By Jack Fairey
Democracy is a wonderful thing. It provides the people power they have historically been denied and allows the masses to have a say in the direction of their country. But to ignore the influence of wealth on swaying those systems, one can find them even more stubbornly flawed by another factor: inertia. To understand the weight of bureaucracy, one must look to our colonial forebear, the UK. The UK has crept its way toward democracy since the first Parliaments in the 13th century, those eventually unfurled to extend their voting rights beyond those with enough money and troops to cause problems if the King ignored their wishes. Parliament’s myriad rules and systems have grown in complexity and volume since that time, until the present day. Whilst the UK isn’t the most complex system in the world, nor is it the most overburdened with regulation, its systems are hard to change on a moment’s notice.
To describe the process of legislative creation it must first be decided upon, written, and then cleared for Parliamentary introduction by the ‘PBL’ Committee, then typically published in draft form for review by as many committees as it can be applied to. Consultation with the public, then introduction to one house of government, then back to committees, back to Parliament and then to the King. Typically, this would be followed by a review a few years later and potential re-legislation if the bill was ineffective. This level of complex deliberation is critical for good law-making, but the consequence is that governments are typically slow to react as soon as anything falls beyond the remits already granted to ministerial action. Add to that the difficulty in discerning the right course of action and the difficulty discerning the popular course of action, narrativising your decision to appeal to the public, and the uncertainty inherent in the consequences of decisions made in government, it’s little wonder that governments without specific mandates can retreat from any sweeping reform. It makes for frustrating viewing when the government pulls back even further from these challenges and defers decision-making further. If a challenge arises, often, the response will be a minute immediate reaction, followed by the announcement of a report, commission, investigation, or inquiry.
There’s a long and proud tradition of this running back to the 1800s; Royal Commissions into the treatment of the poor laid the foundation of the welfare state, but their recommendations were often either sycophantic toward the already acceptable view of the time or ignored for the subsequent 30 years. Governments successively were happy to pour funds into sustaining these commissions for the better part of a century, but instead of embracing their findings, they established an equally proud tradition to Britain’s welfare; its deferral of decisions. 69 inquiries were launched between 1990 and 2017, at a cost of at least 630 million pounds. Their recommendations were either dismissed by the government or implemented creepingly slow. The Grenfell Tower disaster sparked a public inquiry that lasted from 2017 to 2025, with its recommendations all accepted but expected only to be implemented and enforced from 2028, 11 years after the fire killed 72 people.
It’s hard not to find that pace of action inherently unworkable in a functioning government. What’s more, there have been two elections in that time, and though on this issue the parties are relatively aligned, on plenty of other issues, these long-running inquiries can emerge into wildly divergent political landscapes when they’re finally completed. The inquiry into undercover policing, for instance, apart from revealing an infiltration of a wide swathe of broadly left-wing groups, has been running since 2015 and is still ongoing. In that time, the home secretary who announced it, Theresa May, has since become Prime Minister, lost the job, and been followed by four others.
Australia is similarly plagued, though to a lesser extent. One finds that Australia is still wracked with a chronic attachment to procedures through which action is taken, rather than the action itself, and holds on to various means of delay to avoid real action. Perhaps the most bizarre example is the Royal Commission into Banking. A long-running saga that exposed the broad exploitation of Australians by our big four banks, it revealed abuses such as charging 11,800 dead people for financial advice. Rampant profiteering – and a general atmosphere of profit maximisation far beyond the scope of legality and further from morality – was revealed to be running rampant in the system and drawing money out of the vulnerable. It was created under a weakened and pressured Malcolm Turnbull, but emerged under a resurgently confident Scott Morrison, to face the cold light of day, and ultimately be largely dismissed. With the pretence of COVID-19, the very first recommendation of the commission was abandoned, one that recommended laws requiring responsible lending not be changed, scrapped to ‘remove unnecessary barriers to credit’ in the face of economic meltdown. After hesitating for three years following damning Four Corners reporting into the Commonwealths bank financial planning division that found evidence of the same type of abuses that would later be investigated, it was all to be dismissed on arrival (in large part).
