Government is getting more difficult. Many voters have turned off. They are scathing of politicians and deeply cynical about their honesty and motives.

The Liberal Party has a major woman problem, but it also has a men problem. It also has a youth problem, a problem with people moving into middle age, and with significant ethnic groups. Each of these is a symptom of a wider problem, not necessarily addressed by focus on any one of them at the expense of others.

It was said this week that the average age of Liberal Party members in Victoria is 68, and that one of the major expenses of running a branch is organising wreaths for funerals. Party membership is said to be in sharp decline – possibly down 30% in the last year alone. Those who are left are overwhelmingly old white men of British stock, resentful that the monoculture has disappeared, and inclined to blame all social change, particularly advances in the rights of women, as consequences of “woke” heresies. State membership of the Liberals is about the same as a middling AFL club.

Labor folk, who are smug about problems in the Liberal Party, have much the same medium- and long-term problem, including with ages of members and declining total memberships. Labor’s concentrated action on getting women into parliament, which began a generation ago, may have disguised the fact that its fundamental problem is more serious than in the Liberal Party.

The problem is not of factions, nor of their increasing rigidity, though the warfare about spoils of office and each party’s face to the electorate are again evidence of the internal cancers. Indeed, the base issue is that the parties have no base.

Neither party is effectively controlled by its members. They are not mini-democracies, models of community decision-making. Nor are their members representative of the electorate at large. The policies parties put to the electorate have rarely emerged from the party branches, nor have they been debated and tested within them. What passes for debates, with party councils or open conferences, is usually tightly choreographed — for show — with decisions settled in advance.

Instead, those who control the party have surround themselves with power-brokers and supposedly professional advisers and minders, nearly all, one way or another, on the public payroll. All of them will be steeped in ideology and party history, but they are unusually remarkable for standing apart from it.

Thus, Labor Party operatives, supposedly the political wing of the working class and the instrument of its industrial wing, are increasingly of the middle class with little real affinity with the opinion and priorities from the workplace. They are university educated, trained as research assistants and lobbyists, not themselves of the workplaces or industries on whose behalf they purport to speak.

Like their counterparts in the Liberal Party, who have served their apprenticeships working with business lobbies and advocates, or in ministerial offices as minders, most have very little experience of the problems of the ordinary Australian.

The modern MP lacks serious experience of life outside politics

When or if they want to know of these problems, for the purpose of passing down some message, they do not go through the party’s structures – the party branches or the industrial shop floor. Instead, they commission research from friendly consultants — people of their own ilk — often indicating the type of result they want. There is a handy consequence of this, because party operatives already on the public payroll aspire to get jobs after politics from their mates in the lobbying and consulting industries.

There are also well-established systems by which a revolving door has such party people move smoothly between being employees of, and agents for, a politician into friendly trade unions and party-aligned bodies such as law firms and advocacy bodies, and into industries dependent on political favours and discretions.

The Liberal Party, of course, has much the same structures, much the same ways of looking after its best employees when something inconvenient — such as an election loss — temporarily interrupts the system, but not the fact, of imposing on the taxpayer.

One consequence is that almost all new politicians, Labor or Liberal, emerge from the ranks of those who are already publicly paid operators. These may be cleverer in understanding how politics works at a practical level. But they have already established their loyalties, their causes and their manner of thinking, and it hasn’t come from the university of life. Indeed, their expertise in life, and the problems of the working Australian woman or man, is often more informed by research material than by experience.

Nor, usually, has their actual background (as opposed to their parents’ background) involved much in the way of dirty fingers or job insecurity. Even those, such as women or people from non-British or Irish ethnic groups, who are feted and paraded as part of a decisive movement towards being more representative of the general population, have usually been pre-trained and tested for their understanding and acceptance of the principle that loyalty is above all, and that, at a pinch, they are expected to toe the line established by the old men. Even more on the principle that no one wants surprises.

Party members have less influence and power

There are two bad consequences. It is by no means established that rule by suits is better than rule by people who come out of the population and who have jostled among other civilians for the job. The suits may be terribly smart, as well as, often, awfully young. They may be technically better qualified than civilians, although now, when a high proportion of young women and men have professional qualifications and experience in the private or community sector, that cannot be taken for granted. The suits may have learned some arts of cunning, instant political tactics, and may have supped at the feet of very clever operators. All too often, that means that their ambition, arrogance and impatience with process has been one of the major causes of popular alienation with politicians and the political career.

Equally, “professionalising” politics deprives the population of a good number of ordinary Australians with skills, experience and diversity of background. A desire to serve is not confined to suits. Convictions and passions are what gives the political process character, colour and the capacity to see all sides of a question. Potential civilian candidates are daunted by the unequal struggles of getting preselected.

The taxpayer-paid minders and insiders have unlimited time to campaign for their own preselection, including by regular attendance at party functions. If an outsider has a cause which has inspired her to stand — which may be more effective action on climate change, or better resources for education — that cause will often be swallowed up by the demands of party discipline. A party campaigns with one voice, not for protests by new candidates. Fewer outsider candidates are winning preselection; more and more are heavily discouraged, particularly at their first elections, from deviating from the party line towards the issues that have inspired them.

