There’s always a bit of pomp and circumstance around the meeting of the federal parliament. But in recent years, the number of “traditions” has been growing.
The “traditional” church service before the first meeting of parliament for the year has been a thing for a while. More recently, the “traditional” attendance of leaders and politicians at the Last Post ceremony at the Australian War Memorial the day before parliament sits has become a tradition.
A tradition that is fast fading however is accountability. Never have politicians had more opportunities to tout their wares: technology means they can turn up in any corner of the country and be questioned.
Television and radio programs vie to get them on air. Podcasts have become the new fashion for this particular election campaign.
But that doesn’t mean politicians actually answer questions. The concept of fronting up and answering questions seems to be lost on some of our leaders, despite the increased opportunities.
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Dutton’s media strategy
For the past two and half years, Peter Dutton has been exceptionally selective in the media appearances he makes, defying the “tradition” for decades of opposition leaders using any possible opportunity or platform to be noticed. Instead, he has often only done one or two interviews with friendly questions in a given week.
And, let’s face it, it has worked for him until now.
Things have got a bit more edgy in the past month, with an election only a couple of months away.
This week, he appeared on the ABC’s Insiders program (as well as his more common appearances on Sky), and did a rare proper press conference at Parliament House.
On Insiders, host David Speers asked the opposition leader six times whether he planned to cut government spending and, if so, by how much and where.
The repeated answer was cutting public servants, though he declined to say which public servants, and which services would be cut, though apparently not in areas that might be politically sensitive like disabilities, human services or veterans affairs (some of the places the current government has increased numbers because the Coalition had left services in such a scandalous state of disrepair as to earn the approbation of at least royal commissions).
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Specifics on cuts remain unknown
Dutton said the Coalition wouldn’t be having an independent audit of government spending because “we know what we’re doing”.
“We’re able to hit the ground running”.
Asked if that meant voters might not know until after the election where a Dutton government would cut spending, the opposition leader said “we need to sit down and look through an ERC process, which would be the normal course of things. We’ll do that in government.”
But what was particularly sobering about this rather extraordinary declaration that voters wouldn’t know what services the Coalition would cut before it won office, was that it seemed to barely raise a flicker of interest in the media.
Senior journalists were heard dismissing Dutton’s statement on the basis that parties always have to have their costings scrutinised before polling day.
Really? Well that’s okay then!
In reality, both sides have become increasingly tardy about actually submitting policy documents for formal costing. The Abbott-led Coalition simply refused to do so altogether in 2010. In 1990, the Peacock-led Coalition didn’t have a health policy.
Apart from the Coalition’s nuclear policy, the only notable policy to be released recently is its plan for tax-deductible business lunches. It hasn’t said how much that will cost but the suggestion is it will be $250 million a year.
The government asked Treasury to cost an identical policy and its estimate was between $1.6 billion and $10 billion a year.
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Dutton pushes caravan issue
Dutton’s declaration that spending cuts might only emerge after the election was only made more deeply ironic given the Coalition’s line of attack on the government this week.
This was that the prime minister was failing voters by not saying if he had known, or what he had known, about the caravan containing explosives found at Dural in Sydney’s north west. That is, demanding accountability.
On Thursday morning, Dutton said he had called his press conference to say that he had “written to the prime minister today asking for an independent inquiry in relation to the fact that the prime minister of our country wasn’t notified for nine days, 10 days, of what was believed to be the biggest planned terrorist attack in our country’s history.”
Dutton once again dismissed the idea that, if this is what had occurred, there might be some fault on behalf of the police and security agencies, and inferred in his statements that, having worked in the area, he knew there was something up.
He went on to (once again) suggest, rather extraordinarily, that security agencies “were worried that the prime minister or his office were going to leak the information which would have compromised the covert nature of it”.
Challenged on whether he had any evidence to back this, he said he wasn’t going to comment “on discussions I’ve had with individuals out of agencies”, even as he was demanding the PM should publicly say what discussions he had had.
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‘Leaders need to be properly scrutinised’
This issue dominated the press conference, along with questions about what he thought about opinion polls, Donald Trump, and whether the prime minister should have gone to Queensland to hit flood-ravaged areas.
The dark shadow of antisemitism at home and Donald Trump’s increasingly alarming modus operandi might explain the media fascination with the caravan story and give licence to other politicians around the world to make what we may call bold and unsubstantiated assertions.
But we are now only a couple of months from our own election, and our leaders need to be properly scrutinised, and be open to that scrutiny.
Dutton received just a couple of questions about his own policy positions and whether he would be open to scrutiny during the “official” election campaign.
It prompted some very chummy, ho-ho stuff about how he was “happy to take questions, to speak with you regularly, as I do sometimes off the record as well, and have a pretty good relationship with many of you”.
This was after pointing out that he had done a press conference not far away and that only three journalists had turned up. Actually, it was in Goulburn, almost 100 kilometres from Canberra.
One place Dutton still hasn’t turned up is the National Press Club.
And that brings us back to traditions. He hasn’t addressed the club — a platform for politicians for 60 years at which they are questioned in a televised forum for over an hour — since becoming opposition leader two-and-a-half years ago.
Thirty-two years ago next month, the then prime minister, Paul Keating, appeared at the Press Club two days before polling day on March 11, 1993.
The then opposition leader, John Hewson, had decided he was not going to honour the tradition of both leaders addressing the club in the last week of the campaign but instead hold raucous rallies around the country.
(So far only Hewson, Bill Shorten and Scott Morrison haven’t turned up in the last week of the campaign).
“Dr Hewson has broken one of the traditions of Australian politics,” Keating said at the time. “We don’t have such a lot, of course, homegrown traditions, but one of them is that leaders make themselves accountable to press in the week before an election, Dr Hewson has not answered a question of substance since Christmas.”
Barely out of “the recession we had to have”, Keating observed that it could not be said “that I’ve ever run away from scrutiny or from the opportunity to explain our policies, or further to face up the ramifications of those policies”.
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“As treasurer and then prime minister, I’ve taken full responsibility for the economic and social affairs of Australia, and all the responsibility that is mine, I will shoulder. All the damage that the recession has done, I’ll attempt to repair. Every sensible thing that can be done, will be done.
“In this place, this week, Dr Hewson had a chance to explain his so-called plan… and he refused.”
The choice voters faced, he said, “is not between one party and a vacuum”.
“It’s a choice between two parties”.
One thing you would have to say for Hewson. He certainly had a plan: Fightback.
Three months, at most, from a federal election, Dutton doesn’t seem to have a plan. And voters seem to be confronted by a vacuum .
Laura Tingle is 7.30’s chief political correspondent.
