The Chaser Report - The Shrinking Nation | Graeme Turner

Episode Date: August 3, 2023

Author Graeme Turner joins Charles and Dom to discuss his new book "The Shrinking Nation" and answer some questions on what got Australia into the depressing political state that we talk about it being everyday on this podcast.More about Graeme's book can be found here! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

The Chaser Report is recorded on Gatigal Land. Striving for mediocrity in a world of excellence, this is The Chaser Report. Hello and welcome to The Chaser Report with Dom and Charles. Today, our guest is leading cultural historian Graham Turner. His new book is called The Shrinking Nation, how we got here and what can be done about it. It has a sandcastle on the cover with an Australian flag on it. It sometimes feels like that's all there is to this country of ours. Graham Turner, welcome to the Chaser Report.

So nice of you to join us. Thank you very much. Now, when you sat down to write this book, I think, in late 2021, things were looking a tad bleak. What drove you to dive into, I guess, the morass in which we found ourselves at that point? Yeah, I guess it was longer than just 2021 in the making because I was just getting more and more amazed at the kind of degradation about political culture. and at the same time as all these waves of social change happening,

our politicians were from both parties, we're just sitting on their hands and waiting for things to happen. And so it really was driven of frustration. But there were a couple of trigger points, you know, the reaction to COVID was one, but also I live in the northern rivers. And so I was watching the way in which governments responded to the emergency around the floods.

And so there are a lot of provocations that made you think, really, you know, this country used to be a bit better than that. We need to think about how we can put it back on track. More in just a moment as we get further into this topic. Graham, Anthony Albanesey's Prime Minister, now everything's fixed, isn't it? Since 2021, aren't we in a bright new Australia where every problem has been resolved? If only, if only, yeah. Certainly, I think that there was a collective sigh of relief when Albanese was elected.

But now I think we're waiting for the other shoe to drop so that actually some change might occur. All right. So let's look at the trigger points, I guess, that you were seeing at that stage. And you've identified a disconnect between what was happening on the ground and what was happening in our parliament. What did that look like from your perspective? Well, where I am, in the northern rivers, I was watching delays in people being rescued. I mean, not just helped, but rescued from the floods. And then the long aftermath, you know, there are still people more than a year on now, still people living in tents or living inside shells of homes. And so the idea that government is there to advance the well-being and maintain the security

of the population, that seems to have taken a second seat. You know, we sit back now and we look at the surplus, and we're supposed to congratulate the government for producing that, but we're still got people who are homeless, we've still got lots of unemployed, we've still got lots of disadvantaged people. And I think really the surplus isn't going to make much consolation to those people. I was on radio when that was all happening up in Lismore and it was fairly astonished that in a place known for flooding regularly, there weren't any boats, it seemed.

The SES had no boats. You needed an army of basically legends in tinnies going around and sorting everything out. It just seemed like a pretty bleak point in terms of a state responding to anything happening, particularly given climate change. That's right. there was almost no state response for a week. Yeah, I don't think that's an exaggeration. There's almost nobody on the ground for a week.

And then the New South Wales came in with it, but there was almost no interest federally. And so the idea that government is there to protect us and that they're a safety net when things go wrong, that's really not easy to believe in any longer for a lot of people who have been victims and not just the floods, but COVID and the range of other things of fires before that.

But how much? Because that was Scott Morrison. I remember that. And remember just his sort of indolence at responding to anything. There just seemed to be no urgency on getting the government involved. Well, his famous catchphrase was, it's not my job. He didn't hold a hose. No, no one's ever seen him holding a hose. To be fair to him, he's never been there pitching in. But how much can you ascribe, like, you sort of argue that it's a sort of broader social malaise, philosophical malaise about the government. But can't we just all pin it on Scott Morrison? Like, he was singularly just a piece of shit. Well, he was certainly the low point. But I don't think it's just Scott Morrison. I mean, I think an awful lot that happened before him enabled Scott Morrison.

that in many ways, the manner in which Tony Abbott ran his government, and before him really, even Kevin Rudd, where a lot of big issues were pulled to the, you know, push to the side. So really there were, and climate change is the most obviously example of that, but there are plenty of them where you had the social issues that needed to be addressed. And the issue for the government was not to address them, but to come in with some kind of political fix that would move it off the media's agenda and give them some free space.

