Chaos is the New Black

All the shocks and surprises of this new senate have left the press gallery with a serious case of the vapors. Its as if the current drama was unknowable, unseen and unreadable pre-September. Well, atleast this is what folks like Mark Kenny want you to think, or want to believe themselves.

Polling and the realities of the senate were well understood before the last election. And in the subsequent months our knowledge of the senate has only increased. Why all the shock then?

You see, people like Kenny have this funny idea about how our federal democracy works. They seem to think that if a party 'wins' government, it wins everything, the whole house. Clean sweep. However, the reality is the party that 'wins' only ever wins a majority proportion of seats in the lower house. So we have an opposition, which represents a substantial minority of the population. It only ever wins a proportion of places in the senate, in this case a minority.  So it then has to 'negotiate' the passage of its manifesto through at least one of these houses. To complicate this Australia is also a federal system, with states and territories, who usually have their own ideas about how the joint should be run. And to complicate things even further there is all this governmental, and not so governmental, bureaucracy that is to varying degrees answerable to the federal government. Examples of this are the ABC board, Treasury, Tim Wilson the new human rights commissioner, and ARENA. To put it bluntly, nothing happens overnight. This ship is too big to turn on a dime, and some things will simply NEVER be possible.(I'm lookin' at you state based 'taxes')

Is that an iceberg ahead?

This isn't a bad thing: as an off-shoot of the Westminster parliament, with some very important bits borrowed from the U.S of A, our democracy has hundreds of years of political drama, subterfuge and bastardry to draw on. We have all these 'checks and balances' because our history has taught us they are necessary. One only has to look to the utter shamozzle of Queensland to see what happens when you tinker too much with the system; A unicameral parliament shoe-horned into a bicameral polity. We will never know for sure how the current Queensland drama would have played out if it still had its upper house, but I doubt it would be quite so lop-sided or prone to flights of fancy like this Chief Justice malarkey.

We have a 'hands off' attitude to some appointments of government connected organisations to avoid politicising such organisations. It may only be a fig leaf, but it is an important fig leaf and should not be down-played: much of our system of government involves "conventions", and they only work because all players agree that they should work. In a sense its all an illusion, like money or what constitutes good table manners. We have all agreed that broadly this how things should work, and because we all agree on it that is why it works this way.

So many rules

History has taught us that revolutions make for great art.......

Now I'm not suggesting the LNP is trying to subvert Australia's democracy, although you would get such an impression from reading some of the drivel pumped out by journos like Kenny. Not as a call to arms, mind you. Not because he believes the running of government is being subverted by anti-democratic and unconstitutional monsters, which is clearly a bad thing. No, because he apparently wants our government and democracy to be subverted! As do many others in the press gallery.
They all just want to see 'things' get done, and to hell with how this effects Australia's democratic system.

"We had an election!" they all cry.

"Mandate!" they all shout.

.......however they don't end for the best, you know?

While ignoring the fact that we do not have a winner takes all system....which is exactly how a successful democracy should work. Culturally, this was learned the hard way. Endless civil wars, assassinations, putschs, revolutions, have all taught the collective West (and many of the Rest) that "winner takes all" systems are bad: they are not stable, are not good for economic development, are not good for the people, and do not last. That our democracy has lasted so long is a testament to the success our system has had in convincing both winners and losers that their aims are best served by maintaining all the built in checks and balances, and to not try and make a blind grab for unparalleled power.

How the press gallery imagines the 2013 election.

What of the supposed "chaos" of the last few weeks? This apparent "chaos" is primarily due to the media's credulity and the inability of this government to successfully prosecute the politics of the changes it wishes to make. It is the government that has dropped the ball, allowing everyone else to hog the middle ground. Making bold statements about your legislative agenda is just so much hot air. If you don't have the numbers, then too bad. This government is in complete legislative turmoil because of its own bizarre failings. This is the story the media should be reporting on, but instead we get drivel about how Palmer is wrecking the joint.

looks pretty civil to me

That Palmer should be seeking now to claim his pound of flesh is besides the the point. Everyone, including the media and the government, should have seen this coming and reacted accordingly. This is not the 90's; there is no such thing as a 'mandate' to do anything in the senate. There are now many more cross-benches and minor parties, all elected  by their own electors, who have their own agenda's. Why should they help a floundering and unpopular government? Just so they can be dragged down as well? This is a mess of the LNP's doing, let them sort it out themselves. The government will have to compromise and it will have to do a dirty deal(s).

Welcome to politics.

lol

At the end of all of this, I would just like to quote a few words from the man who has done the most to show that the emperor really does have no clothes on; Clive Palmer:

Asked whether the government had tried to trick PUP, Palmer said: “It could have been, but you never want to underestimate the incompetence of the Abbott government.”

Says it all, really.