestion that this impasse of a result may be an opportunity for the country to stop and think about what sort of political institutions and processes it wants.

With the ‘doughty three’ (like that huh?), releasing their seven point letter to the PM, the establishment commentariat has gone into panicky overdrive in an attempt to head it off. It’s bad enough the Greens have snuck into the Lower House (for a second, not first time), now there’s three possibly, four independents.

And that godamn WA National won’t take the whip. You can see why they’re spitting. Imagine if you had to report politics on your front page, rather than writing a series of memos to party heavies, cunningly disguised as actual news.

Thus Michelle Grattan in The Age:

Rob Oakeshott sees safety in his bold model for consensus politics?—?but others will see naivety. Parliamentary reform is one thing, and much needed … But Oakeshott’s proposals go way beyond ordinary change.

What? Beyond change that can be absorbed back into the system? Noooooooooooo!!!!

This is a terrible election result for Australian foreign policy, Greg Sheets Sheridan wrote, mourning that the man of steel would not be succeeded by the age of Iron. The Greens are less fussed about Afghanistan than they were about Iraq…But they might make the difference in dissuading it from offering any increased help there, or undertaking any new security role either.

God, a prudent foreign policy with checks and balances on war? Nooooooooooo!!!!

None of this will be easy as demonstrated by the confused ramblings of Rob Oakeshott during the past 24 hours, Paul Polonius Kelly remarks. Forget the nonsense that party politics has taken a blow or is in retreat.

Not easy? No business as usual? Nooooooooo!!!!

Tim Soutphommasane, the Oz’s pet left philosopher, counselled against ‘educated despair’ by which he meant any meditating on whether things could be done other than through the existing party shells.

And Dennis Shanahan simply wants a new election to be held immediately, and to keep repeating it until we get it Right.

The 2010 election result has offered that rarest and most blessed of things, a rupture and a discontinuity in the process. It’s one that makes it impossible to sell the line that the parliamentary electoral system we are ruled by has some deep-seated pole of wisdom that somehow expresses rather than imposes a political form. What the result is making clear to people is the inherent arbitrariness of the system, its closed nature, and the way in which that is obscured when a party is elected with an unchallengeable majority.

The difficulty for the business as usual crowd, is that they spend so much time celebrating the virtues of the single member electorate system, that when it throws up a number of actual single members, they can’t damn it out of hand.

And when such members begin to suggest that the process by which they were chosen could be reflexively acted on by both MPs and the public, the business-as-usual crowd panic about stability. Weird, isn’t it? Post-election Iraq has been without a government for several months, with no working coalition in sight, and this is an example of democracy at work. Australia has a few days or weeks with no majority party but a process of rational and open negotiation, and it’s a disaster.

What has happened in Australia, in little more than the wink of an eye, is that the political question has been pushed into an entirely new dimension. Ever since the 1970s the economic question has lain moribund as a major political division, no matter what lip service is paid to the gulf separating etc etc, and the occasional flashpoint such as WorkChoices.

The political question who leads, how and through what institutions has barely been regarded as political at all, or cynically manipulated, as in Howard’s handling of the Republic debate.

The virtual stasis of both these questions is one reason why so much political energy flows into cultural questions and why culture wars become the dominant mode of struggle.

Once an interruption such as the 2010 election makes it impossible for that stasis to be maintained, the energy flows back into the political question, and real change can be imagined by all except those whose job depends on nothing changing ever, ie the mainstream commentariat.

Once that happens, the left/right divisions based overwhelmingly on the economic (and social-cultural) question cease to be of primary importance, and there is the possibility of new processes, and new flows which make provisional blocs in different ways. It’s the most imaginative solutions that become the most possible.

Thus, why should we not consider Rob Oakeshott’s idea of a multi-party cabinet? Why is Dennis Shanalamadingdong’s idea of a whole new election the ‘sensible’ idea, while Oakeshott’s idea that the people who actually have been elected form a government seen as the whacky one? The Constitution recognises parliament, the GG as head-of-state, and her/his appointed ministers as government. It has nothing to say about prime ministers or parties.

So Shanahan’s suggestion is that the system has failed because it worked.

What’s happened in this election is that the process of parliamentary electoral politics which is minimally democratic and the party-based politics of interests, which isn’t democratic in the slightest, have come into contradiction, in a situation where the system usually silently serves the interests. The profound cynicism and mild fear of the commentariat have caused them to back the interests against the system.

The process has left many people high and dry, desperate to catch up. Thus Paul Kelly, who disguises his cynical anti-democratic power elitism by sporadic attacks on cultural elites, is desperate for a cozy party system that can be nagged to impose a yet more neoliberal agenda, against the oft-expressed wishes of the mass of the Australian people.

The fetishisation of ‘stability’, as if the country was Bosnia-Herzegovina one heartbeat away from a shooting war, is a con. If we are so pusillanimous as to entirely subordinate our political process to the flickering of the global markets, then we may as well let Goldman Sachs choose the government.

Stability is the very achievement that allows a country the luxury of uncertainty, when isolated outbreaks of actual public will throw up an ensemble capable of creating a new situation. I’m under no illusion that the rural independents are about to put the whole constitution and political apparatus into play. But they don’t need to.

The mere process over the last three days has done more to make visible the invisible structures of power, and their potential (if not straightforward) transformability, than a hundred civics lessons. Other gains, such as an increased role for private members bills, would serve to bang the wedge a little further into the old tree dead.

Stability is not the issue, nor is it the danger. The danger is a politics so deadened that only the most demented and monomaniacal, the Feeneys, Shortens, and Bitars, can stand it, and everyone else retires to their private lives. The more the commentariat shriek in fear, the more interesting the ride.

The independents and minor parties should push this process until the rivets are popping.

And here’s the Prime Minister’s response.