The idea of actually using government to make life better for all Australians has not been around for a very long time a couple of decades, I think. To be fair to Kevin Wright, he was at least, I think, between five and ten years away from his committee is reporting back

on a roadmap for a plan for change. So had he been around longer, he would have sorted out. What I wonder is, though, have we ever been good at this? Certainly my sense is, yes, that the Australian government, particularly due to federalism

and perhaps just the sort of fair degree of comfort that most of us live in and the lack of urgency that seems to be there. The government hasn't been terribly responsive or on the front foot about much in my lifetime that I can recall. Were things ever good? Were we ever in there responding quickly and indeed getting ahead of the curve with these sorts of challenges? Yeah, I think there are plenty of points in Australian East where you can see that

just after the war, for instance, massive investment in housing came about. That was from a liberal government. I guess what happened, if we're talking the broad changes, what happened is that they outsource a lot of government. They really didn't want to have to invest in a lot of things that we thought were important, age care, childcare, dealing with the environment. All of those things got outsourced so they no longer became government's problem. They became problems that had been handballed over to private concerns.

And I think that shift, which is about a 20, 30 year shift, has meant the governments just don't do as much. don't claim to do as much. I mean, John Quiggan wrote a great piece where he said, this is what would have happened, you know, 50 years ago if COVID had happened. We had our own Commonwealth serum laboratories, which would have produced vaccine. We had our own airline Qantas, which could have airlifted people back to Australia. We had our own quarantine centres that were set up all around the country. There are all kinds of things that the government did then and could do that it no longer can do and that outsources to private companies. They don't do because they don't make any money out.

of people have gotten rich through privatisation. I'm sure they're doing wonderfully well. Yeah, sure they are. But that, I mean, what you're talking about, that, that shift is, that's a Hawkeeting thing, wasn't it? That was when they started. Yeah, it goes back that far. And so why? Why did they suddenly decide that they didn't want to be actively involved in all parts of the economy? Well, I guess there's a big change in serious. about how government works and about how the economy works that, you know, people normally talk about it as neoliberalism, and I suppose that's a good a name for it as any, and that that had prioritised the economy is the thing that we needed to look after, and the idea that the

nation or the society might be something that was more important, that got sidelined. And so there was a fundamental shift in the way people thought government should work and the role of the individual within society. That meant that individuals got buried and the economy took over the idea of society, the nation, and became the primary thing that people wanted to support. I guess there's a couple of issues there, aren't there? Because it's not just about what the policy choices are that are made, but it's to do with state capacity. So how much the state is actually able to do what its mechanisms are. We talked about this recently with the Reserve Bank, which has the one lever of interest rates and nothing else that can really do. But then also,

there's an ideology in there, isn't there, about people's beliefs about what a government is supposed to do. And you see, I guess, a big difference between the view in Europe where the state's expected to do a lot of things and in places like America where there's a bit of a view that all the government needs to do is get out of the way and unleash the private sector and everything will be wonderful. Has that changed? Do you think over the decades in Australia? Well, hopefully it's in the process of changing. I suspect that that's kind of running its course now. But really, that's what's dominated policy for certainly the last 20 years, the idea that small government is good government, that the market is the best way to regulate opportunity

and distribute resources and that the government should leave all of that alone. That has been a kind of article of faith for both major parties for a long time. But I do think that the rhetoric during the last election and some of the things that Chalmers are saying around setting up a well-being budget, for instance, would indicate that maybe that's sort of running out of steam because people see the consequences of it. You know, they've been told that if the rich get rich, they'll get rich along with them. Well, they've seen pretty clearly that that doesn't happen. The rich just get rich.

You know, it doesn't help the rest of us. And I think people are getting to the point where they're seeing through that ideology and thinking, well, actually, we need a better way of explaining how government works and how discharges its responsibility to the community. But isn't one of the problems with the rich getting richer is that then suddenly they've got more power to keep that wealth, you know, that suddenly our media institutions start being corroded because they all start supporting, because they're all owned by the rich, they start supporting that mode of, you know, doing things.