These uses of investigative systems can be good – it was certainly in the public interest to reveal the heinous behaviour of the banks – but the systemic hesitance to approach big challenges like banking regulation, the use of institutional consideration mechanisms, and the eventual dismissal of those mechanisms findings show how these systems can be hidden behind to escape the actual responsibilities of government.
In a time requiring courage in government, there’s a severe lack of it from most parties and politicians; There’s no will to stand up to entrenched interests or to tackle complex reforms of the system from top to bottom. The current Labor government is similarly lacking in courage – instead of acting to remove tax cuts for the super-wealthy, its primary ideas for growing the economy are awaiting a report from the Productivity Commission later in the year, going after only modest reforms such as a 20% cut to student debt and maintaining a pre-existing commitment to create two brackets for super contributions, so that those with over $3 million in Super have to pay a higher tax rate. Labor’s program is certainly not weak-willed when compared to the general drive of governments to reform for the last 15 years, but it’s still tinkering around the edges of Australia’s chronic issues. Unrelated to hiding behind processes, Labor’s housing policy is limited by the same lack of ambition that drives many to cling to those procedures. Their aspiration, as listed on the Labor website, states that they want to construct 30,000 new homes in 5 years for some level of social housing, and somehow incentivise constructing tens of thousands more privately. Australia is targeting 1.2 million homes over those same 5 years, but to do that it needs state support in a variety of ways that simply aren’t being considered or accommodated. Increased migration programs may help deal with workforce challenges, where a government group (Build Skills Australia), estimates a shortfall of 90,000 skilled labourers to construct places for our growing nation to live. How can we address these challenges without a courageous ability to push through process with a clarity of purpose; to eliminate unnecessary reams of restrictions that accumulate at every layer of government, and to allow the country to navigate the complex challenges that confront it?
This is, of course, not without a reticence; excessive regulation, where streamlineable should be streamlined – hiding behind process and procedure shouldn’t be encouraged, governments should be pushed by the public and their strength of conviction to move through and create meaningful change. No system is meant to last forever, after all, and adaptation is the only thing that will keep them alive. In another great Anglo-Saxon country, the US, we see how process and procedure are necessary to maintain democracy in the face of those who threaten to overthrow it, but also how these procedures are temporary, ephemeral, and overturned by those with the strength of support to do so. Equally, clinging to the system and the status quo fails to protect it. When the system fails to meet the needs of the people, the people will eventually lose faith in the system and elect its destruction, good and bad. The Republican project of systemic manipulation has been largely successful; systems are instruments to be worked both within and without to achieve a broader set of goals. Evil as they may be, their success is evident. They don’t cling to the system anymore, they disparage the elements that don’t serve them, and ride roughshod over the obstacles that were designed to obstruct the very abuses of power that have become commonplace in the US as of late. A big reason why they ended up in such a position to do so is that they were blessed with a mouthpiece who recognised that the system required reform. Though he’s misdirected that anger in a direction that’s entirely unproductive, cruel, and will almost certainly worsen the issues that engendered the fury responsible for his rise, it’s been successful because it’s the only platform that acknowledges a problem and offers any attempt at systemic change. The Democratic project is at one of its lowest points in modern memory; it’s lost the presidency and Congress and now sits in a position to reconsider its actions, something it refuses to do. Without a charismatic leader willing to drag them to genuine policy positions, it may flounder for a long time still. Beyond the refusal of the Democrats to embrace populist progressive reform, a remarkable issue with the campaign (beyond trying to appeal to a mythical centre by mimicking the Republicans) was the refusal to acknowledge that anything was wrong. They became so tied to the system, and it’s virtue, that they refused to acknowledge a need for change, refused to distance themselves from a deeply (if unfairly) unpopular previous administration, and couldn’t connect with the genuine anger felt by Americans, even as it stems from issues Democrats could typically seize upon; wealth inequality, wage growth, a feeling of general relative impoverishment compared to only a few years prior.
It’s a difficult balance to strike, then; barriers exist for a reason, and it’s important to maintain and respect them even as one makes necessary alterations to deal with the needs of the present. But they’re impermanent, require robust enforcement, and an over-identification with the process misses the forest for the trees. People don’t live in pages of procedure; they live in the real world. If governments can’t pick up the pace, they’ll fall behind.