Remember “internationalist bureaucracy”? Scott Morrison, in full-blown Trumpian mode after his 2019 election win, decided to rail against an “ill-defined borderless global community” and “negative globalism”.
Like most Morrison neologisms — especially the notorious “can do capitalism”, which didn’t last 24 hours — it was soon abandoned. A year later, Morrison was praising multilateralism.
His latest invention is “public autocracy”. Morrison says integrity bodies shouldn’t be allowed to investigate pork-barrelling and rorting of public funds for partisan purposes, telling Liberal donor Nine: “If we are going to so disempower our elected representatives to do things about what is needed in their communities, then what is the point? We can’t just hand government over to faceless officials to make decisions that impact [sic] the lives of Australians from one end of the country to the other. I actually think there’s a great danger in that.”
That’s a strange change of tune from Morrison. The day before that interview, in response to Labor’s housing equity proposal, Morrison was rubbishing the idea of elected representatives doing things needed in their communities, like helping people into home ownership. On the one hand, politicians are some monstrous invasive species that shouldn’t be allowed near the reins of power; on the other, the only people who can be trusted to do the right thing.
The richer irony was that it was on the very day the “public autocracy” of the Reserve Bank lifted interest rates.
If the prime minister seriously thinks “public autocracy” is a “great danger” then he should immediately revoke the Reserve Bank’s independence and make monetary policy a function of Josh Frydenberg’s hopelessly politicised Treasury, where elected representatives can direct it — not faceless officials in Martin Place.
He should also propose a referendum to get rid of the High Court and the Federal Court — nothing but “faceless officials” “making decisions that affect the lives of Australians from one end of the country to the other” there. Far better to have politicians deciding legal cases, family disputes, complex constitutional issues.
Is this taking a sensible idea to an absurd extent? No, it’s to point out we already have what Morrison calls “public autocracy” but is more accurately called “independent experts” right through our system of government. Anyone trust politicians to decide court cases? Command troops on the battlefield? Regulate industries? Run public broadcasting? Of course not. We recognise that politicians don’t have the expertise and can’t be trusted to act independently, despite the magic pixie dust of being elected.
In fact, why have independent regulators at all? Just faceless officials making decisions that affect lives. Get rid of them. Politicians should do it. Morrison will also need to get rid of the military command of the ADF. Who are these faceless generals controlling our military services and leading our troops? Let’s get elected representatives in to run the military too.
In recent decades we’ve come to understand that we need more “public autocrats”, not fewer. Central bank independence — once a shibboleth of the neoliberal right — arose in the 1990s because of the belief that politicians couldn’t be trusted to lift interest rates when that was needed to combat inflation. During the pandemic, Morrison and his fellow politicians fell over themselves to insist they were merely following the advice of health experts.
And in Sydney, where corruption of local councils by property developers was so endemic, not merely were property developers banned from donating to politicians, local councils were stripped of their power to decide development applications — instead independent expert local planning panels do it.
That is, we’ve decided that politicians have proven themselves untrustworthy. They’re too easily bribed; their desire to be reelected makes them ignore the public interest; they’re blinded by their own ideological obsessions. So they need to have less power. And part of the push for a federal ICAC, and for the reining-in of pork-barrelling and rorting, is driven by the fact that the Morrison government is the most corrupt in federal history, and neither Morrison nor his ministers can be trusted to act in the public interest.
The great danger is in allowing them access to power at all, not letting them have more.