Yeah, no, that's true. And unfortunately, I mean, nobody forced them to use their money to consolidate their power. They could actually use their money to social benefit. But they've chosen not to. They've chosen to make as many attempts as to. possible to rig the system in their favour. And that's, in a way, that's seen as being okay within that community. And that's something that probably does need to change.

And it's something that you would hope will change over the next decade. Now, you're a pioneering figure in the world of media studies. I'm keen to know what role you think the media has in this in a bit more detail, because it's often seemed certainly in recent years that sections of the media were essentially a wing of government and in cahoots with government, We saw this in RoboDet recently where essentially you had, I think Alan Tudge had a list of friendly media outlets where he was guaranteed, you know, to be able to get the message across in whatever way he wanted. Has that, has that changed in your period of studying the media that we essentially got really another wing of the coalition at times through Talkback Radio and, of course, News Limited and its various organs? Yeah, I think it has changed.

Certainly in the media seems as if it's more partisan because it's less diverse now. So you hear a few of different voices. But I think really in the print media and in television too, the power of News Limited has really made a difference to the way politics gets dealt with in Australia. And that's become, well, that's really the case over the last 20 years or so. And so if you want to work for a company that's not owned by Murdoch, You know, there aren't many left that you could work for. And so there is a lot of compulsion upon journalists to do what the propriety proprietor wants to do.

I know there's all that talk about how much influence Murdoch exercises personally. He doesn't need to exercise personally. Everybody knows what the job is. So I think what has happened is that it's become more partisan, it's been become more concentrated, but also the notion of facts and the notion of what's true and what isn't true has kind of dissolved. So there's actually a lot more freedom and licence now for media reports to just simply give us bullshit

rather than give us stuff that we might rely on as being true. Are you seeing any countervailing trends? One of the things you write about in the book is the, I guess, the teal revolution in a sense. And we've certainly seen three people like David Pocock coming to the Parliament and a lot of what the Teals have wanted to do. They've been pretty unrelenting on issues like the Integrity Commission

and some of the other things that they've pushed through. Do you think there are any green shoots of, I guess, a resistance to the torpor we've seen in Australian public life in recent years? Yeah, I think there is. I mean, I think to some extent there's kind of a vacuum being opened up by the inaction or disinterest in government by the coalition and by the Labor Party.

So that has left space. And it's not just the Teals, who are kind of on the liberal end of the spectrum. Somebody like Jackie Lambie also represents a kind of of authenticity. That means that, you know, she speaks from her experience and we'll take a position on the basis of that. So if we're, Pocock's a really good example of somebody who's he's a conviction politician and he's prepared to do what he can to change what happens in Parliament. So from my point of view, the more of that, the better that the way that the parties, the dominant parties have worked for the last few decades has not really been in Australia's

best interest. Do you think the jury's out on Anthony Albanese at this stage? I mean, it's still fairly early in his first term. He's focusing clearly on the voice and that's proven to be quite a struggle. But I guess that is at least a fairly major attempt to revise our institutional arrangements. He's obviously taking a lot of a lot of heat. He's expending a lot of political capital on this at the moment. And if it does go down, that will be quite challenging for him. But that does seem at least one example of a politician, at least trying to do something new to address one of our most pressing, you know, historical and social problems. There are a number of areas where you can point to the Albanese government kind of grasping

the nettle and deciding we're going to make change happen. Age care is probably another one. And so, yes, I think there is reason to be optimistic about it. But it's still early days, as you say, it's early in the term. And you do have the sense that they're holding their nerve and avoiding doing anything that will scare the horses until they go. for a second term. But, you know, they'd better have a pretty good rave second term agenda if they're going to operate like that, I think. Well, if you believe Peter Dutton, it's a treaty. That's the thing that's being discussed. But I guess on climate, and Charles, we've talked about this quite a lot on the podcast. There's been a lot of disappointment with what the government's

