It has been a bad week for Australian political leaders.
In one week, Queensland Premier Campbell Newman has lost his job, Northern Territory Chief Minister Adam Giles has fended off an attempted coup and Prime Minister Tony Abbott has seen his political future slip out from underneath him.
What is going on? Australia has become a nation of ‘leaderside’. We dispose of leaders almost as quickly as they rise to power, quickly blaming them for anything that goes wrong with a government. Kevin Rudd and Campbell Newman were too arrogant and Julia Gillard and Tony Abbott simply had no political intelligence. Yet the real problem doesn’t lie with individual leaders but with our concept of leadership itself.
Over the past decade our society has entered what some call a ‘crisis of politics’. As the social bases of our major political parties have been decimated, so has their authority within society. Politicians have become heavily distrusted, with assumptions they are all deceitful and only in it for their own power. Those who run against the political establishment are quick to gain popularity. Nowhere is this trend greater it seems than in the way we treat political leaders.
A bit of context here. Over the past decades our society has become more obsessed with ‘leaders’. Connected to our neoliberal focus on the individual, we have placed more faith in ‘leaders’ to provide solutions for our social and political problems. Gary Gemmill and Judith Oakley call this our ‘great leadership myth’ — the idea that our organisations, institutions, and broader society, require great leaders to survive. Without a leader we are helpless.
Nowhere can we see this more than in our politics. Over the past few decades, Australia has trended more towards a ‘presidential’ style of politics — one where the focus is placed heavily on the leader of a party instead of on their politics or policies. We focus our attention almost solely on our party leaders, giving them unprecedented power.
The problem with this, as Gemmill and Oakley argue, is that it de-skills and de-mobilises those around leaders — from their political colleagues to the mass population. This is why we see constant complaints from backbenchers that party leaders are not consultative enough. The leadership myth removes power from the masses and to provides it to an elite few.
Herein lies the crux of why we seem to be facing a new leadership crisis every few months.
As leaders have been given more power they have also become more disconnected from those around them (and importantly from the general population). Look at what is causing Abbott’s leadership woes — concerns he has completely lost touch with the general population and that he is not consultative enough with his party. In the past leaders used to be able to get away with this disconnection as they had a strong social base to back them up. But as these social bases have been hollowed out and the crisis in politics has begun it has become clearer who these leaders represent. Hence we’ve lost our patience — disposing of leaders as quickly as possible.
And herein lies the final contradiction.
Even while the realities of who our leaders represent have become more apparent, the leadership myth has still remained dominant. As our politics trudges through its crisis we have continued to search for a new leader who can save it.
As these crises intensify however we should be heading in a different direction. Around the country, political parties are tearing themselves apart and instead of hoping that the next person may save them, we should be looking at alternatives. This can mean looking at more cooperative forms of democratic decision making, to removing our obsession with party leaders to instead focus on the team of players. It means recognising that leaders are simply a figurehead and that in fact real change comes from all of us.
There can be no doubt that people are sick of the constant speculation and fighting about leadership within our major political parties. But the solutions often provided wont actually deal with this issue. The focus remains on the issue of leadership itself, when it is other alternatives we should be exploring.
In placing all our faith in leaders - in buying into the myth - we have removed ourselves from ownership in our political process. We have allowed others - those with vested interest in the elite - to make decisions for us, and with the expected consequences. It is essential that we start doing that experimentation - getting rid of our focus on leaders and looking to other forms of political organising.
Simon Copland is a freelance writer and climate campaigner. He is a regular columnist for the Sydney Star Observer and blogs at The Moonbat.
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