AQ: Australian Quarterly April-June 2016

VOL 87 ISSUE 2 APR–JUN 2016

The 30 Year Aberration

An Aversion to Minority Government?

I N C L U D I N G : D R B R E N T O N P R O S S E R | P R O F M A R Y O ’ K A N E | M A L C O L M P AT T E R S O N | P R O F C L E M E N T M A C I N T Y R E

DISCORDANT VOICES: The Shape of Parliament

SHANE HOWARD:

Spirit of Place

LIBERATE OR IMPOVERISH?

Human Relations in a Wired World

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CONTENTS

AQ VOL 87 ISSUE 2 APR–JUN 2016

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34

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Discordant Voices:

The 30-Year Aberration:

Liberate or Impoverish?

How Choir Music Helped to Shape our Parliaments

An Aversion to Minority Government?

Human Relations in a Wired World

PROF CLEMENT MACINTYRE

DR BRENTON PROSSER

DR MALCOLM HUGH PATTERSON

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State of the Nation: New South Wales

Shane Howard:

References

The Ingredients to be a Great State of Innovation

JANE SLOANE

IMAGE CREDITS: Please see article placements

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Spirit of Place

PROF MARY O’KANE

COVER IMAGE: © Sergey Nivens - Fotolia.com

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AQ

A WORD

Australian Quarterly

D

id you hear the slamming of the door?

With the ascension of Malcolm to the top job, many – if not most – people could be heard mentally shutting the door on the last few years of political circus.

Yet one silver lining of the turbulence created by the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd-AbbottTurnbull switch-a-roos (henceforth known as the RGRAT years – pronounced ‘regret’) was the broad public realisation that ‘Political Culture’ was a very tangible thing, and had very tangible repercussions.

‘Political Culture’ was no longer a latent, inscrutable element of political discourse; it was embodied in the twitchy trigger-finger of the Labor party and the indignant obfuscation of the Liberals. Australia’s political subconscious was on show and it was deemed broken.

In this edition of AQ we take an intriguing look at one of the potential influences on that culture, one that you might not expect – architecture. How has the political culture of Australia’s parliaments been shaped be the choir music of the early Christian Church? What do other parliaments around the world look like, and would Australia benefit from a parliamentary Renovation Rescue?

Also touching on the issue of parliamentary culture, Dr Brenton Prosser puts Australia’s aversion to minority government in perspective. Are minority government really an anomaly, and is it the Australian people or the government itself, that dislikes the concept of shared power? A thoroughly readable insight into the practicalities of governing.

No other song about indigenous dispossession has resonated across White Australia like Goanna’s iconic 1982 release, Solid Rock. It remains one of our country’s most politically charged songs. In this edition we meet the man behind the music, activist and Australian legend, Shane Howard.

And in the second iteration of our exclusive State of the Nation section, we welcome NSW Chief Scientist, Prof Mary O’Kane, to the pages of AQ. NSW is arguably Australia’s home of innovation, and Prof O’Kane takes a look at the current science policy landscape that will shape the future of NSW science.

We also ask the question of whether digital technologies are empowering or impoverishing our human-to-human interactions.

Thanks again for your support of Australia’s only science policy journal. Let us know what you think via our Facebook (@AQAustralianQuarterly) or Twitter (@AQjournal).

Grant Mills

Editor

NOTES FOR CONTRIBUTORS AQ welcomes submissions of articles and manuscripts on contemporary economic, political, social and philosophical issues, especially where scientific insights have a bearing and where the issues impact on Australian and global public life. All contributions are unpaid. Manuscripts should be original and have not been submitted or published elsewhere, although in negotiation with the Editor, revised prior publications or presentations may be included.

Submissions may be subject to peer review. Word length is between 1000 and 3000 words. Longer and shorter lengths may be considered. Articles should be written and argued clearly so they can be easily read by an informed, but non-specialist, readership. A short biographical note of up to 50 words should accompany the work. The Editor welcomes accompanying images. Authors of published articles are required to assign copyright to the Australian Institute of Policy and Science, including signing of a License to Publish which includes acceptance of online archiving and access through JSTOR (from 2010) or other online publication as negotiated by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. In return, authors have a non exclusive license to publish the paper elsewhere at a future date. The inclusion of references and endnotes is the option of the author. Our preference is for these to be available from the author on request. Otherwise, references, endnotes and abbreviations should be used sparingly and kept to a minimum. Articles appearing in AQ are indexed ABC POL SCI: A Bibliography of Contents: Political Science and Government. The International Political Science Abstracts publishes abstracts of political science articles appearing in AQ. Copyright is owned by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science. Persons wishing to reproduce an article, or part thereof, must obtain the Institute’s permission. Contributions should be emailed to: The Editor at info@aips.net.au

