Keynote Address

The Importance of Developing and Sharing a Collective Vision

Anne Summers AO Ph.D

The Australian Public Sector Leadership Summit 2011

National Convention Centre

Canberra

Thursday 13 October, 2011

Ladies and Gentlemen

Thank you for inviting me to address you this morning on this important if challenging subject: the importance of developing and sharing a collective vision.

Not an easy subject, but a very timely one, and one that is important – probably vital - for our future as a nation.

I’d like to begin with a short quote:

“Calculating politicians and a vicious media make sure that citizens retreat from empathy, which offers the only path to unity, and arrive at the dead end of argument and grievance.”

Sound familiar?

It could be talking about the recent Convey of No Confidence, perhaps. Remember that convoy of trucks from across the country, driven by aggrieved citizens who descended on Canberra to make known their dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister and many of her policies?

In fact, the quote is from a recent issue of The New Yorker.

It is from a brilliant article that describes the “sick political culture” of the United States these days, and dissects how in the decade since 9/11 the possibility of a common narrative in that country has been destroyed.[1]

It documents in depressing detail the virtual collapse of that nation’s democratic institutions – witness the continuing imbroglio about handling the debt, the budget and the jobs crisis. The surrender of Washington to corporate interests is evidenced by the thousands of lobbyists who – rather than voters – determine the outcome of legislation, more often than not in ways that are antithetical to the interests of citizens.

The article goes on to lay out the failure that is America today:

“Starting with the intelligence failures that did not foresee the attacks, every major American institution has flunked the test of the September 11 decade. The media got the W.M.D’s wrong. The military failed to plan for chaos in postwar Iraq. Congress neglected its oversight duties. The political system produced no statesmen. C.E.O.s and financiers couldn’t see past short-term profits. The Bush Administration had one major success: it succeeded in staving off another terrorist attack in America. It botched almost everything else.”

And:

“The Bush Administration collapsed in the late summer of 2005 – not in Falluja or Kandahar but in the submerged suburbs of New Orleans. The response to Hurricane Katrina gave Americans such a devastating picture of official failure that it suggested something fatally wrong with an entire approach to governing… An Administration staffed by cronies neglected to take care of its citizens for whom it had the greatest responsibility. Katrina made brutally clear that the White House had substituted passive, self-congratulatory bravado for serious organized effort. Like Iraq, New Orleans represented a failure of individual leaders, but also of national institutions”.

That’s the USA. A gloomy assessment but not an inaccurate one, in my view.

But what about Australia?

Certainly, we have not witnessed a total collapse of government. As we saw with the Queensland and Victorian floods earlier this year, and with Cyclone Yaarsi, our institutions are capable and effective.

Our politicians rose to the occasion and were calm, efficient and reassuring. The pastoral role of our politicians was never more needed – or more evident. But, in the case of Anna Bligh in Queensland, it appears that her stellar performance during those twin crises in her state is not going to see her rewarded by re-election.

And that underscores the kinds of problems we are facing here in this country when it comes to arriving at a collective vision.

We are impatient with our politicians.

We have been schooled, through the 24 hour news cycle and the increasing brutality of partisan politics, to expect instant solutions to difficult problems.

We demand simplicity when complexity is involved.

We criticize a Prime Minister who cannot reduce to a simple 30-second sound-bite the complicated issues involved in recalibrating our economy to a post-carbon future.

The massively multi-layered immigration issue is reduced to slogans: “Stop the Boats” versus “the Malaysian solution”. Many of the challenges of the modern polity, those that cannot be boiled down to slogans and sound-bites, often do not even get an airing at all.

(One of these, and a pet peeve of mine, is the issue of how to increase the workforce participation of women, especially mothers. It is national challenge for which there are solutions but it is impossible to get a discussion going on this issue. Not sexy enough, I suppose, although it is of pressing economic and personal importance to a very large number of people.)

In such an atmosphere, when politicians and citizens get together to try to address some critical issues, as they did last week in Canberra, talking about taxes then about jobs, the media treats it as a joke.

The television coverage consisted of nothing but images of people yawning, or actually asleep, giving the impression that the tax summit was a waste of time, and reinforcing the notion that it is only shouting and sloganeering that represents meaningful political activity.

In fact, the print journalists’ account of the two summits was mostly not only positive but contained seams of optimism that perhaps our politics was redeemable. Consensus might be possible, they observed. Meaning empathy which, as my opening quote suggested, is the only path to unity, to a collective vision.

