TOM ST JOHN
ARTS / LLB IV
I. A Tough Act to Follow
The public presentation of Australian politics has always been suffused with a sense of theatre. The soliloquys and satire, the veiled intrigue and gleeful backstabbing, the tragic flaws revealed and condemned by a chorus of heckles from the groundlings. For a bit of idle chicanery, the players will sometimes don costumes for our amusement: the customary hard hat and vest at a work site, or religious garb smuggled into the Senate. Amidst all of this, the Royal Commission is political spectacle par excellence. High-priced Senior Counsel chew the scenery, gladiators toying with their subjects. These events serve as a constant source of drama, talking heads and politicians emerging to partake in the schadenfreude. All the while, an ensemble of potential culprits waits backstage, nervously eyeing their turn in the spotlight.
For the most part, the targets of public ire know to nod along to the criticisms and look sad at the right time. There is an air of masochism in their spotted enthusiasm, something that seems bizarre until you realise that they know something we don’t. They know that none of it is actually real. It’s all blood packs and stage punches and retractable knives. In our society, only certain kinds of theft are deemed worthy of punishment – the wrongdoers are far more likely to leave in a luxury SUV than a police van. It’s a public flogging with a whip made of silk.
“...there is no inherent or inevitable harm from a hypothetical Royal Commission. ”
Setting aside the obvious concerns with placing broad, coercive, powers at the disposal of Australia’s executive government, there is no inherent or inevitable harm from a hypothetical Royal Commission. In fact, the recent inquiry into institutional sexual abuse is a useful example of its virtue. This concerned a multi-generational tragedy that required time, expertise, and a workaround to the political hurdles that would emerge from any inquiry so likely to indict a powerful religious organisation. At its core, it was an issue of oversight. There is no controversy in making a normative judgment about the wrongness of institutional sexual abuse. Before that, the Royal Commission on Human Relationships, announced by Gough Whitlam after the failed reform of ACT’s abortion laws, publicly examined many of the prejudices of Australian society and laid the groundwork for something resembling a social liberation movement.
Apart from a fallow period in the early 21st century, the Royal Commission has been used frequently since Federation. The biggest difference is the seriousness of the subject matter; it seems unlikely that “the butter industry” (1904-1905), “the pearl-shelling industry” (1912-1916), or “the charges made by D. L. Gilchrist concerning the construction of the western section of the Kalgoorlie to Port Augusta Railway” (1916) were the most pressing political issues of their day. More recently, it has been harder to draw a line between what is rightfully outside the government’s expertise and what is merely beyond their political appetite.
A Commission into the banking sector, an ill-fated ambush of labour unions, and more inquiries rumoured to be forthcoming in the energy and insurance sector – it is important to note that such areas were not thought to be the province of politicians merely because of custom, but because of a commonly held understanding about the role of politicians to safeguard the material interests of the electorate. That is not to say there is no intuitive value in taking political fieldwork out of the hands of ideologues with potentially contradictory priorities and outsourcing it to arbiters of objective truth. The scrutiny on a government’s potential dereliction of duty is why Royal Commissions, though fairly frequent, are not always necessarily popular in Canberra social circles. Our present Prime Minister, for what it’s worth, voted against the Banking Royal Commission 26 times.
But that intuition never questions the assumptions on which it is premised, like whether some objective truth actually matters to doing the work of politics, or the essential difference between finding facts and finding solutions. The problem with this thinking is that it successfully obscures a conversation about the rule of law – whether it might have been preferable if the government had, at the time, set up safeguards or oversight that prevented the sexual abuse of thousands of minors, rather than, decades later, forcing survivors to relive that trauma in a sterile amphitheatre full of lawyers and cameras. It appears that the two major parties in our country have reached bipartisan consensus that the only legitimate force in Australian politics is retroactive scorn.
II. Intermission:
Impeachment and The United States
Australia is not alone in struggling to comprehend the proper usage of a political tool that can alternatively be seen as public spectacle or stony-faced audit. Even before the first draft of the Mueller Report hit the printers, as they had done in the wake of myriad scandals before, the leadership of the Democratic Party in the United States Congress were swift in quelling calls for impeachment. The House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer called impeachment “not worthwhile,” while the House Intelligence Committee chairman Adam Schiff said House Democrats were “not there yet” on impeachment. Schiff said he saw no value in “an impeachment proceeding that we know is destined for failure in the Senate.”
