Australia: The Politics of Degraded Democracy

Why is there a sense of unease about Australian politics? William Maley argues that a key reason is that while Australia is not facing a crisis of democracy, the functioning of its political system has degraded markedly in recent decades. The Commonwealth Parliament is not a credible deliberative body and nor is it effective in holding the executive to account. MPs and Senators have been increasingly recruited from a barren gene-pool of political staffers, and the major political parties have morphed into patronage networks, not least as a result of the confluence of compulsory voting and public funding. Party leadership has been notably unstable, generating declining trust from the mass population, and the Public Service has been hollowed out, de-professionalised by the advent of ‘managerialism’, and debilitated by ambitious leaders. Put these and other problems together, and the harm that they can do is greater than the sum of the parts. This book paints an unsettling picture of where politics may be heading if things do not change.