Every government has to walk a tightrope between being a hard, head-kicking political party that is trying to demolish the opposition and get itself re-elected, and also the national government which represents the whole, and can be trusted with issues like national security.
The Abbott government thus far hasn’t straddled this line all that well – the shift from opposition to government has taken the whole year to get over. They’re a bit like a bloke who has been living with his girlfriend for a year but has only just worked out to not keep the toilet seat up.
Part of the problem is they believed they could use the functions of government to keep acting like an opposition. To this end they set up two Royal Commissions to do very little other than attempt to smear the past two ALP Prime Ministers – Kevin Rudd with the Royal Commission into the Home Insulation Program, and Julia Gillard with the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption.
“It seemed as though the entire strategy of the counsel assisting the union Royal Commission, Jeremy Stoljar, was based on hoping at some point Ms Gillard would, like at the end of an episode of Scooby Doo, announce that yes she was guilty, and she would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky bloggers.”
Royal Commissions are among the most important processes a government can initiate. They are reserved for cases when other investigations will not reveal the truth – perhaps because the issue is too systemic and beyond the means of a mere criminal investigation, or because the issues affect those in power who might be able to otherwise stifle investigation.
But with these two royal commissions we had the government essentially acting in response to their basest political instincts. It saw them listening to the voices of the unhinged – the media editors and commentators who struggled to admit the 2007 election was not a mistake and then found the result of the 2010 vote beyond their ability to compute.
There had been coronial hearings into the deaths of the 4 young men who died while installing insulation under the home insulation program. Was there any truth that seemed to be hidden from those hearings?
Nope. And yet the lure of knowing Kevin Rudd would be put on the stand was too great for the government to resist.
After all, the home insultation program (HIP) was such good media fodder for them while in opposition. Remember 3AW’s campaign regarding the number of fires that occurred under it? My gosh, there might have been a “cover-up”! The Daily Telegraph breathlessly reported that “Dozens of NSW homes have been destroyed or damaged by fires”, or The Australian chipping in to tell us that “Peter Garrett has admitted his troubled $2.5 billion insulation program has been linked to 86 house fires around the nation”.
Royal Commission now!
When the Royal Commission handed down its report, it displayed a grasp of mathematics that seemed beyond many of those working in the media. “The number of fires in absolute terms did increase under the HIP,” it wrote. “That is not surprising because there was a huge surge in the number of installations taking place.”
It further noted that “the rate of insulation-related fires in dwellings pre-HIP to have been about 2.54 per 100,000 per year” compared to “1.07 incidents per 100,000 households per year” for those houses in which insulation was installed under the HIP.
In a lovely slap to the media it noted with as much sardonicism as a Royal Commission can muster that “The occurrence of fires does not appear to have been an issue of particular concern, other than to the media”.
This week Julia Gillard took the stand at the trade union Royal Commission and once again nothing new was found. Much to the chagrin of those journalists who thought this was their Watergate, the commission was reduced to the level of the pathetic – discussion over why didn’t the former PM get three quotes for the renovation of her bathroom.
It seemed as though the entire strategy of the counsel assisting the union Royal Commission, Jeremy Stoljar, was based on hoping at some point Ms Gillard would, like at the end of an episode of Scooby Doo, announce that yes she was guilty, and she would have got away with it too if it wasn’t for those pesky bloggers.
Alas, for them it was not to be, rather it ended with the commissioner Dyson Heydon rather exasperatingly pointing out that they were going over “well-trodden ground”.
Quite.
All that was left was for the counsel representing Ralph Blewitt to suggest “that your association with Mr Wilson in the early 1990s has led to your judgment being clouded about matters of ethics and running files?”
And that really in the end was what this was about – men attempting to suggest a woman who they did not believe deserved to be Prime Minister had been pretty much under the spell of a man, and thus had been involved in illegal acts.
Such an approach is bad enough when it involves politicians throwing mud in attempt to get some to stick, but to elevate it to the Royal Commission level only serves to denigrate that institution and reduces the sense of the government being able to act in the national interest.
It matters when the government is also looking to involve Australia in a war and trying to suggest there are no political reasons behind it upping the national security rhetoric.
Unfortunately, so far Tony Abbott and the government have been treating our response to Islamic State militants in much the same way it would a political issue – such as giving favourable leaks to friendly Sunday tabloids.
The result is that when the head of ASIO intimated on ABC’s 730 this week that Australia’s terror threat level may be raised, the Attorney General, Senator George Brandis had to repeatedly tell ABC’s AM program that he was “at pains” to let listeners know that “this is a professional judgement of the agencies, not a political decision of politicians.”
Perhaps here the government might finally be learning the lesson that when you use professional and non-political agencies and institutions for political purposes, voters tend to assume you always are.
Such a belief is not actually in anyone’s interests especially when you are trying to unite the nation.
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