Short term thinking has taken hold of our society at all levels – our political leaders rarely see beyond the next poll or the next election, and in many ways they are responding to a populace that is equally sucked into the demands of the moment – resulting in ‘the longevity vacuum’ – putting us all at the mercy of an unplanned future.
Ours is the age of impatience. It’s the age of instant gratification and quick fixes, the age of fast food and real-time messaging, overnight shipping, the twenty-four hour news cycle and the intimate immediacy of social media. We live in a world where ‘tomorrow’ is often too late and next year is too far away to contemplate.
Unfortunately, our politicians are no different. We think we elect representatives to plan for our collective future, but instead we get meek and pliable party delegates that react to yesterday’s polls and whose horizons extend no further than the next election – never far away. Our executive government – regardless of its current political leanings – is equally mired in the minutiae of the day, poll driven and bereft of vision.
Gone are the days when Prime Minister Ben Chifley could push through the Snowy River Scheme – a grand plan for irrigation and energy supply – against much opposition in 1949. As Chifley said: “The Snowy Mountains Plan is the greatest single project in our history. It is a plan for the whole nation, belonging to no one state, nor to any group or section. This is a plan for the nation – and it needs the nation to back it.” Another politician with long term vision and tenure to match – Robert Menzies – cut the ribbon for the first stage in 1955, but the project was not completed until 1974. (For the record, Menzies was originally opposed to it.)
It is difficult to see how a project of that magnitude could be conceived in the age of impatience, let alone completed. Look no further than the muddle of poor planning, dysfunctional execution and endless cost overruns that is the Pacific Highway upgrade, now in its 22nd year and still years away from completion – subject to constant political meddling and infighting between the States and the federal government about funding. And that’s just a four lane highway across flat land!
It is a testament to the longevity of the Snowy River Scheme – and somewhat ironic – that Malcolm Turnbull’s flagship energy policy is ‘Snowy 2.0’, announced in 2017. In the scheme of things a rather modest upgrade – yet the projected costs have already doubled, before it has even started.
Snowy 2.0 is the current government’s answer (of sorts) to the absolute shambles that has been Australia’s energy policy. Or rather, the lack of a coherent policy. Others will have more to say about that, but suffice to say, in an industry where capital decisions are made with a purview of 20 to 30 years and beyond, with the effects of climate change hanging over us as the proverbial ‘Sword of Damocles’, our government has dithered. It has commissioned endless inquiries and reports that in the end they mostly ignore, under the auspices of a minister (Josh Frydenberg) so obviously out of his depth.
One of those reports was the ‘Finkel Report’ – a quite succinct and practical outline of how Australia can move towards clean energy by the year 2050. It is not my purpose here to discuss the merits of his recommendations, but I hold it up as an example of a report commissioned by the government in recent years – others are the Henry report on taxation and the Gonsky report on education. These are all strategic treatises that outline specific objectives based on coherent thinking on the long term effects of recommended policies. More often than not, these reports end up on the scrapheap of political expediency. Our politicians are no longer interested in, or capable of, addressing the issues of the day with long term solutions. Statements of vision disappear in the political oratory of vacuous grandiosity – motherhood statements like: a ‘fairer Australia’ and ‘nobody shall be left behind’, or my personal favourite: ‘securing the future for all Australians’.
At a time when so many of the issues we confront cry out for strategic thinking – environment, immigration and education to name a few – our politicians never seem to be able to see past the next election cycle. At the federal level that is a maximum of three years (six for senators) – and sometimes it ends up being a lot less than that when the governing party decides to call an election early. The big issues of our time (indeed of any time) call for planning decades ahead, not just a few years.
And not only do we elect our political representatives for very short periods, we then entrust some of them to become ministers in executive government. And we end up with an Energy Minister who is completely out of his depth on energy policy, a Health Minister who is a lawyer by trade and has never run a hospital or a general practice, and an Education Minister who has hardly set foot in an educational institution since he left school. These ministers are supposed to be the ‘chairman of the board’ of the departments they are assigned to. Yet they typically only hang around for a single term at the most, before they are moved on to another portfolio for which they are often equally unqualified.
