Memo to indies: Here’s how you can major party-proof politics for decades

Community independent MPs who might hold the balance of power after the coming election could have a relatively limited window to force the major parties to comply with their demands. The experience of Australia’s last minority government, from 2010-13, was of an initial honeymoon period that gave way to the Gillard government reneging on its commitments to Andrew Wilkie regarding gambling reform, and eventually walking away altogether from the Greens on whom Labor relied for lower house support.

While the independents have issues that are — rightly — a priority for them like genuine climate action and tax reform, delivering a longer-lasting impact on how government works in Australia should also be a priority. Individual policies can be overturned by the next majority government; structural and institutional reforms can last much longer. One of the Gillard-era reforms that has stuck, for instance, is an independent Parliamentary Budget Office, even if it’s currently too small to deliver the kind of impactful fiscal advice that would genuinely worry the major parties.

Elsewhere I’ve urged independents to consider the creation of an Australian equivalent of the US Government Accountability Office, which churns out a massive number of audits and evaluations of US government programs and offers policy insights gleaned from assessing the effectiveness of government policies.

I also reckon we need to lift funding for the auditor-general to enable it to produce one report a week, given it’s the accountability body that genuinely worries ministers and public servants (the National Anti-Corruption Commission should worry them as well, but under current management is more the butt of jokes than a source of concern).

There are also basic transparency and integrity measures that the major parties can be prodded into: the publication of ministerial meeting diaries — which currently have to be extracted via freedom of information requests — should be published regularly as they are in Queensland, Victoria and NSW without apparent harm to the either the smooth functioning or basic venality of governments. Moreover, they should be extended to include all MPs and senators, and incorporate attendance at party fundraisers.

In this spirit, Crikey has today published said ministerial meeting diaries obtained under Freedom of Information laws, including Anthony Albanese’s, Richard Marles’, and Michelle Rowland’s.

Annastacia Palaszczuk’s ending of the absurdity of keeping cabinet papers secret for decades should be copied. Freedom of information laws should be strengthened to curb the capacity of the public service to delay and refuse requests and significantly reduce the grounds on which documents can be censored before release. And Helen Haines has already prioritised repealing Don Farrell’s attack on independents via political funding laws.

These would significantly improve the accountability of governments and how they run their programs. What they wouldn’t do directly is lift the overall standard of policymaking, or expand policymaking into areas the major parties consider no-go zones, like genuine climate action, or reversing the rotten GST deal with Western Australia, or properly taxing profits from offshore gas.

A reform that would change that dynamic is one championed by, inter alia, economist Nicholas Gruen, who has pushed the idea of citizens’ assemblies for some time. Not an issue-specific citizens’ assembly, as Allegra Spender and other independents have proposed for housing policy (and the Greens proposed for climate policy in 2010) but a standing assembly that could set its own agenda and pursue issues of public policy it deemed worthwhile.

Crucially, the standing assembly would be chosen by sampling, like juries in the court system, rather than election (Gruen explains the pluses and minuses of both approaches here). It wouldn’t have legislative power, though it could have some of the powers of, say, Senate committees, such as asking public officials to give evidence. Gruen suggests one mechanism by which the assembly could interact with Parliament proper — requiring a secret parliamentary ballot on an issue where Parliament has declined to agree to the assembly’s proposals.

But the primary benefit, surely, would be to introduce a genuine contest in policymaking. Currently policymaking is dominated by the party that controls the executive. There is some limited non-executive policymaking apparatus available via parliamentary and particularly Senate committees, though these are usually controlled by one or other of the major parties. A standing assembly prepared to investigate issues the major parties don’t want to touch, to conduct hearings, debate solutions and produce its own recommendations, would disrupt the major party control of policymaking (and help push the media out of its policy laziness).

There are plenty of practical questions about how it would operate — Gruen tackles some of them here — but he repeatedly points to the success of the Michigan Independent Citizens’ Redistricting Commission, a 13-member standing body picked by lottery that ended gerrymandering in that state by Republicans and Democrats after a 2018 vote took the power to draw electoral boundaries away from politicians.

Such bodies are no more perfect than other human institutions, but the Michigan commission is now seen as a national example to address the blight of gerrymandering.

Such an assembly would represent a genuine source of fresh thinking in what is an increasingly stale and rigid governmental process controlled by the major parties and their partisan conception of what is possible. It might also stick well beyond when the current generation of politicians has moved on.

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