The lessons of political failure

Politics can be brutal and unforgiving. And maybe that’s the way it should be when we’re talking about the capacity to shape our nation. Our leaders need to be tested if we’re to have confidence in them.

On election night I was with a mathematician, a professor who sees the world in a completely different way to me. He’d called the election well before Anthony Green. His extrapolations proved to be very accurate, unlike some of the sad early night barracking from frustrated commentators and party apparatchik who couldn’t accept that most Australians didn’t see the world as they did.

Much has already been written about the election outcome. There is inevitably a cornerstone of truth to most of the analysis, a grounding in facts, but then the commentariat tend to leap off into theorising about all kinds of possibilities.

From a charities and not-for-profit perspective, I think there are some very important lessons to learn from the election on Saturday. I want to highlight just three. I should note that I claim no particular insight or expertise and am happy to accept that many will have different perspectives.

The first point I would make is that this election has again demonstrated the importance of well-developed policy.

In the charities and not-for-profit sector, being able to offer credible and feasible policy options is the basis of successful advocacy. Simply calling out what’s wrong, or campaigning strongly to highlight harms or inequities, is rarely enough to drive change.

I know some ‘campaigners’ will get upset with me making this point, but if you can’t offer workable solutions, you risk being categorised as little more than a noisy nuisance, or, as a senior politician once suggested to me, another yapping want-to-be guard dog with no teeth.

Most commentators during and after the election have agreed that the Coalition hadn’t done the detailed work on Coalition policies. This became patently clear with the backflips and inconsistencies that emerged during the Coalition campaign.

Too much of what the Coalition was offering seemed to be asking the electorate to accept that we should trust them to fill in the policy detail later.

The second important point for me was that values and consistency matter.

There was a level of cognitive dissonance in so much of the Coalition campaign. Something seemed to not add up about their approach. A good example of this is the principle supported by most in the Coalition that government needs to be smaller, lower taxing, and take a less interfering role in our lives.

But smaller government and less intrusion into our lives doesn’t translate into wanting to use taxpayers' funds to build nuclear power stations, or government confiscating gas from private fossil fuel companies, or reversing tax cuts, or telling us what can be taught in schools or whether we can have a welcome to country at our local community event.

The Coalition’s policies, words and actions during the campaign didn’t match any coherent set of consistent values.

Charities and not-for-profits also need to walk the talk. To gain and maintain community respect and engagement, charities and not-for-profits need to show by their actions what their values really are.

My final point goes to representation.

As we await the final make-up of the Parliament, 40 Coalition lower house seats have been confirmed to date. Just seven of these Coalition MPs in the next Parliament are women. (47 out of the 87 ALP lower house seats confirmed to date will be held by women – a clear majority).

Representation isn’t everything, but it’s incredibly important. There were so many examples during the campaign where Coalition policy seemed almost anti women.

The Coalition boosting productivity policies highlighted four priority industries – mining, manufacturing, construction and primary producers – all male dominated.

Predominantly female industries like education, health, aged care, childcare, community welfare and housing seemed to take a back seat in the Coalition policy bus, or even worse, be treated as non-productive drains on government resources.

Representation is obviously important in the charities and not-for-profit sector. It’s why some of us advocate for client and community representation in governance.

If we want to really serve a community we need to engage in meaningful ways and look to co-design, collaboration and providing real options for those we are serving to not just have a say, but have their experiences acknowledged and their views respected.

The charities and not-for-profit sector could learn a lot from the failure of the Coalition at Saturday’s election. It strongly reinforced the importance of doing the policy work to be able to offer workable solutions, ensuring consistency in our values and our actions, and understanding that representation is much more than an occasional seat at the table or a tick the box consultation.

These observations aren’t new or particularly insightful, and yet they continue to be real issues for the Coalition.

For the sake of our democracy, I hope the Coalition will be able to make the changes needed to better reflect the values and perspectives of our communities. It will probably be a long and painful process. But given the importance of getting our leadership right, perhaps that’s a good thing?

David Crosbie has been CEO of the Community Council for Australia for the past decade and has spent more than a quarter of a century leading significant not-for-profit organisations, including the Mental Health Council of Australia, the Alcohol and Other Drugs Council of Australia, and Odyssey House Victoria.