1Q: Is there merit in governments playing catch-up politics?

Tim Dunlop’s blogging experiment, One Question, has the third round happening. (For full details see Tim’s original post.)

The current question is this: the government is accused of playing catch up politics, but is there some merit in such an approach?

The other participants have their answers up already, and I’m behind because of more interest in other questions this week, to be frank, as well as a horrid day of HTML coding yesterday rescuing crashing websites which ate into my writing time. (At least this post is shorter than my other efforts.) The other answers are:

Andrew Bartlett | Joshua Gans | Kim Jameson | Robert Merkel | Harry Clarke | Tim Dunlop | Ken Parish (still to come)

I’m with Tim: the obvious answer is that yes, there certainly is merit in governments playing “catch-up” with adopting policies which have been initiated by others and which offer an effective approach to addressing current issues. To ignore good policy crafted by others would be foolish and arrogant, surely.

However, the term is disparaging, and Tim unpacks why. It implies that the government has been belated in its response, and that its commitment to the policy may be incomplete and merely a matter of politicking i.e. the government is less interested in actual policy than it is in politics.

This week’s question was Joshua’s, and he asked it before the Howard emergency plan was announced, referring to the examples of broadband policy and climate change. It’s hard, now, not to apply the question to the indigenous emergency plan, which we have written about quite extensively here at Hoyden. [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]

Filed under: 1Question, Politics, authoritarianism, indigenous

1Q: How relevant are motives in assessing the public policy stance of a politician or commentator?

This week’s One Question is from Harry Clarke, who writes in an earlier post:

In assessing testimony in a court of law motives are important. Elsewhere they are less so but they pervasively affect our attitudes. Some have argued that the ‘The Motive Fallacy’ (specifically, believing that exposing the motives behind an expressed opinion shows that the opinion is false) is so common in politics that serious policy debate is almost nonexistent.

…The problem with falling prey to the Motives Fallacy in a political debate is that attention is turned away from the analysis of policy consequences. Policies just become part of a political game that seeks to establish who might win or lose. The specific effects of policies remain unanalyzed by the person who says ‘X is only just saying that because of Y’ where Y has nothing to do with the effects of the policy.

My fellow 1Q contributors have largely concentrated on current events, and made many of the best points (teach me to get weighed down and be late). I plan to look back at how motives have been weighed as to relevance in the past, and particularly the roots of the idea of weighing motives in a truly ancient debate, albeit a debate that probably long predates its first recorded pithy summation.

“Cui bono?” (to whose benefit?) were the words flung by the orator Marcus Tullus Cicero repeatedly at a jury in Rome, words he attributed to the consul and censor Lucius Cassius Longinus Ravilla, as he defended a client charged with murder and succeeded in vindicating him. As Harry alludes to above, the principle of cui bono? forms the basis of criminal investigations today, in determining who is a credible suspect, and in weighing the strength of various motives according to the benefit derived. Whether the benefit is tangible, intangible or even delusional, the belief in a benefit to be gained through committing a crime underpins our concept of what constitutes a motive.

But the political arena is not susceptible to the same simplifications and controlled microinvestigation as the criminal court, and political policy decisions have ongoing ramifications and ripple effects that a single concrete criminal act does not.

Filed under: 1Question, Media, Politics, ethics, history, skeptics

1Q: Does the country really change when the government changes?

Updated to change name of post (this interblog round robin will all use the same post title to aid searches)

Tim Dunlop is introducing a new feature where a round-robin of ozbloggers will respond to a question on a current topic. I’m chuffed he asked me to be one of the group. We’ll all take turns in asking questions, and this week the question is Tim’s:

My first question is picking up on something said by both John Howard and Paul Keating, namely, that when the government changes, so does the country. Both made the comment at a time when it looked to them like they might be about to lose power and so there was, of course, a sense of warning in their observation. So that’s my question: Does the country really change when the government changes?

My answer:

The opposite could be said to be equally true, that when the country changes so does the government, and in fact it is most likely that a mutual reciprocity exists between the opinions and attitudes of the electorate, of politicians and thus the policies and legislation of the governments that politicians form. The opinions and attitudes of the electorate also influence how civil servants implement governmental decisions, as well as how the media covers issues and how the government responds to media coverage, so the action-reaction is a continuing reciprocity and tension that exists throughout a government’s term, not just at election times.

Obviously, the “art” of government is meant to be in forming and implementing policies that influence society, that do change the country in ways the government thinks the country ought to go. Much of the allure of government is surely exactly this opportunity to engage in some tinkering with social engineering: the implementation of ideologies. The nuts and bolts of social administration are not nearly so appealing, and often seem to be viewed as interfering with the “real work” of governing, which is changing things in ways that are meant to be an improvement according to the ideology of the day.

Meanwhile the electorate is always mostly interested in, firstly, confidence that economic management will maintain and hopefully improve income, conditions and general lifestyle, alongside the second but almost equal consideration for most voters: the efficient delivery and maintenance of physical and social infrastructure items i.e. exactly those nuts and bolts that make governments’ eyes glaze over while governing (although the pollies give the appropriately reverent lip service during elections). The electorate’s identification with more specific aspects of partisan ideologies is nebulous for the most part, consisting of a broad sympathy with the politicians who usually articulate most of the same Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD) items that they themselves feel apprehensive about.

Forgive me for what is perhaps a far too obvious extension of the metaphor, but there’s obviously a limit to how far the reciprocal tension between electorate and government can oscillate, how far one can drag the other into changing in the same direction, without the attachment snapping because of a fundamental imbalance in priorities.

So what do these tensions and balances between the nation and the Government mean when there’s an election in the air?

Filed under: 1Question, Politics, Sociology