That splendid journalist George Magalogenis, writing in The Australian, reminded us that tax reform comes only via consensus with unlikely allies “…like the way the Australian Chamber of Commerce & Industry and the Australian Council of Social Service found one another after the 1996 election to push the consumption tax cause.”[2] The result was the GST. (Of course, it wasn’t as simple as that but it is worth remembered that alliances are the essential pre-requisite to arriving at a collective vision.

The Tax Summit only came about because it was a condition of one of the Independents for providing the support on which the Gillard minority government depends.

The government did not want it, the Opposition did not attend it. Yet, as previous such meetings have proved (under the Hawke government, especially) this is the way changes can be championed in this country.

Again, let me quote George Megalogenis:

“While it is a national sport to sneer at the independents, they were right to point Labor down this consultative path. Imagine if Swan had held a tax forum last year. The mining tax would be law by now, and a budget surplus locked in for 2012-13”.

SINCE ALL OF you work in the public sector and are engaged in the business of government, I am making the assumption that you are interested in the relationship between the need for a collective vision and good government. So I am directing my remarks today towards examples of government being tested, or even strained, by the absence of unity.

The most glaring example of national division at present is probably climate change.

Just five years ago, in 2006, the Lowy Institute Poll found that 68 per cent of respondents agreed that global warming was serious and a pressing problem, and that “we should be taking steps now even if this involves significant costs”.

You might recall that a year later, in 2007, there was broad political agreement on the need for an emissions trading scheme to begin tackling the problem of how to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

The Howard government had, albeit lately and with some obvious reluctance, gone to the 2007 election promising a scheme. And of course the victorious Rudd government had been elected on a promise to ratify the Kyoto Protocol and to legislate an emissions trading scheme.

We know what happened.

Rudd changed his mind. The Liberals changed leaders – twice! – and changed their policy. Today the politics of climate change could hardly be more toxic (pardon the pun!).

And the public feels the same way. The 2011 Lowy Institute poll showed that only 41 per cent of respondents felt we should be taking significant steps to reduce emissions regardless of the cost. The Coalition has reduced its discussion of the issue to a simple slogan: A Great Big Tax.

We have seen how toxic this issue has become, with so-called Deniers and Sceptics dominating the debate, and drowning out all sensible discussion of the advantages of Australia being a leader in this economic reform, and adding to our once-proud record of being a political and social innovator in the 19^th and 20^th centuries.

Despite this, the legislation passed the House of Representatives yesterday and will soon be law. Yet the Opposition insists it will go to the next election promising to repeal it.

In other words, the opposition is relying on – if not helping to perpetuate – the fracturing of opinion.

Instead of national pride at our global leadership, we have venomous denouncements of the policy and of the person – the Prime Minister – who has steered it through.

Let me give you another example where, despite the lack of national consensus (i.e. a collective vision), we have bi-partisan agreement and where, therefore, good government is possible.

I refer to the issue of women fighting in front line combat positions in the Australian Defence Force.

There are few issues that arouse such passions.

Last week, I had someone who works at ADFA compare it with abortion and euthanasia as one of those highly-emotional issues that really divides people.

This person told me that she and a female serving senior officer had appeared on the Insight program on SBS earlier this year, in a special discussion of women in combat. After the program, the two of them were available to chat online with viewers. She told me the venom and the hysteria of those who jumped online to chat was quite confronting. This was no ordinary political disagreement: this was almost primal in its passion and its intensity.

It is literally a motherhood issue: the people who oppose women going into front line combat roles are, at bottom, upset that those who create life would also be those to take life. They can’t abide the idea of mothers being killers.

There is no doubt that this, too, is a complex and multi-layered issue, with all kinds of cultural and personal dimensions. It generates extraordinary fervour and hostility. But where it differs from climate change is that the Coalition is right behind the government.

On September 27, the Minister for Defence announced the removal of all gender restrictions on combat roles for women, opening up the opportunity for women to apply for jobs such as Army Infantry and Navy Clearance Divers that had previously been closed to them. The significance of this is two-fold.

Women will now be able to compete for jobs that are pre-requisites for rising to leadership positions in the military. No woman could currently be, say, Chief of Army because she would not have been able to accumulate the field experience that is necessary for any leader to be both qualified and respected. Secondly, we are now acknowledging the end of the cultural and other taboos that have kept women from combat roles in the past.

There might still be entrenched – if muted – opposition to this within the ranks of the military, especially in the Army, but the official policy now – supported by government, opposition, the defence leadership and key defence lobby groups – is that our defence forces will no longer have formal gender–based restrictions. Australia will again lead the world in a major reform.

