As politics becomes religion, the right invents a new way to avoid accountability

A novel round of finger-pointing is emerging among some conservatives after the robodebt royal commission, and that is to declare the government of the day guilty of having engaged in a partisan abuse of power, loosely defined. 

Writing in The Australian on Saturday, Chris Kenny ominously warned of the “Americanisation of our system” wrought by the “weaponisation of quasi-judicial processes” for political gain. 

He worried about the spectre of using the robodebt royal commission findings to “hound” former prime minister Scott Morrison “out of Parliament”, framing the conduct of Government Services Minister Bill Shorten as predatory in this regard. 

And while Kenny conceded Shorten had fallen victim to “similar tactics” during the Tony Abbott era, he intimated that Shorten’s seeming exploitation of the robodebt royal commission was of a different order, comparable with that of US Democrats who oppose Donald Trump’s 2024 presidential tilt.

The broadsheet’s Paul Kelly was of a similar mind, lamenting what he called the “judicialisation of politics”, despite acknowledging the robodebt royal commission itself was justified.  

The use of royal commissions as “instruments of moral punishment” or methods of “brutalised revenge”, he said, with the public and media standing by “demanding retribution”, had emerged as a “new modus operandi” for incoming government. 

“Labor has repaid this technique in spades.” 

These are large and heroic claims. And ones that take Morrison’s complaints of “political intimidation”, along with Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s rhetoric of “witch-hunts”, to their logical conclusions, exposing some within conservative media as the seeming amanuenses of Morrison or Dutton. Or they of them. 

It would be a mistake, though, to dismiss such views as another flop from Coalition studio productions, or group therapy for anyone on the right overborne by frightening new levels of shared denial or delusion. 

On the contrary, one way — perhaps the only way — of neutralising or diluting genuine, far-reaching scandals, such as robodebt or Morrison’s baffling secret one-man government, is to label any inquiry announced by the opposing side as necessarily and irreducibly partisan. Something heralding a dangerous descent into calcified polarisation emblematic of our American counterparts and therefore posing a threat to our democracy. 

The criticism or technique, so far as it encompasses all scandals — however bad or objectively terrible or not terrible — glosses over such distinctions (at least so far as Labor is concerned), relegating any inquiry into said scandal as little more than an echo chamber of partisan obsessions. 

At its heart, the argument of Kelly and Kenny is that Labor’s recent inquiries into robodebt and the secret ministries confirm we have entered the realm of what might be called “total politics”: a state of being where politics becomes an ersatz religion that privileges self-interest and winning at all costs above decidedly quaint ideas like the public interest. 

Distilled, total politics is the domain of institutional arsonists. It is a space in which norms and conventions are brazenly abused, sabotaged and degraded, but where rules are technically followed yet pushed to their absolute limits — and sometimes breached in the name of partisan advantage. All that matters, as writer David Graham has pointed out, is “what’s possible, not what’s prudent”. 

If this sounds familiar, it’s because it is. It was, after all, during the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments that norm-torching, lying and the degradation of the common good were elevated to a national pastime, and where many on the right did their utmost to import or ape the worst of the nativism of the Republican Party in day-to-day Australian politics. 

This unbounded, born-to-rule, power-for-power’s-sake mentality found, and continues to find, reflection in the routine contempt displayed by the Coalition for various oversight bodies, such as the auditor-general, occasionally the courts, as well as the NSW anti-corruption body. 

It also found frequent expression in the Coalition’s various multibillion-dollar rorts; Angus “fantastic” Taylor’s attacks on Clover Moore; Morrison’s 2022 election-day boat arrival stunt; his tacit support of violent anti-lockdown protesters in Melbourne; the tenor of the failed voter identification and religious discrimination bills; and, not least, his sustained attacks on minorities, such as refugees, whom he falsely labelled as rapists and murderers, among other examples.

But perhaps nowhere was this mindset of total politics so exquisitely captured than in the robodebt and secret ministries scandals, where the conduct of government manifestly morphed into whatever Morrison and co deemed appropriate.

Far from representing a symptom or a variant of the same political malaise, Labor’s inquiries into these particular scandals are part of the necessary antidote. The same applies to the newly established National Anti-Corruption Commission, which was not formed to inflict ongoing revenge on the Coalition but in response to the general degradation of democracy during its term.    

In reality, the only side of politics that has demonstrated, and continues to manifest, an unswerving penchant for total politics is the Coalition, as vividly encapsulated in the uncommon devotion that Morrison — for all his disgrace — continues to inspire among his colleagues. 

Arguments to the contrary that seek to paint and taint Labor with the same brush are not only removed from reality, they also do nothing to disabuse the Coalition of the political malady that has long infected it. If anything, they cement the delusion — not by insisting the Coalition is innocent, but by suggesting it’s improper to hold it to account. And that poses dangers for our democracy. 

As former Labor MP Doug Cameron tweeted yesterday in answer to Taylor’s insistence that Morrison remains a “highly respected” member of Parliament: “This misplaced, misguided and utterly stupid tribalism from the Liberal leadership shows they have learned nothing and still treat honesty, integrity and good government with utter contempt.”