Conservatives find it is impossible to hold back the tide of social change, as technology continues to modernise community relationships and values. Reformers are just as frustrated, for while society has a habit of remaking itself, they find the task of moulding these changes into their ideological template to be insoluble. Human nature is too labyrinthine to be shaped by the feeble powers of the state.
There is, of course, a third category of politician: the Labor conservative. Their position is doubly damned in the public arena. Neo-conservatives attack them for the sin of being Labor, while the progressive Left constantly feel betrayed by their reluctance to embrace “real" reform.
Garrett is an interesting case study for other reasons. His career, in effect, has moved from one entertainment industry to another. As a musician he was in control of the creative content of his band Midnight Oil. In modern politics, unfortunately, there is no creative content. Most of the debates are ancient and the arguments are just for show.
In this parliamentary term, for instance, the primary economic contest has been between the advocates and opponents of Keynesianism, a doctrine developed before any of our serving parliamentarians were born. Even when new issues arise, such as climate change, governments know of no other way of handling them than through age-old ideologies – in this case, a market-based emissions trading scheme.
When Garrett joined the ALP in 2004 his two great passions were climate change and the protection of Tasmania’s old-growth forests. As the party’s environment spokesperson he has suffered the humiliation of being stripped of responsibility for the former, while on the latter, Labor has given up, caving in to the lumberjacks.
Within this policy vacuum, Garrett himself has become a form of entertainment: his appearance, his larger-than-life persona, his latest nickname as the Batt-man of Australian politics. He has gone from inspiring a generation of young Australians with his music to being just another joke-politician, part of the “news" content through which the media markets its infotainment services. It says a lot about politics that it has turned Garrett into a caricature of himself.
His No. 1 fan, Defence Minister John Faulkner, must be shattered. Faulkner led the push six years ago to find Garrett a safe Labor electorate. He saw him as a wonderful talent who could help secure the party’s inner-city seats. Remember this was after Labor had just lost the Cunningham by-election to the Greens.
The message is clear for other high-profile, successful Australians considering a switch into parliament: Garrett’s fate awaits you. The only people who survive in modern politics are the bland party bureaucrats, the one-dimensional drones whose personality gene was excised at birth. They function by three rules, bound as tightly as bonsai: take no risks, never stray “off-message" and never show any spark of life.
Ultimately, Garrett, a man of deeply formed principles, was ill-suited to a culture of compromise. As a warrior of the Left, he deeply distrusts the capitalist system, the way in which the market economy pursues profit ahead of environmental sustainability. But how then did he choose to implement the government’s home insulation program? By throwing money at any cowboy enterprise that owned a ute and a ladder.
The mixed economy never works out for the Left. It wants to do good things for society but the only mechanism available to it is the omnipresent capitalist market. Governments are not very good at resource allocation and small businesses are not very good at quality control. This is why public-private partnerships like the home insulation scheme frequently fail.
How much better it would have been if the federal government had introduced a carbon tax. This would have given households a reason to install their own insulation and reduce their carbon consumption, without the creation of a new public-private program. I’m sure the Batt-man agrees.
The Australian Financial Review