Andrew Giles (Scullin, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Schools) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

For me, the scariest sentence uttered by a politician in recent times wasn't said by Donald Trump, nor by Senator Hanson. It was British MP Michael Gove who said, when campaigning for the Brexit referendum, 'People in this country have had enough of experts.' In saying that he effectively pushed away an argument he didn't want to participate in. He changed not just the subject but the terms of the debate, such that the ramifications of the UK leaving the EU, or staying, became a question of feelings, not a series of issues that could be debated on the basis of some agreed facts. Of course, when the votes were counted, Gove was proven right.

Reactionaries in Australia, both in this parliament and outside of it, have embraced Gove's message. It is shaping our politics and diminishing our democracy. Most obviously, this has distorted what passes for our debate on climate policy. Last week, the Minister for the Environment blithely dismissed the IPCC's special report, suggesting that the world's leading climate scientists had got it wrong. This seems like the logical end point of a conversation in which the views of the member for Hughes are inflicted on us almost without pause.

Gove's insight was to tie a real sense of frustration in the community to his way of thinking. Insidiously, he suggested that rejecting expertise is a way for people to take back control over lives that seem out of control. For too many Australians, formal politics is frustrating—frustratingly pointless, they might say. Decisions that shape their lives are removed from them. They've been told there are simply no alternatives to neoliberal prescriptions. We have taken important decisions out of the hands of elected officials and there is an appetite for more of this. And if it's said that these processes are what have delivered 27 years of consecutive economic growth, this simply adds insult to the injury experienced by those Australians who aren't benefiting.

Absent the growth story, this is at the core of Donald Trump prevailing over Hillary Clinton. Commentators on the right have taken to disparaging what they call the politics of grievance, but this really is the core of their reactionary populism, not its antithesis. They have abandoned the battle of ideas, placed it in the too-hard basket. So, in place of a shared political conversation, we face the prospect of drifting towards divergent discussions, each built around a distinct set of facts and experiences—another side of contemporary US politics and not something we should be anxious to emulate.

We need real policy debates. We need them to be opened up to all of us in order to make clear that there are real choices to be made in Australian politics, with real consequences. A strong democracy needs to be anchored by a shared understanding of what it is we are talking about and deciding on. A big part of this involves harnessing expertise within our Public Service and beyond it, putting some shape to our national political conversation and allowing disputes over facts to be meaningfully worked through, if not always resolved to everyone's satisfaction. The work of experts matters, but it must inform and illuminate, not be seen to be adjudicating, much less closing off options. We also have to bring into the conversation the lived experiences and concerns of all Australians. This can't just be through our parties, the news media and civil society, though all of these matter. It requires changes to the practice of politics.

A recent speech by Ben Rimmer in the City of Melbourne, 'The ethics of gravity', provides a pathway through what he describes as the unsatisfactory state of contemporary political debate. He asks whether we have sufficient regard for the importance of underlying human experience, knowledge and capacity. Mr Gove's example suggests we haven't. His argument, in effect, is that these can't be brought together with expertise—that the type of national political conversation I've been talking about cannot, or perhaps must not, happen. He is wrong. Ben Rimmer speaks persuasively about building human connections as an imperative. He is right. We do have to grapple with the challenge of filling in the gaps between people and processes. In a personal and moving way, Mr Rimmer ponders the extraordinary capacities of frontline health workers and the critical importance of their perspectives, as I'd see it, in combination with the more abstracted views found near the top of the Public Service. There is no necessary conflict between experts and the rest of us—quite the reverse in fact.

Complex policy problems don't come with simple solutions. None of us could possibly be equipped as a decision-maker or as a citizen to form considered views on all those questions that concern us. We have to rely on the work of specialists, but this does not mean delegating our values or our vision to them. We have to be honest and direct about this, and about what this means for those with expertise in a positive sense—enabling and informing a rich and inclusive national political conversation. It is through such a conversation that our competing visions for Australia can engage Australians.

Let's not give in to Mr Gove's cynicism and let's not sell Australians short. What they've actually had enough of is politics without purpose or possibility. In a healthy representative democracy, we shouldn't hide from informed debate. We need to encourage it and to see how our ideas shape up through a testing democratic process. It's revealing that it's the Conservatives who seem so determined to risk this.