Bruce Bisset: Holding politics to account

Bruce Bisset

Politics is a funny game. It can throw up people - politicians, officials and commentators alike - whose lack of social grace and adequate competence makes one wonder how on earth they could possibly succeed.

Or having somehow made it, only to stumble into error and trip over excuse, continue to hold down positions they seem constitutionally unsuited for.

We see this locally, regionally, nationally and internationally with increasing frequency. Politics, always inclined to a dog-eat-dog mentality, has become rabid and ragged to the point where almost anything goes - because almost anything can be got away with.

Seems the moral checks and balances of society have been so degraded that even in a so-called "uncorrupted" democratic system like ours, anyone involved in politics can adopt the presumption they can do whatever they like, with impunity.

Not just for so long as they hold office, but as long as they can continue to dine out on it.

Okay, that's overstating it - but only just. Think about the lies, the rorts, the flippant banal excuses we have witnessed and are witnessing, and ask, how is it our so-called leaders seem no longer able to be held to account?

Personally, I blame the insidious influence of corporate "culture": the greed-driven rung-climbing that encourages a stab in the back with a smile in order to advance. Where there is no "I" in team because the team is a myth (or rather, a diverting trap for the gullible) that the "I's" exploit on their way to the top.

This ethically-bereft model may (arguably) be good for business, but it does not translate well into public governance. Not unless you want a fascist totalitarian state.

One difference is that in business there's another layer - the company board, and through them the shareholders - which can unilaterally change whatever they see fit at any time if the current direction is seen to not be working as it should.

Whereas in governance, the council or Parliament, and its officers, in effect are the board. And because the shareholders - the public - only have effective input once every three years, and then only via the directly-elected members, the whole governance structure can run away off the rails without any real recourse save revolution.

And this, dear reader, is what has happened - or is in the process of happening.

The other difference is of course that a company exists solely to make a monetary profit for its shareholders, whereas a government must provide the whole gamut of social cultural and environmental services its citizens expect; good public service, in short.

But when a business model assumes the mantle of control over government, these vital aspects are diminished in value; and the considered expenditure of public money is no longer a sacred trust, but something of a free-for-all for which no one must provide account.

So we get high-ranking individuals within councils wanting to build legacy projects like velodromes, or regional factions promoting vested-interest irrigation schemes, or ministerial merchant bankers treating a country as a revolving credit facility, or apparently-certifiable populists taking control of the world's most powerful nation.
We get what we see, today.

And we get their wowsers and wool-pullers hosting election debates or delighting in claiming to have caused an opposition resignation; a complicit media that eggs on conflict as a positive and sees mass subservience as an end.

There's a teensy contradiction there that I would be worried about if I were one of the elite. You can see this breaking out in all sorts of places. And without a move to restore accountability, you may soon see it breaking out here, too.