It's politics, but not as we know it

The Liberals look like a political party visiting from a foreign country, writes DAVID BURCHELL VISITORS from out of state (and particularly from that great city on the Yarra) often observe how different NSW politics is. Different from politics elsewhere, is what they mean. But perhaps they also mean different from what politics ought to be, at least as we imagine it. For a start, there’s the radio commentary. Those talkback hosts with their incendiary tongues, and the listeners who complain about everything under the sun - but especially the supposed demise of law and order, the crookedness of politicians everywhere, and declining public morals. Then there’s the frenetic tone of political debate. State parliament used to be affectionately known as The Bearpit - because almost everything seemed to be allowed there. Half-baked attacks on personal character, read off pieces of paper under parliamentary privilege. Outrageous figures claiming to prove that there are almost no police on the beat, or that criminals are hardly ever caught, or that when they are they live in the lap of luxury. Finally, there’s the rancorous tone pervading ethnic politics. The Lebanese Muslim community might as well take up arms and start a civil war tomorrow, for all that it would change some people’s view of them. At the same time, Lebanese Sydneysiders are a formidable political force. And so the state government deplores the activities of some of their members out of one side of its mouth, and goes cap in hand for votes with the other. In fact, you could do worse than describe the business of governing NSW as the politics of the two-sided mouth. If you want to improve conditions in prisons somewhat, be careful to accompany this with thunderous attacks upon the criminal class. If you want to improve funding for community services, match this with a lot of huff and puff about tough love and pulling yourself up by your bootlaces. If you want to trim the budget, conjure up a new and more efficient railway timetable which will make everybody’s trip quicker. If there’s a simple explanation of why Labor has now run NSW for so long - and why, despite many tribulations, it will continue to do so after 24 March - it’s the party’s skill in the politics of the two-sided mouth. Notoriously, the former premier Bob Carr used to request a transcript of the calls to the city’s leading talkback radio host on his desk for the start of every working day. He wouldn’t listen to the program himself, mind you. (In his personal tastes Carr adored classical music, loathed sport, and used to wash his hands after every bout of flesh-pressing.) But he wanted to keep in constant touch with what was going on it the neighbourhoods. It’s no coincidence that NSW Labor is better at this game than its political rivals, despite the fact that the “shock jocks” lean heavily towards the conservative side of politics. After all, constituency politics in Sydney - as in Chicago or New York - has long been a matter of stitching up majorities out of the ethnic patchwork quilt of an immigrant city. Sympathise with one group in their quarrels with the next, and vice versa. And get all of them - Lebanese, Turks, Vietnamese, Sudanese, whoever - off to the polls before closing time. By the same token, the perennial problems of the NSW Liberal Party are tied up with their limited skills in the politics of broad-mouthedness. On account of Sydney’s peculiar electoral geography, the Liberals’ heartland is locked up in that vast middle-class Anglo ghetto on the city’s North Shore. There are migrant communities there - mostly members of the ethnic Chinese and South East Asian diaspora. But they’re doing well enough for themselves as individuals that they don’t have an urgent need to lobby anybody. Liberal leader Peter Debnam has a private school headmaster’s air of authority, but too often he sounds as if he’s faking it in this street-smart town. By contrast, current NSW premier Morris Iemma has deliberately turned his unassuming, family-man image into a political strength. For all his vaunted literary skills, Carr was an intellectually lazy man, and by the time he left office Labor looked complacent and lacking in ideas. Iemma has been busily distancing himself from the later Carr years, making much of his own community instincts and concerns. He attends football matches like a previous era of politicians used to go to church. And so he’s ridden out a series of nasty political crises - such as an alleged sex-offending minister and a girlfriend-beating MP - with an air of imperturbable calm. In the end, the biggest threat to the Coalition is the NSW Liberal Party itself. Until it broadens its core base beyond the hang-’em-high set, and gets a wider range of types into its branches, it’s doomed to look like a political party visiting from a foreign country. • David Burchell teaches in Humanities at the University of Western Sydney, and is associate editor of APO. This article first appeared in the Australian Financial Review. Photo: Andrew Nisbet/iStockphoto.co