Think tanks and political parties
Thank you James – your statement “ASPI was created by the Howard Government in 2001 to provide contestable advice on Australian defence policy” has me wondering about the advice related to the 2004 decision to join the illegal Iraq coalition.
But other matters come to mind as well: your words had me thinking further about my sense of the persistent decline, if not absence, of political education that should be a political party’s mandate. Shouldn’t that be where the contest is joined? How and why have our major parties capitulated into seeing themselves as “social engineers”?
Peter Varghese evidently sees ASPI as a “think tank”. My question then: is it to be the task of “think tanks” — by proffering “contestable advice” — to provide the outlook(s) needed to be understood by the Parliament’s electors concerning the right path to maintain and promote public justice?
If so, then the “think tanks” should be offering a service of self-critical research that explains how they have historically displaced political parties as the electorate’s major public-legal educators. Could “think tanks” be co-perpetrators of a development in our political culture by which accountability to electors has been hollowed out and made problematic?
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