You may have read in the press earlier this week that a female soldier was sexually assaulted at Tarin Kowt base in Afghanistan. No information was given as to whether she was assaulted by another soldier or by a civilian but she was flown home at her request.

I found it very interesting that the Australian Defence Association’s comment on this incident was to say that this assault must not be allowed to influence the debate on the role of women in combat roles. Neil James, the executive director of the Association, said it was “absurd” that sexual assaults on female soldiers “somehow proves females should not serve on the frontline or in combat roles”.[3]

I found his comments especially interesting because the ADA is conservative on many issues and I had expected that it might take the position – shared by so many of the voices who argue against women in combat – that the risk of sexual assault is a major, if not a sufficient, reason to deny women the chance to do these jobs.

Yet it does not.

It has a very long and detailed document on its website analyzing the arguments for women being able to occupy all combat positions. It also goes through in great detail rebutting all the arguments against, including those relating to the risk of female soldiers being subject to sexual assault, or the fear that male soldiers would be distracted from their tasks, or even risk their lives, to protect the women.

As someone who has followed this issue closely since 1984 when I was involved in helping implement the provisions of the Sex Discrimination Act relating to women in the defence forces, I was both surprised, and relieved, to see that rational thought has replaced the kind of emotional hysteria that used to prevail on this subject.

Neil James made the point that places likes Tarin Kowt, which is a large multinational military base, “should be compared to the towns they effectively are when assessing crime rates”.

This is also the argument of Major Rhonda Cornum, an American servicewoman who was captured by Iraqi forces during the First Gulf War in 1991 after her helicopter was shot down.

She was sexually assaulted, and unable to defend herself – or fight back – because of her severe injuries; she had two broken arms and a bullet in her back. Interviewed after her release, she told Time magazine: “You’re supposed to look at this as a fate worse than death,” she said. “Having faced both, I can tell you it’s not”.[4] She said by way of providing a context: “Every 15 seconds in America, some woman is assaulted. Why are they worried about a woman getting assaulted once every 10 years in a war overseas?” She also made the point that while she was asked if she had been raped, no male POWs are ever asked the same question.

I HAVE USED THESE two examples to illustrate differing approaches to arriving at national consensus, or collective vision. In both instances, there is significant discord but in the case of women in combat there is the possibility of arriving at consensus.

When the political parties and the major lobby groups are aligned, the possibility exists to lead the public to their position.

They can persuade and educate and try to bring the public to their way of thinking. This is simply not possible with climate change which, despite carbon pricing having been legislated, will continue to be a divisive issue in our country.

You may be hoping that I can provide you with some solutions as to how we can develop a shared vision in Australia today.

I wish I could!

The most I can do is to urge a return to civility, to respect for one another and to listening to each other. We have stopped doing that, except in fora such as the much-ridiculed Tax Summit.

The media’s negativity about such gatherings is not helping. Nor is the large and growing presence in our media – print, radio, tv and online – of so-called shock jocks, those rabid commentators who seem to delight in stirring up irrational and ill-informed chatter on the important issues of the day.

This is a new phenomenon in our polity and one that is very worrying.

I recently discussed this with Lachlan Harris, who used to be press secretary to Kevin Rudd when he was Prime Minister.

Harris made the point to me that there are now two very different, and at times contradictory, forces at work in influencing public opinion. The traditional News Cycle – now turbo-charged and operating 24/7 – has been joined, in fact overtaken, by the Opinion Cycle.

Political leaders know how to influence the News Cycle but, so far at least says Harris, they have not figured out how to influence the Opinion Cycle.

Why this matters is that, according to Harris, in 2004 they (the political leaders of the ALP) estimated that people got 70 per cent of their political information from the News Cycle. Today, that has been turned on its head and now most people get their information from the Opinion Cycle.

This is especially worrying to those of us who would like to see us able to arrive at a collective vision because the Opinion Cycle is based on the division of opinion.

New is about getting stories – scoops. Opinion is about generating division.

Opinion is on the ascendency and is influencing News, which is now increasingly opting for controversy and division rather than straight reporting of information.

And let’s not kid ourselves about the power of these forces.

As Harris pointed out to me, in 2010, the two cycles combined to demand that Kevin Rudd should go. He went.

Now, just a year later, they are combining again to demand that Julia Gillard should go.

Are our politicians able to resist such demands?

I think the need for a collective vision in Australia has never been greater.

And perhaps the first thing we need to agree on is that we must not surrender our democracy to the shrill voices of the unelected opinionators.

Thank you