Our prosperity hangs by a social-media thread

The 2013 election is shaping up as a contest between the ‘boring but important’ and the ‘cool but irrelevant!’ Indeed, that is the contest Prime Minister Rudd intends to win, with a strong emphasis on the latter.

A new report from the BCA, ‘Action Plan for Enduring Prosperity’, contains just about all the boring but important stuff. But on the day of its release, we learn that the Rudd re-election team has hired three top social-media campaigners who helped Barak Obama defy the odds to defeat Mitt Romney in last year’s presidential election. They’ll handle the ‘cool but irrelevant!’ stuff.

And Rudd will need all the help he can get to bypass traditional gatekeepers – the ‘elite authenticators of information’ as the Columbia Review of Journalism once characterised journalists – and appeal directly to the bewildered masses who so thoroughly adore him.

Expect to receive YouTube links via Twitter with footage of “Kevin eats an icecream with some schoolgirls” or “Kevin [awkwardly] downs a light beer with some tradies” or “Kevin speaks Mandarin with a mouthful of steamed pork bun”.

The Coalition will be hitting back, of course, with “Tony arm-wrestles troops in Tarin Kowt” or “Tony shows us a concerned, furrowed brow while touring a Cape York community” or “Tony runs up Kosciusko for charity with Bronwyn Bishop on his back”.

All good stuff. But the BCA wants us to focus on tax reform (yawn) and fiscal policy (YAWN) and infrastructure (zzzzzz).

As the 100 CEOs of our biggest firms, represented by the BCA, know, there will be no icecreams for the next generation, no jobs for tradies, and no money for education and jobs assistance in indigenous communities if the boring but important stuff is ignored.

The BCA is quite right to argue that this is a turning point in our history – that the “benefits of a terms-of-trade boom have masked emerging cracks”. We will get only one chance to reform the economy before our competitiveness is stripped away by global and domestic forces beyond our control.

We have to ask ourselves whether we want to be more like Germany or Portugal 20 years from now (Germany being reliably boring but important on the world stage, while Portugal, sadly, is a bit too exciting and irrelevant.)

The BCA has come up with ‘nine things we must get right’:  

– Tax, fiscal policy and the federation

– Planning for population and cities

– Providing infrastructure

– Realising the potential of people and workplaces

– Rethinking our approach to regulation and governance

– Embracing global engagement

– A strong, stable and competitive financial system

– A coherent and comprehensive energy policy

– Creating the right environment and systems for innovation.

 Nine things to get right. Nine. Does that seem like a nice round number? Nein!

 There is a tenth thing that we must get right, and recently we’ve been getting it wrong. The bullet point to add to the list above is:

 – Preserving and enhancing our democratic institutions and processes.

The 42nd and 43rd parliaments have caused a lot of confusion about what rule ‘by the people, for the people’ should actually look like.

First was the ‘knifing’ or ‘execution’ of ‘the prime minster we elected’ set in motion by a small group of union leaders that voters hadn’t elected.

Then, when the 2010 election returned a hung parliament, Tony Abbott bent over backwards to convince Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor to help him form a legitimate, democratically elected government. But when they went with Julia Gillard, Abbott did everything he could to impugn the legitimacy of her government. Confusing, eh?

Late in the 43rd parliament, a small group of elite journalists took daily briefings from a small number of MPs that they called the ‘Rudd camp’ and managed to swell the size of that camp until Rudd was returned as leader.

By and large, everyday Australians are too busy getting by to understand the nuances of political intrigue and manipulation in these events. But in principle, our elected representatives have a constitutionally defined right to elect any prime minister that can all agree on. A minority government is legitimate. And two small elites conspiring to use the party-room ballot to change PMs is not, strictly speaking, undemocratic.

But then democracy is as much an aspect of national culture as it is of pointing to the rules and saying “technically, we’re still a democracy”.  

An information war is about to be unleashed on Australian voters, through Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other social media platforms. There is no time left to adjust the political culture of Australia – to convince voters that they must switch off the ice-cream-eating, or Kosciusko-scaling stories and think, just for a second, what the social/economic outcome of shaving an extra $4 billion off the federal budget might be.

But whatever kind of government this election returns, journalists, educators, and business and community leaders will have to redouble their efforts during the 44th parliament to get Australians thinking about boring but important things – even if only a little bit. Otherwise, our ‘enduring prosperity’ is already lost.