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EDITOR: Grant Mills ASSISTANT EDITOR: Camille Thomson DESIGN AND PRODUCTION: Art Graphic Design, Canberra PRINTING: Newstyle Printing, Adelaide SUBSCRIPTIONS: www.aips.net.au/aq-magazine/ subscribe ENQUIRIES TO: Camille Thomson, General Manager, AIPS, PO Box M145, Missenden Road NSW 2050 Australia Phone: +61 (02) 9036 9995 Fax: +61 (02) 9036 9960 Email: info@aips.net.au Website: www.aips.net.au/ aq-magazine/ Facebook: www.facebook.com/ AQAustralianQuarterly ISSN 1443-3605 AQ (Australian Quarterly) is published by the Australian Institute of Policy and Science.

This project is supported by the Commonwealth Government through a grant-in-aid administered by the Department of Finance and Deregulation.

ACN 000 025 507 The AIPS is an independent body which promotes discussion and understanding of political, social and scientific issues in Australia. It is not connected with any political party or sectional group. Opinions expressed in AQ are those of the authors.

DIRECTORS OF THE AUSTRALIAN INSTITUTE OF POLICY AND SCIENCE: Leon R Beswick (co-Chair) Andrew Goodsall Maria Kavallaris (co-Chair) Janelle Kyd Suresh Mahalingam Ross McKinnon Peter M McMahon Peter D Rathjen

IMAGE: Insert

Discordant Voices: How Choir Music Helped to Shape our Parliaments In 1632 the Scots began work on the construction of their first formal parliamentary building. The decision to construct a purpose built parliament, replacing meetings in different towns and buildings, was partly driven by the changing nature of the relationship between the parliament and the monarch, and partly to reinforce Edinburgh’s position as the principal Scottish city. Built in the classical style, the building was to be “an architectural expression of (Stuart) royal, state and civic power and justice”.1 When the new parliament was first used in 1639, it is thought that the members sat on redecorated pews taken from (and later returned to) the nearby St Giles Cathedral.2

T

he deliberate construction of an imposing parliament as a ‘theatre of state affairs’ reflected patterns that have since become dominant in parliamentary buildings around the world.

But, in the apparently accidental use of ecclesiastic furniture – pews taken from the Cathedral choir set facing each other – the Scottish Parliament mirrored the English parliament at Westminster, and anticipated a pattern that has since been replicated in many Westminster-style parliaments, including all those built in Australia.

Different parliaments have different structural arrangements and each has been

ARTICLE BY: PROF CLEMENT MACINTYRE

IMAGE: European Parliament 2006

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The Ingredients to be a Great State of Innovation New South Wales has good so-called innovation inputs – settings that support innovation. This includes a robust research and development sector – boasting outstanding strength across a diverse range of disciplines, including solar energy, quantum computing, nextgeneration communications, geotechnical engineering, robotics, biotechnology, health and medical research, and data analytics, including financial data analytics.

ARTICLE BY: PROF MARY O’KANE

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t is home to 11 universities, a large number of Australian Research Council Centres of Excellence, Cooperative Research Centres, the Australian Nuclear Science & Technology Organisation (ANSTO), and several Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) laboratories including Data61, leading health and medical research institutes, and

IMAGE: The Parkes Telescope in 1969

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a growing list of big tech companies – all of which are hives for quality research activity.

Much of that activity is concentrated in Sydney – a big science city, and a cultural and economic hub for the Asia-Pacific region. Add to that what’s happening in R&D in the largely industrial cities of Newcastle and Wollongong, and NSW emerges as a mega science state!

The state’s research activity is enhanced through ready access to landmark, national-scale research facilities, funded through the Commonwealth’s National Collaborative Research Infrastructure Scheme (NCRIS) with contributions from the State, the universities and industry.

Recognising the critical role these facilities play in the research ecosystem, the State Government recently tipped in an additional $7 million to support local NCRIS and NCRIS-derived infrastructure, including the Australian Microscopy and Microanalysis Research Facility, Australian National Fabrication Facility, Bioplatforms Australia, National Imaging Facility, Terrestrial Ecosystem Research Network, and the Integrated Marine Observing System.

Building new and bolstering existing linkages between researchers and industry will be critical to driving the so-called “ideas boom” – fostering greater innovation and growing the economy.

Over the past eight years, my team in the Office of the NSW Chief Scientist & Engineer has worked determinedly to promote and encourage R&D with global impact, and broker partnerships and shore up connections within and between the public and private sectors to bolster the State’s research capabilities and networks.

NSW and, certainly, Australia can prosper by being an industry innovator and early adopter.

Our universities and research institutions already provide government, industry and business access to scientific and engineering knowhow, as well as cutting-edge

research infrastructure – including largescale facilities for testing and prototyping.

