Pearls and Irritations

Many of Australia’s public policy settings were designed decades ago. Since that time, society and the economy have changed radically. Australia’s outdated policy settings now extend to matters as important and diverse as taxation, competition policy, drug laws, reproductive healthcare, the carbon transition, media regulation and the organisation of our parliaments. Change is urgent. This is how we achieve reform, write Scott Hamilton and Stuart Kells.

On 8 October 2024 a panel of speakers came together for the launch of A Better Australia: Politics, Public Policy and How to Achieve Lasting Reform at the University of Melbourne. With former Prime Minister the Hon Julia Gillard AC, former Victorian Premier the Hon John Brumby AO, and La Trobe University’s Professor Andrea Carson, we discussed how Australia’s policy settings were no longer fit for purpose; how beneficial change was therefore urgent; and how such change might best be achieved.

The emergence of mega platforms – such as in social media and online commerce – is one example of an important new development that has changed the game in economics as well as in politics. The architects of Australia’s competition laws and policy frameworks did not envisage digital behemoths that function like natural monopolies or public utilities, and that have huge power over the flow of information and commerce.

The impacts of powerful social media platforms also play out along gender lines. At a time when some traditional media outlets has become much more careful and thoughtful about matters of gender, social media has gone in the opposite direction, distributing vast amounts of toxic content. Much of that content targets female politicians and women in general.

The social media platforms have cleverly avoided accountability for distributing offensive content by arguing they did not have the same responsibility as traditional media publishers to moderate or remove hateful and harmful material. On dubious grounds the platforms have fended off calls for stronger rules, such as ones that would hold the platforms responsible for what they published, or ones that would identify the people behind harmful posts. The platforms have argued that such regulation is unfair or impractical. And yet such regulation is certainly possible and desirable.

Gillard: ‘I do think that this is a regulation question. You cannot, for example, take an advertisement out in The Age tomorrow, threatening to rape or kill someone, and have The Age publish it. But you could certainly put that up on X or other social media platforms, and while they say they have moderation policies, the reality is those things end up there and stay there.’

Gillard acknowledged that social media companies do not see themselves as publishers, but as ‘more like a bookstore, and the people who are responsible for the publication are the authors of the content. But I think it is such a nonsense debate. If we had a bookstore at the end of the street that had titles like, “Vile misogyny towards women politicians”, or “How to starve yourself to death if you’re a teenager”, or “How to commit suicide efficiently”, we’d be saying we want this bookstore closed down.’

John Brumby: ‘People say you can’t regulate. You can regulate. People said this about 100 years ago about international trade. “It’s gone beyond the control of governments.” People said these things couldn’t be solved. They can be solved. Julia’s analogy with the bookshop is right. People do things and say things under the anonymity of social media that they wouldn’t dare do if they were standing in front of this audience or on the Channel 9 news.’

As with many other issues, Brumby said, ‘solving this is probably going to require some level of bipartisanship. Sensible people in the Labor party and sensible people in the Liberal party coming together to agree. This is a classic case of where democracy needs to work to improve the environment for the people that live in it. And it can be done.’

Addressing the pan-generational challenge of climate change is another area of public policy that necessitates a new approach. Scott Hamilton noted that in the last five years, the world’s climate change challenge had demonstrably worsened. ‘During that time,’ he said, ‘the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere has gone from about 415 parts per million (ppm) to 427 ppm. If we look at what the global climate budget is, we’ve got about five years of that budget left to keep at the 1.5 degree of global warming’.

Analogous to solving the so-called ‘twin paradox’ from the theory of special relativity, Hamilton said we all had to break from the steady, straight-line policy-making of the past if we were to return the Earth to a safe climate trajectory. This would mean drastically changing the direction of global climate policy action – again something that is both possible and urgent.

Recognising the polarised and hyper-partisan nature of contemporary politics, there are several ways to improve Australian democracy. Julia Gillard discussed how the institution of parliament might be made to work better. Unlike the cramped Old Parliament House, she observed that the new national parliament had gone to the other extreme: the large and sprawling building, in which most MPs sat in their offices with their staff, was not conducive to serendipitous conversations, and could even be isolating, especially for new MPs. Deliberate steps had to be taken to increase interaction within and between political parties.

John Brumby spoke about his longstanding idea that parliament should be set up differently: that, for example, the person speaking at any given moment should speak from a lectern next to the Speaker’s chair, facing forward, to make the forum less adversarial. Julia Gillard suggested randomly allocating seating – instead of having the government on one side and the opposition on the other – to help reduce isolation and partisanship.

With randomly allocated seating, Gillard said, ‘It would be very hard for people to get in each other’s faces if they are sitting next to each other. Say, someone from the Greens and someone from the Liberal Party—human beings are human beings, within two months they would be talking about family, they’d be lending each other tissues, you’d be lending each other cough lollies. It would break down a lot of the isolation.’

Brumby spoke about changing workplace attitudes in the broader community, and compared this to the operations of parliament. He referred to legendary Labor minister Mick Young. ‘Mick was brilliant in the parliament, an old shearer and president of the Labor Party and then a minister. He used to support the adversarial nature of parliament. He used to say, “If you’ve got a big idea that you want to foist on the Australian people, the place it has got to be tested is in the chamber, and it is a ruthless place, but that is where you get tested”.’

If Paul Keating were on the panel, Brumby said, ‘he would probably say the same thing [as Young]. But having seen federal politics and then state politics in opposition and government, and having seen how workplaces have evolved and how peoples’ behaviours have changed and improved over the years—I don’t think that model serves us well anymore.’

Brumby warned, however, that nothing would change the irreducibly difficult nature of politics, especially when it comes to achieving significant reform.

I remember the first day I was in federal parliament, I was sitting next to someone on our side, a former deputy speaker. He said, ‘John, what I’ve come to learn in this place, is that for every complex problem there is always a simple solution—and it is always wrong’. Which is true. That’s part of politics too. We think we have this magic wand—‘we are going to fix climate change’—it’s nirvana. Politics is a laborious business, it’s boring holes in hard wood. It takes a long time, a lot of patience and a lot of work.

The panel discussion concluded on a hopeful note. ‘Sometimes,’ Stuart Kells said, ‘government is about fairness and merit and foresight. Sometimes, ministers and officials put the public interest first. And sometimes, in politics and public policy, the fine minds and good hearts win.’

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