done in terms of approving new minds and so on. How does this all look from the northern rivers in a place where, I guess, everyone's terrified of more fires and more flooding? It's pretty bad. I mean, people in this area must wake up in the middle of the night every time it rains, wondering what's going to happen. So there's no faith at all, I don't think, in government providing support into the future. And the buyback program that they set up got wound back in terms of the numbers of houses that were going to be included. So there's a lot of resentment and disillusion, I think, in this area about the role that government has played. And I mean, to some extent, the community is stepping up, you know, it's one of those places

where that happens. And there are a couple of local petitions, one from the National Party and one from the Labor Party who've been quite heroic in the way that they've pushed for their communities here. So it's not a completely bleak outlook, but it does seem as if they feel like they're ignored in Canberra and in Sydney, they don't really matter. They matter to their local politicians, but they don't matter in the places where change is going to occur. In terms of, I guess, the questions to do with the state capacity and the views about the role of government, do you think there's, there are some changes? we can make to how the system works. People have talked about reforming federalism,

perhaps looking at things like how the Senate works, maybe even the two-party system. Are there changes that you've got in mind that might make things a bit more reactive and make us a bit more able to deal with all of the troubling policy challenges that we know around the corner? I'm probably not the person who asked about constitutional change. I'm not, that's kind of outside my area of expertise. I guess, I guess, what I'd like to see is a change in the way in which the public service is structured and the relation it has to expert advice and so. And I think that what's happened with the PWC inquiries revealed just how badly served we've been by these consulting firms, stepping in

and providing advice without any kind of knowledge. And I think that one of the real detriments has happened to some extent as a result of the rise of Trump is this undermining of the idea of actually well-informed advice. And so you look at what happened during the fires and so on the ignoring advice from experts in that area and see how much damage that cause. There really does need to be a much more structured relationship between government and advice that is informed

and is disinterested and is not simply driven by vested interests. Yeah, I was going to suggest something slightly different, which is more cultural wars, Because I think that's where, that's where, you know, everyone gets really activated, everyone feels really involved, very engaging. The media gets to sort of, there's lots to talk about, there's lots of colour and movement. Why not just a few more cultural wars? So we should invent a few enemies.

Yes, exactly. It'd be good to see that ramped up in the opposite direction of the way it's been going for the last 20 years. Less news more often. It's interesting looking, though, at the way the Liberal Party's responded to this. And you've got a fairly different path, certainly here in New South Wales, it's early days for the new opposition here, but they seem to be far more moderate. Whereas Peter Dutton seems to have really doubled down

on the way things have been done in the past. At times he's seen to be channeling Tony Abbott more than Scott Morrison and certainly going back to the legacy of John Howard. Do you think that in the long term, the sort of negative view about the state that we're in, the shrinking nation, do you think we're going to bounce back to that? Labor does tend to overextend itself and then get voted out, or indeed do nothing and get voted out during the Rudd-Gillard period. Yeah, I hope that doesn't happen.

I mean, it does seem to me that what's happening now is pretty unusual, you know, the level of support that the Liberal Party now has, or the lack of support that it now has, and their failure to respond to that by changing their policy or even their rhetoric does feel like a bit of a death spiral to me. And if that is due to people wanting better politics, better way of producing politics, a more engaged and connected form of politics, that would be great. But we did vote Scott Morris and in, so you know, you wonder if the Australian electric could make that kind of mistake again.

I wonder how Bill Shorten feels about that in hindsight. looking back and how utterly he was rejected on multiple occasions. He must wake up in the middle of the night. But I guess if there's a consensus, this is the thing, in a two-party system, if there are things that both parties agree on, we've certainly seen this in New South Wales, where possible culture war topics, for instance, the age of consent for same-sex relationships and so on,

some of this sort of stuff has simply been agreed by both parties. If you had a coalition in the more, I guess, Turnbullian, Bishop model, a more moderate coalition, then a lot of these things would get taken off the table and no longer prosecuted if both parties essentially agreed on a lot of this sort of stuff. Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think opting for a kind of half a partisan,

you know, winner-take-all politics, that really goes back to Abbott, I think. That's been really destructive. But it's interesting that, like you're saying, some of the state politics, that's not necessarily the case. It does seem to be a particular disease that has affected the federal parliament. and it's hard to see how this current generation of politics,