The proliferation of Royal Commissions and the lack of enthusiasm for impeachment both represent first, the rejection of a moral imperative, and secondly, naivety of an ancillary strategic goal. The Democratic establishment’s nose-pinching refusal to consider even the possibility of upholding sworn civil duties represents its own specific brand of moral decay. Yet even from a strategic perspective, impeachment proceedings could provide any motivated or seasoned politician a perfect chance to combine complex strands of Trumpian scandal into a singular political narrative about widespread dishonesty and corruption native to an unpopular political class. Even if one had become utterly cynical about the mere notion of moral duty in politics, there could be no better way than impeachment to rile up a notoriously antsy President, demoralise his supporters, and provide a cohesive narrative for an easily-distracted media. But the reality is that these politicians find those suggestions terrifying.
The reasons given for avoiding impeachment – near-certain failure in the Senate, a forthcoming election, apparent lack of public support – would be easier to swallow if House Democrats were actually willing to do the things they say they would rather be doing instead of impeaching the President. The fact that all of the bills Democrats are passing through the House are no more likely to get through the Senate than, say, impeachment proceedings, is of little practical consequence. Neither, apparently, is weakly signalling for meagre electoral reforms while confirming a swathe of conservative judicial nominees who will almost certainly strike down the legality of such policies. At its core, there seems to be a fear of exercising political power without universal public support, a fear that the failure to impeach a plainly corrupt President will somehow vindicate his plain corruption.
“Politicians that have sold us on the virtue of Royal Commissions as a helpful information-gathering first step are simply hoping that we don’t notice the lack of action that inevitably follows. ”
In Australia, the fear is that passing legislation to, say, rein in the banking industry – done without the imprimatur of objectivity – will unfavourably tip the scales of our mercurial electoral see-saw. Politicians that have sold us on the virtue of Royal Commissions as a helpful information-gathering first step are simply hoping that we don’t notice the lack of action that inevitably follows. If we are going to commit to a system where we agree to only address wrongdoing a decade or so after it first happened, one would at least hope that these policies would be effective. Instead, the recommendations from Hayne’s Banking Royal Commission Report were described by the Finance Sector Union as “cosmetic”.[1] Regardless, in an industry where it was acceptable that banks would charge insurance premiums to dead people and reward themselves for the innovation with inflated bonuses – all the while publicly insured by the Reserve Bank’s euphemistic ‘Committed Liquidity Facility’ – it’s unlikely we can resolve these endemic cultural issues with one-off regulatory reactions.[2]
Where the Democratic Party of the United States is unable to see the value in a process as distinct from its endpoint, the Australian political establishment sees no need for an endpoint at all. Yet in both cases the politicians share a peculiar brand of nihilism in the worth of their own profession. This is what happens when the political class spend years using terms like ‘responsibility’ and ‘political dignity’ as punchlines; they have convinced even themselves of their own inability to hold any accountability for misconduct with anything other than toothless reprimand or aesthetic contrarianism.
III. Curtain Call
The easiest thing to do in politics is to argue for nothing at all. There is a marked benefit for politicians if we all agree to sacrifice participation in democracy, to give up on advocacy and activism and allow some enlightened mechanics to fix our country for us. We have been told that our only defence against institutional malfeasance is this coterie of steely technocrats, deployed at random, girded by the assumption that it’s easier to get the world to change with a clipboard than a picket line. But would it not be better if we could do the work of politics – reckoning with the wounds of our colonial past, addressing the rampant lawbreaking inherent to certain professions, reckoning with the perverse concealment of decades of crime – without paying lawyers and bureaucrats to tell us about it after it has happened? Unfortunately, I’m not anticipating any change like that. Still, the 2040 Royal Commission into Institutional Political Inactivity on Climate Change will make for great reading. After all, the show must go on.
[1] @FSU_Australia (Finance Sector Union Australia) (Twitter, 3 February 2019, 11:42pm AEST) <https://twitter.com/FSU_Australia/status/1092327635768684544>.
[2] The Committed Liquidity Fund – a fund available to a little over a dozen Australian banks to buttress their liquidity in times of financial stress – is Australia’s answer to the American banking approach of ‘Too Big To Fail’: see generally Reserve Bank of Australia, ‘The RBA Committed Liquidity Facility’ (Media Release 2011-25, 16 November 2011)