So what should a Gillard minority government look like?

Policy making would have to proceed in a very different fashion – and here both the Prime Minister’s negotiating skills and stated desire to reach out for consensus might be key enablers of a successful approach to governance in a new political landscape. With the executive losing control of both houses of parliament, a more deliberative process to policy formulation would be both necessary and desirable; and it’s here that I find Rob Oakeshott’s suggestions most interesting. There would perforce be more involvement by backbenchers, Ministers would need to be more open and transparent about policy aims, and it may be necessary to loosen Cabinet solidarity.

If we were to have a governance and parliamentary process something like this, it would come as a mighty shock both to our accustomed modes of doing politics as usual, and also media management. The media are most happy reporting on partisan conflict, and treating any suggestion that policy might be debated as an opportunity to go hunting for the “disunity” narrative. A minority government would need to be much more relaxed about being off message, much more comfortable leading public opinion through debate and exposition, and would have to eschew both the policy by focus group approach and the soundbite style of political communication.

It may also be that a minority government would need to be bolder in grappling with the big issues. It’s right to point out that a large reason why nothing positive has happened on climate change has been the related phenomena of its use as a partisan weapon by the Rudd government, the restriction of the policy process to a narrow range of interests – and the failure to persuade citizens of why an ETS was worth doing, and how it would operate.

A more inclusive process could work, if the policy goals were clearly articulated, and well communicated.

None of this is remotely consistent with the dominant Sussex Street style of doing politics, and the temptation to set things up for another election in short order would be deeply counter-productive. As would the temptation to try to control and orchestrate everything.

But the faux-populist/micro-messaging/electoralist style of campaigning – and of governing – met its Waterloo on Saturday.

We do have something of an opportunity here to forge a much more responsive style of governing. But we shouldn’t underestimate the forces arraigned against it, and the force of sheer inertia in how things are customarily done. But it might be Julia Gillard’s singular contribution to Australian politics to lead us to such a place.

LEIGH SALES: Okay, on asylum seekers, particularly those who come by boat, what’s your view on offshore processing?

ROB OAKESHOTT: I’ve been very loud in my electorate that we are the moat people. The very fact people have to come here by boat says we’ve got a huge strategic advantage in dealing with this.

They’ve normally come through three or four countries where those countries don’t even know that people have passed through their borders. So I think we can manage this and manage it in a strategic sense. Our offshore processing is about $470 million a year of taxpayers’ money.

I’m not fussed about Nauru, Christmas Island, East Timor but I would ask that at least we consider onshore processing under UN conventions and 90 day rules. I’m sure we could find a mayor or a council in the North or Northwest of Australia who would be very interested in the 350 jobs that we’re currently exporting to Christmas Island because we are driven by some sort of fear of dealing with this issue on the mainland.

And they’re 350 well paying jobs. They’re Defence. They’re ASIO. They’re Customs.

So you know, I think we need to put fear in the back pocket, deal with it strategically, deal with it on a regional basis, stick to UNHCR guidelines and targets and really step up and deal with the issue on the mainland as much as trying to farm the problem out to some regional neighbour.

LEIGH SALES: And very briefly, climate change. You want an ETS back on the agenda?

ROB OAKESHOTT: Yeah. Look, I think if we are serious about the job we do, there were people who dedicated their lives to the science who said there’s a problem. The response was to get eminent economist Ross Garnaut to write up a report about how we turn the science into an economic model and the whole thing went to mush after that.

I’d ask this Parliament to at least consider going back to the Garnaut Report, and see whether we can lay a platform for delivering on and fulfilling our duty of finishing the process that’s gone from the science to the economics. Let’s get it through the politics and let’s deliver something for this nation.

The entrails of the weekend’s result are being eagerly sifted through. Hidden amongst them is an idea that’s being championed by several of the now all-important independent MPs: parliamentary reform. But what would that look like?

Rob Oakeshott is running hard on this issue, citing the failure of the Rudd-Gillard government to pay attention to the myriad reports it commissioned. In his interview on the ABC last night he specifically cited the Rudd-Gillard government’s lack of substantive action on the Henry Tax Review as a significant failing. The Prime Minister also appeared to open the door to discussions on reforms during her press conference yesterday.

At one level Oakeshott’s concerns are practical. A lot of the independents’ time is tied up with parliamentary busy work that seems to have little impact. But his remarks make it clear that he has a bigger goal. Somewhat ominously he’s described our current situation as “a stimulus package for democracy.”

The reform and revitalisation of Parliament and related governance processes has long been the red headed stepchild of Australian politics. Nobody’s wanted to invest time and effort in reforms that only wonks and parliamentary tragics will ever hear about, let alone care about. My own wish is for a revitalised green paper process that’s adhered to for all new policies, but that seems as likely as the return of steam trains.

What remains unclear is whether Oakeshott and his fellow independents are talking about tinkering with the in-trays or significant structural reforms, maybe even electoral system reforms. There’s recent precedent of course. The Liberal Democrats were successful in getting the Tories in the UK to commit to a referendum on preferential voting in 2011 (the so-called Alternate Vote). We already have instant-runoff polling in the House of Representatives so any reforms would be quite different. A piece from the Centre for Policy Development from 2006 discusses a number of options. As it points out:

The great difficulty in implementing [reforms] has been that governments do not want more effective parliaments. Governments regard parliaments as bodies to be controlled.

Of course the reform that’s largely missing from public discussions so far is the overhaul of political donations. There’s probably a limit to what three blokes from Port Macquarie, Tamworth and Townsville can tackle.

There is a significant chance following this election that democracy may actually take hold in Australia. Do any of you know what it might look like?

Related links: The Senate’s Papers on Parliament Series, Parliamentary Reform on Malcolm Farnsworth’s Australian Politics Website.