of politicians and their advisors are going to break away from that unless there's really savage electoral pushback or less there's a bigger, the larger number of independents coming into Parliament that they have to deal with. Well, it does seem as though they've responded to the Teals by kind of going, well, we're not going to get those seats back, so let's just go further to the right. Charles and I do sometimes end up being a little bit negative

about where we're at and the future of the country. don't we, Charles, it's a bit of an issue on the podcast as we discuss Australian politics. In your book, though, you do try and strike a happy note at the end, and you assert, and I'm not entirely sure, I wish I could be so optimistic, you assert that there's a better country somewhere, attempting to escape from all of this. What is it that gives you that confidence that we're going to somehow, or at least there's a chance of us, for us improving? Why are you an idiot?

And do you regret already publishing that? Yeah, should you have deleted the positive conclusion? And for the second edition, you'll just go somewhere in here, there's a worse country. I was all wrong, it's all turned to crap. Yeah, look, it's interesting, actually, when I wrote the first version of this, my publisher said, my God, this is really relentless. And I didn't need to think, okay, well, is that the full story? Is there something else to be said?

And then I thought, actually, there are places you can look, and particularly the places I was looking were looking at the role of particularly strong women who'd made an impact on public policies such as Great Tame, Grace Tame, and seeing some kind of groundswell of support for people such as that. I also see the voice as being a positive, although if it goes pear-shaped, as quite possibly could now, that would certainly mean I'm going to rewrite that section of the book. But I mean, I do think that the fact is that there's so much of a disconnection between the everyday experience of Australians and the way in which politicians think about shaping that experience, that there has to be some kind of recourse to

what life is like for the rest of us. So I kept on thinking that really there needed to be a reinvestment in kind of building some kind of national cultural policy that produces things that make us feel good about ourselves and feel good about belonging to the country. And I think that there is still a lot to be done in that area that can have effects. So, you know, having watched the Matilda's the other night, I had that, you know, just remind you that there are lots of things that you get out of being part of a nation. And really, they're the things that the cultural policies are Keating in particular set up back in the 90s and supported things like the film industry, the music industry and so on,

that actually generated pleasure and meaning for lots of Australians. And I think we've got to go back to some of that and thinking about how we can make life more pleasurable and meaningful for everyday Australians than it is at present. Certainly Tony Burke would want us to point out that they're working on a national cultural policy, although we'll sort of see what it does going forward. I guess though it is worth remembering despite all the bleakness, there are things that can change. I mean, I remember how many years was it, Charles, Q&A every single week forever, it seemed,

a decade, same-sex marriage was discussed and debated over and over again. And just now that we've finally gotten on and done it, in the most painful and an unnecessarily destructive way possible by having the postal survey when clearly it was going to get up. That's no longer discussed. That's just a given, it's almost become like Medicare. It's just a thing that no one will ever propose to get rid of. I say that even though Donald Trump may get re-elected and relitigate all kinds of things

there. But we do eventually get somewhere better, don't we, on some of these issues? Yeah, and I think what, I guess what I was thinking to when I was working on this book is that in most cases, what we're looking at is politics. lagging behind the population in terms of their embrace of progressive change and having to catch up. And so that's bad that they're having a catch up. But the fact that there's pressure on them to do that is good.

That is funny that you know mainstream Australian politicians ever going to be in danger of being ahead of the nation in terms of being progressive. You'd have to go back to, I guess, Whitlam for that, anyone to risk frightening the horses in any way at all. Yeah, that's true. Yeah, Graeme, it is, it's a fantastic book. It's a rocking read And as Dom said

You know Yeah It's pretty depressing I mean it's It's an evisceration of Yeah It's angry Basically

Yeah But it does get hopeful at the end That is true Yeah Yeah Yeah I'm not giving up hope That's true

And you certainly read through it And kind of go Oh that's That's right Oh thank God That doesn't happen anymore There's certainly Reading it at this point

in August 2023, it does feel as though even if we bounce back with a change of government at some point, possibly in the next year or two, something for the time being have gone off the agenda. Graeme, congratulations. The book is The Shrinking Nation, how we got here and what can be done about it. It's out now from UQP. Thank you for joining us. Thank you very much. Our gear is from Rogue. We're part of the Iconiclast Network.