If they have secured the endorsement of one or other faction chiefs or trade union suits, they often have a bloc of artificial numbers, selected in advance by their faction at the party’s head office. In some states, particularly Queensland, NSW and Victoria, factional bosses have decided among themselves, long before any preselection, that the seat will go to a particular faction, whose “turn” it is. Undoing such arrangements can be very messy.

Party preselection is often very corrupt. How can we trust representatives if they are beholden to factional chieftains?

Beating such “arrangements” by local popularity, skilful wooing of branch members or character assassination of the person selected by the factions is very difficult. In most parties, but particularly the Labor Party, the process is potentially very corrupt. That is not only because votes are bought and sold, including by branch stacking, but because successful candidates have accumulated political debts to the factional chiefs which makes them quite susceptible to pressure. This is pressure which is often applied for no good public purpose.

Nor can it be claimed that these insiders are potential ministers, future party leaders and of the highest quality. Factional leaders have repeatedly proven they are more interested in reliable drones than people of individuality and character.

More worrying, however, is the way that the modern processes of paying only lip service to the views of membership strips the party of much of its moral legitimacy and common purpose. Party leaders, from prime ministers and leaders of the opposition down, are continually surrounded by advisers, urgers and lobbyists. They are being warned continually about the effect of policy choices on public opinion. The lobbyists often have polling data and well-prepared submissions to back their case. But they are mostly arguing their own interests rather than the public interest. It is by no means clear that disinterested efforts to improve public policy get the same attention or deference. Look, for example, at the privileged insider positions of the gambling and alcohol industries in the decision-making of the Labor Party.

The party branches do not have the heft or the information to counter this special pleading. Party organisations do not send money downwards. Top politicians may hobnob with party chieftains, particularly old white men, but they do not spend much time addressing party branches or trying to win arguments in the councils of the party. The party organisation (likewise deaf to the memberships because their work is supposedly so important) does not greatly concern itself with resolutions emerging from “below”. Nor do the advertising representatives, the pollsters, the campaign organisers and the expert suits who draft campaign themes. More and more, it appears, campaign themes are little more than slogans, election promises have not been thoroughly tested in debate between ministers, and sometimes important issues are ignored because they are inconvenient.

A very good example of this in action was seen with Peter Dutton’s campaign which seemed to lack even ordinary discipline. His team simply failed to prepare adequate policies, let alone justifications for them that could be put in speaking notes. They did not appear to have programmed their campaign, including around the regular release of policies. The polling appears to have been particularly inadequate and may have led to bad tactics. Most of the party front bench were discontent, backbenchers were very worried from the start. Party members and supporters were apoplectic about the inadequacies of the party’s campaign on nuclear energy, on working from home, on sacking public servants and on defence policy.

Public funding is making the problem of party democracy worse

We should remember that each of the major parties started their campaigns with about $100 million given them by the taxpayer. With this base, fundraising was not quite as important. The public funding produces considerable complacency, and not a little failure of accountability to members. Some years ago, a legal action against Pauline Hanson followed state Electoral Office allegations that she was running a pseudo-political party she entirely controlled, designed to milk into her own pocket, the public funding coming from the votes she was gathering.

The premise is that parties were democratic structures, subject to the law, accountable to party memberships, receiving grants which should be directed towards the party’s interests. One must wonder whether the major parties could live up to such requirements. This is not a worry that funds are diverted to improper purposes. It is, instead a concern that the money is spent without any serious regard to supposedly democratic and accountable membership structure. The members, simply, have no say at all. Those who demanded some right to participate in what was done would be quickly shoved out of the way.

Insiders, indeed, refer to parties as “brands”, not as organic organisations subject to deliberately difficult processes of making decisions, allowing a maximum of participation, if with a system of battening down the hatches once binding decisions are arrived at.

The increasing lack of relevance and respect accorded to party membership, or democracy within parties, fits into a general pattern of less and less public participation in much community activity. Most could be forgiven for giving up involvement. Monthly party meetings at 8.30pm in the public library are a deadly bore, especially to the young or people leading busy lives. The pattern of participation was set in about 1890 and much has changed in society since.

Oddly all the modern technology and the internet ought to be improving communication and participation. But it isn’t, and sporting clubs and cultural organisations suffer as much as political parties. Some subjects which can attract the passions – the environment, the need for action on climate change, events in the Middle East and education for example. Matters may mobilise people, not into party branches but on to the streets. It is vital that parties adapt.

But the sad thing is that most of the major parties are not very interested in broadening their bases, increasing their memberships, or having debates about what ought to be done. They might, in theory, agree on the need for it, but the idea of more consultation, more debate, more open government, excites no enthusiasm whatever, from the prime minister down. They do not see it as in their real interest. They are probably right, because a good many representatives would not be in parliament were their work to be subject to better public scrutiny.

But it is not merely a matter of whether politicians can shelter themselves from the public. A crisis of legitimacy and authority is involved. Government is getting more difficult. Many voters have turned off. They are scathing of politicians and deeply cynical about their honesty and motives. Australia is by no means as far down this path as the United States, but Trump is a warning of what happens when people decide that conventional politics doesn’t work.

Republished from The Canberra Times.

The views expressed in this article may or may not reflect those of Pearls and Irritations.