Death of Democracy?

Are we witnessing the death of democracy in Australia?

This question is starting to get some airplay in the media these days. That in itself is something of a revelation - the idea that we are is clearly gaining some traction among the political commentators at least; raising such a question 10 years ago would likely have been met with confusion oustide the most fundamentalist right and left.

Margo Kingston certainly thinks we are heading down a slippery slope. Her excellent Webdiary features continual highlighting of the anti-democratic decisions being made by the federal government, and her just-released book "Not Happy John" details some of the key concerns, from the closing of the public galleries in Parliament House duing the visit of US President George W Bush to the casting aside of the Westminster tradition of (and reliance on) Ministerial responsibility. In a speech to the Sydney Institute, she said:

The current weakness of our democracy is clearly shown in its failure to
hold Howard to account for his misleading and deceptive conduct in taking
Australia to its first war of aggression in Iraq against the wishes of the
Australian people. The British and American parliaments and media have
comprehensively shown us up.

Yesterday, Robert Manne (professor of politics at La Trobe University) wrote an opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald arguing that the current Prime Minister's contempt for the convention of Ministerial responsibility in the Westminster system of government demonstrates a weakness in the Constitution of Australia:

There is almost no Australian constitutional convention which goes deeper than
the one which says that when a minister deliberately misleads the parliament he
or she should resign. Indeed it is genuinely difficult to see how the
Westminster system of responsible government could survive in the absence of a
convention of such a kind.

In our system conventions cannot be enforced by courts. They rely on the acts of the prime minister. If a minister is shown to have misled the parliament, the prime minister must insist on resignation. But if it is the prime minister who has misled the parliament, who is to act? We encounter here a curious gap in the constitutional convention.

Professor Manne was citing the recent revelations concerning "Children Overboard Affair", in which it has become apparent to anyone with ears to hear that the Prime Minister deliberately misled parliament about whether children had been thrown from a sinking boat full of Iraqi asylum seekers during the election campaign in November 2001. Mr Howard has decided to ride out the controversy, relying on a combination of apathy and xenophobia to take him into the next election.

Given that election is coming up soon, maybe he's right. The people will be able to vote on his honesty directly, and in that respect will certainly get the prime minister they deserve. With Labor's list of 27 lies since 1996 likely to get plenty of airtime in the election campaign, people will be asked to determine how much they actually value honesty in politics, answering for a time at least the confusion amongst pollsters on where that issue sits in the league table of importance of the voting public.

The irony of people potentially voting for the end of democratic accountability of government appears somewhat lost on Gerard Henderson, who seems to have little understanding of the all-too-willing cooperation of the German people in their own disenfranchisement in the early 1930s. In a response to Prof Manne, Henderson today warns against people jumping on the "pre-fascist" bandwagon. While he is right to remind people of the weight of the words involved and the caution that needs to be exercised in using it, he seems to be confused or careless about the difference between "pre-fascist" and "fascist", interchanging these terms in his article as if they are the same thing.

Margo Kingston et al are not arguing that Australia in 2004 is like Germany in 1936. They are warning that meaningful accountability has disappeared in politics, that anti-terror laws are being used to stifle dissent, that wars of aggression are being waged on the basis of lies, and that the majority of Australians are willing to let all that happen because they are worried about their mortgages.

That sounds a lot like Germany in 1933.