Granted, government departments are run by well qualified and competent bureaucrats. But whatever strategic advice they impart to their ministers is having to be reset after every election with a new minister coming on board. This ‘longevity vacuum’ is at the very heart of one of the fundamental problems with modern democracy: the glaring absence of long term plans and strategies.
Our short election cycles and having politically motivated ministers with election focused agendas is not working. There is a fundamental lack of long term strategic planning in government, a very costly absence of continuity and no discernible vision that engenders confidence in us voters that our future is in safe hands.
Quite the contrary. The longevity vacuum is one of the reasons why we, the people, have lost faith in our political leaders.
Kim Wingerei is a former businessman turned blogger and author. His first non-fiction book, “Why Democracy is Failing – A Blueprint for Change’’, will be published in June 2018. Follow @ kimwingerei.com
7 thoughts on “KIM WINGEREI. The longevity vacuum.”
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While I support the general argument in this article, the Snowy Mountain Scheme may not be the best example of the benefits of long range planning. NSW irrigators constitute about 10% of farmers and receive a known water allocation at least 7 years in every 10. While these farms produce significant export income they do not pay the full cost of that water; neither the economic or environmental cost. Unlike businesses receiving water from Sydney Water, who pay the full cost of that water (capital and recurrent), irrigators do not. The states carry the capital cost of developing the Snowy Scheme and water charges to irrigators probably only recover around 50% of the annual operating/maintenance cost. On any environmental assessment, the Snowy Scheme effectively drained the Snowy River and only in recent years has the Snowy River been given some restoration flows. Irrigation has created significant salinity issues which is a cost borne by the State. The release of cold water from dams in summer has had significant impacts on the breeding cycle of biota along the Murrumbidgee and the lack of flood flows has destroyed or severely impaired riverine vegetation. The Snowy Scheme does of course produce significant benefits from its clean, renewable energy production; although climate change could reduce such benefits. On the social account, irrigation along the Murray and Murrumbidgee has fostered the social development of towns but even these came at a cost as hapless soldiers returning from war (particularly WW1) were encouraged to farm land areas which way too small to be profitable. The Snowy Scheme was achievable only because it was considered a good idea and an act of nation building and then in an era when we didn’t recognise or even attempt to assess its full impacts, positive and negative.
Thanks for that additional insight, Michael!
I’ve just listened to a lecture by Noam Chomsky “Who rules the World now”. He explains that the political class does not rule the nations of the world. The rulers are the giant conglomerates, mostly American. Their share of the world’s wealth is about 50%. This equates to the same figure for the USA’s wealth in 1945. So nations have ceded power and influence to corporations and politicians simply do their bidding, since all of them are beholden to the corporate vested interests. This is likely a pertinent reason that they “Fiddle while Rome burns” and get constantly sidetracked by personal issues in parliament.
The above article is a good one and it is a dangerous position for us to be in, but the powerful are not interested in longevity. The profit motive is the sum total of their plans, and they will oppose any threat to that. Existential threats do not concern them. Maybe one day when they cannot escape the chaos they will have created, they will see but it will be too late.
Thanks John, Chomsky is a deep thinker and “un-dresser of emperors”. He is also an optimist, which we all have to be to believe that change is possible.
For my money, the idea that long range nation building is somehow stifled by the presence of democracy, is a shallow argument. One need only consider the China of Mao or the Russia of Putin to see that even totalitarian regimes fail to deliver long range planning which benefits the nations they purport to lead. There are numerous other examples, too many to detail in a short comment.
Political short termism is more a function of the politik struggling to come to terms with a well informed public who mobilise thoughts and action with social media. Thus the ability for politicians to obfuscate while imparting their ideological objectives are in vain as the informed electorate moods swings on each and every decision out of Canberra. I see this as democracy becoming more empowered, not less so.
Thanks Malcolm, not for a moment suggesting that democracy needs replacing. Quite the contrary, democracy is paramount, but what we have now is a democracy taken hostage by the short term’ism of party politics. What we need are democratic processes that engage and involve the people through representatives that are beholden to the electorate, not just their party, donors or those with the loudest voices.
I think the solution is in the electorate. To have an educated citizenry.
Which could be done by including citizen juries and other forms of deliberative democracy.