To compete at a global level, though, we can, and must, do better.

Collaborate to Commercialise There is potential for leaders from industry to use the skills of our very best researchers to find groundbreaking solutions to complex challenges or problems, and revolutionise the way they do things.

Encouraging businesses of all sizes to develop and adopt new technologies and implement sophisticated business models will not only enhance their own commercial outcomes but lead to a stronger and more robust national economy.

The NSW Government, through its Knowledge Hubs Initiative, is co-funding and supporting the delivery of collaborative industry development projects. The Hubs focus on five key sectors: energy and resources, financial services, creative digital, medical technology, and transport and logistics. They aim to develop an industry vision and strategy, improve industry productivity and competitiveness, facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing, and champion research with broad industry benefits.

There have been many great examples of NSW ingenuity in the past, which have transformed industries and reaped broader social, economic and environmental benefits. (see p. 16) And the future, too, is looking very bright, with world-class research underway in our own backyard – much of which has been supported through the NSW Government’s $18-million Research Attraction & Acceleration Program (RAAP).

That RAAP funding is primarily allocated through competitive grants rounds using a rigorous selection process, and used to leverage funds from national and international bodies.

NSW is Australia's information and

And the future, too, is looking very bright, with worldclass research underway in our own backyard – much of which has been supported through the NSW Government’s $18-million Research Attraction & Acceleration Program.

IMAGE: © Hai Linh Truong - Wiki

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STATE OF THE NATION: NEW SOUTH WALES

STATE OF THE NATION: NEW SOUTH WALES

The 30-Year Aberration:

An Aversion to Minority Government?

Recently I attended a lecture on the future of politics by one of UK Labour's next generation of leaders, Tristram Hunt.

After diplomatically dancing around his disdain for the current leader, he described his concern about the widespread lack of interest in democracy and his vision for a new type of politics.

To distil his argument down to just a few words, this new way involved the public switching off the internet and switching back on to traditional Labour values.

ARTICLE BY: DR BRENTON PROSSER

W

hat Hunt seemed to forget was that the drive behind the Labour movement over a century ago was not the content of values (such as social justice), but the power of giving new groups a political voice to advance their

IMAGE: Š Leonard J Matthews - Flickr

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AN AVERSION TO MINORITY GOVERNMENT?

A system that was designed by Edmund Burke to protect the House of Commons from the powerful influence of unelected Lords, has resulted in the political party now being seen as the primary source of vested interest.

economic interests. What he seemed to miss was that while people are disengaged with the major parties they are increasingly involved in online everyday politics. What his words also demonstrated was the immensity of the challenge for any new way of politics for new political times.

Closer to home, we see that the Australian public do not trust or much like their major political parties either.

This is shown not only by declining party membership and falling first preference support, but also in different voting patterns in the Senate that ensure minority arrangements.

However, we do not need these measures to know that the old parties are on the nose; the Australian public will tell you openly that they have been turned off by the major parties' single-minded pursuit of re-election. The great irony is that a system that was designed by Edmund Burke to protect the House of Commons from the powerful influence of unelected Lords, has resulted in the political party now being seen as the primary source of vested interest.

Perhaps what we now need is a repeat of the UK in the 1920s and Australia in the 1940s, where there was a realignment of politicians and parties around a changing electorate.

It is important to note that these underlying conditions and changes are shared across Westminster nations.

Electoral reform and trends are resulting in situations where the idea of a government, party or leader mandate is becoming more problematic. Minority government has become commonplace in Canada and New Zealand, while Australia has experienced minority in at least one house for all but three of the last thirty years.

Even in the UK, with a 'first past the post' system that is designed to deliver majority government, minority government was considered a certainty at the last election until David Cameron scraped in with a slim and unsteady majority. When we look across the Commonwealth what we see is a situation where voters are less likely to give governments a clear mandate, and conversely what we also see, in Australia at least, are claims that there is a strong public aversion to minority government.

What remains unclear is if this aversion exists independently of the broader aversion to political parties and politicians.

While media and political commentators suggest that it does, the lower first preference vote for the major parties in the Senate and the recent popularity of independent or 'anti-politics' politicians might suggest that voters may not be as turned off to minority as it is assumed.

Rather, if there were a public aversion to minority government, I would argue that it has more to do with misinformation and misperceptions than the realities of minority government.

Closing the expectations gap In his recent book in defence of politics and democracy, Matthew Flinders1 argues that much of the public disenchantment with government is the product of expectation gaps. His view is that the cynicism of leaders, political parties and the media – who increasingly represent events in the interests of entertainment or re-election – create unrealistic expectations that our parliamentary and political systems cannot sustain. This is a perspective that can also be helpfully applied to the conditions around minority government in Australia.

In my view, such an analysis points to at least five expectations gaps that may be contributing to the alleged public aversion to minority government.

First, there is the expectation that the need to negotiate with those outside your political party is a sign of weakness. For instance, under Julia Gillard, the ALP was so dedicated to showing her party was ready to be elected back to majority, she failed to communicate the practical realities of

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Shane Howard:

Spirit of Place

I woke up in the Dreaming. I realised there was a powerful intelligence at work – a great sense of understanding in the land and landscape. And the cosmology, spirituality and the cultural depth of Aboriginal society really woke up (for me) there as well.

Shane Howard

INTERVIEWER: JANE SLOANE

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hen I first heard the song Solid Rock, written

by Australian musician Shane Howard, l felt I was being shaken awake from a pale understanding of my country and culture. I came fully alive in that song with a sense of anticipation, yearning and curiosity that was both raw and authentic. As the founder, in the 1970s, of the band Goanna, Howard used his lyrics to express his journey into the interior — of himself, and of Aboriginal Australia.

In so doing, Howard held up to us that cultural mirror of identity, land and dispossession. He used his music to galvanise action on critical issues of land, language

SPIRIT OF PLACE

Song is one of the oldest and most transportable and transmissible forms of memory ... and I still see myself as part of a troubadour tradition – and the balladeer, the storyteller.

We were the media once

people completely pushed to the fringes of society, discriminated against, the butt of jokes, you know, racism. Not in my own family but certainly in the wider world.

‘My Dad had a very keen sense of justice ... Mum was a musician. She played music, she played piano and we sang as a family ... She instilled in us a love of music and, I suppose, the power of music too.

‘There’s one very beautiful moment for me that fed into my songwriting and a kind of “fire in the head” moment ... When I was only about 10, [I heard] The Times They Are a-Changin’ by Bob Dylan … We’d grown up with a lot of folk music around us but Dylan brought something new to that whole genre … He was speaking about

contemporary issues, and I guess that was the great awakening.

‘Song is one of the oldest and most transportable and transmissible forms of memory ... and I still see myself as part of a troubadour tradition — and the balladeer, the storyteller. We were the media once and we would travel from place to place and take the stories of one place to another. And I still think that’s an important

IMAGE: Insert

and country and to engage us in a national conversation that continues to this day.

Shane Howard was born in Dennington, Victoria in 1955. As he recalls: ‘Where I grew up in south west Victoria, it’s Gunditjmara country and on the border between Gunditjmara and Girai Wurrung country. So Aboriginal people were a fact of life for us growing up but it was a very dispossessed reality … My early secondary schooling goes something like “Aboriginal people lived here and then the First Fleet came — colonial settlement — and it was all quite peaceful”. That was the popular narrative in terms of the history that we were taught ... [However,] what I saw around me was drunkenness, I saw Aboriginal

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Discordant Voices: How Choir Music Helped to Shape our Parliaments The ‘Theatre of State’ that we call Australian parliamentary debate has been shaped by a multitude of factors. One of these is the architecture of the buildings in which they’re held. Yet how is this arrangement of space affecting the nature of Question Time and subsequent political decisions? How do other parliaments around the world differ from ours, in both physical design and political culture? And how is it that early Christian choir music continues to have an effect on Australia’s political discourse?

CLEMENT MACINTYRE

The 30-Year Aberration: An Aversion to Minority Government?

Australian governments have experienced a minority in at least one of the houses of parliament for all but three of the last 30 years. Minority government is a modern political reality, yet is treated with distain by the major parties. And with an increasingly fragmented Senate and declining support for the old parties, the paradigm of ‘political mandate’ is falling apart. But is Australia really worse off under collaborative government as the major parties would have you believe? Or is minority government likely to yield greater scrutiny and better legislative outcomes?

BRENTON PROSSER

Shane Howard: Spirit of Place ‘Out here nothing changes, not in a hurry anyway’ – the iconic opening lines of Goanna’s 1982 hit, Solid Rock. Written by Australian legend and activist Shane Howard, the song resonated across Australia, awakening a generation to many issues of indigenous dispossession. In his own words, Shane talks about his own awakening and his life-long dedication to indigenous and environmental activism. As one of Australia’s most respected musicians, Shane’s work continues to attest to the power of music to enact real change.

IMAGE CREDITS: Please see article placements

JANE SLOANE

State of the Nation: New South Wales Sydney is arguably the home of Australian innovation. With the highest density of universities, research facilities and entrepreneurial start-ups, NSW is a hub for Australian science. NSW Chief Scientist, Prof Mary O’Kane, takes a looks at her state, picking apart the threads that make up the research and commercialisation landscape of New South Wales. What role will the first state play in the future of Australian science, and what is the NSW government doing to support local innovation?

MARY O'KANE

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