Labor plans both a high and a low road

What hasn't yet been completely unveiled is the negative "don't vote for them" message - which is all about sleaze. Well-executed, it could have the power to deprive an unusually sanctimonious regime of any moral right to govern at all.

Six years of Coalition government more than provide a narrative of everything an increasingly cynical public is said to fear, distrust and hate in politicians.

It started on day one with dodgy travel claims by Tony Abbott and some of his senior ministers. It's got Barnaby Joyce on almost anything. It's got all the top ministers prostituting the public interest to serve the banks and private superannuation funds. It covers appointments of mates and unworthy people to important positions, including quasi-judicial ones. It involves farming fabulous sums of money to donors, including tax dodgers.

Some of the misbehaviour has precedents, including from Labor, but the problem has become noticeably worse, particularly over Scott Morrison's stewardship and indications that the jig is up, probably for six or nine years. The attack can be as personal as good taste suggests. But it can also be a broad and general indictment of abuse of power, with checks or examples from above, of a party that has become a creature of rich outside interests, personal aggrandisement and rorts, misuse of the public purse and abuse of the public interest.

The politics of attack are always risky. The low road is not necessarily sleazy; it is sometimes a duty. But there's the prospect of retaliation, though this would scarcely hold Labor back given the Prime Minister has not scrupled to attack Shorten personally. There is the risk mud will stick to both sides. Much modern disgust at politics falls on politicians generally, rather than selectively on the party showing poor standards at any particular time. That's a response often justified by the argument that Labor was "just as bad" - say about giving jobs to its mates - when it was in power.

But it's a pretty poor moral argument that bad conduct, and abuse of power, is somehow less blameworthy because others have done it before. It's the poorer sort of argument when a prime minister places himself on a moral high ground, but refuses to lead or discipline his party, or even to set an example. Morrison has been short on the authority, the power or the will to impose discipline on his ministers, or to announce and enforce general standards of any kind. Even when ministers have seemed quite caught out, Morrison has either blustered with general allegations about Labor, or denied any breach of any rule or principle, least of all about stewardship of public money or the public interest.

Politicians in either party can rort their expenses or allowances. But only those on the Treasury benches have real power to abuse, to subvert or turn to partisan interest.

Shorten's power to cut through is increased by the amazing discipline and loyalty of his party over two terms, compared with non-stop brawling and leadership changes in the Coalition parties.

Judged by what he has been saying, Shorten's argument is that corruption, maladministration and abuse of power is something more than a rare and isolated matter. It is now evidence of a new imbalance in the system of checks and balances. That's because old rules or accepted principles and processes are being deliberately bypassed. It's been because rules are being broken. It's been because the rulebook has been thrown away.

For years Labor adopted a complacent Liberal claim about corruption and abuse of power not being a major problem in the federal sphere. It thought the existing systems - say the Ombudsman, the Auditor-General, the Australian Federal Police, an independent Director of Public Prosecutions and the public service disciplinary system - deterred wrongdoing because it could, and would, detect, combat and punish it.

Shorten's power to cut through is increased by the amazing discipline and loyalty of his party over two terms

Labor's commitment to an Integrity Commission with teeth is evidence Shorten accepts that the checks and balances are no longer working properly. Regulatory agencies have been castrated, and efforts to remake them have yet to restore potency. The AFP is compromised, of dubious competence with corruption, and politicised. It's neither Labor nor Liberal so much as supine and eager to please ministers, and overdependent on day-to-day discretions from government. Administrative tribunals - perhaps even parts of the judiciary - have been stacked in a process depriving them of the moral authority to enforce their judgments. Public relations pretences of an open government culture have been defeated by a climate of fear and loathing caused by leak inquiries and relentless punishment of public service dissidents.

Even more concerning for those who worry about corruption, are evidences of compromised public service tendering processes, of over-eager bureaucracies seeming to do anything to achieve what the minister wants, or to prepare, in arrears, materials - even submissions - sanitising doubtful public policy, or measures designed to improperly benefit the government's friends. Happening at a time when government - and departmental secretaries - have been consciously running down their policy and program expertise, instead outsourcing it to often-highly-conflicted consultants, or, generally to a private sector not subject to the scrutiny and accountability of the public sector.

Normally, it would be poor form for Labor to be promising royal commissions into particular actions of Morrison-ministers. But old conventions about this can be said to be inoperative, thanks to precedents set by Tony Abbott.

One might expect an inquiry into water management under the Coalition (perhaps even embracing Penny Wong and Tony Burke) would rattle a few cages, just as would a general inquiry into Barnaby Joyce's administration of anything, such as the live-sheep exports, friendships with mining moguls, and the dairy industry. There could be - should be - a thorough inquiry into immigration and home affairs contracting, and contract management, and into the efficacy of the idea and the practice of one big department of spooks, cops, customs surveillance. The AFP needs a searching external inquiry.

But these latter matters should be regarded rather more as matters of housekeeping - simple efforts to restore some regularity at the beginning of a new government, after manifest excesses by a predecessor.

Voters should focus their attention on systematic reform - ones that will promise that neither Labor nor Coalition ministers, nor pliant bureaucrats, can dispense with the letter and the spirit of rules designed to secure the public interest.

Powerful forces within the bureaucracy - and no doubt soon among the lobbies that will descend on Labor as new best mates - if Labor takes power, will resist or try to limit integrity reform. That's because they are very much part of the problem of integrity. Even some Gillard-era Labor ministers will see too much reform as inimical to the cowboy way they once operated. If Shorten does not lead on reform and in defeating such resistance he will breach a fundamental contract with voters.

My guess is that right now Shorten means everything he says. He knows, after all, from the opinion polls that trust and credibility are his big problems. What better reassurance than to promise a big, and transparent, brake on Labor misbehaviour?

One does not need a long memory to think it ironic it could be Labor, or even Bill Shorten personally, who leads Australian government out of this mire and moral pigsty. It was only a few years ago that the NSW Labor government, and particularly its dominant right-wing faction, was widely seen as the most corrupt state government the nation had ever seen, even embracing the Bjelke Petersen years in Queensland. It was routed at the election and observers wondered whether it would ever be trusted with power again.

Only last month, NSW Liberals went into an unprecedented third term, but the relative narrowness of its victory would suggest that voters are now preparing to trust Labor there again. A PR triumph given there have been no fundamental reforms in the state, other than some reshuffling and recycling of personnel at the state level. At the federal level, senior NSW Labor representatives, many of them proteges or political allies of those in greatest disgrace in Sydney, are unchanged - mostly not even embarrassed.

Bill Shorten is a Victorian, uncontaminated by the odour that once hung over many of the workers' representatives from NSW. But a good deal of taxpayer money has been spent in partisan efforts to smear him as less than a champion of the workers, whenever (at least if) their interests were in opposition to his own. That, miscellaneous treacheries in the Rudd and Gillard governments, and his role as a faction chieftain have made the public slow to warm to him, and somewhat cynical about his trustworthiness.

This week's "Watergate" revelations contribute nicely to a picture of a government of mates, cronies and insiders, rorting the system for the big end of town, at the expense of the environment, small farmers and tax revenue.

All adding to the impression that the National Party in government exists in the modern day more to serve its donors than its members or its constituents. Impressions that add on to bad feelings and bad press about rorts on inland rail routing, by the preferencing of mining and oil interests over farmers in NSW and Queensland, by the manner in which National Party policy is in the service of climate denial, by massive fish kills associated with mismanagement of the riverine system, and by the broad existence and noise emanating from the general direction of Barnaby Joyce.

Of course if it were only a mere matter of the National Party being the National Party, sleaze, incompetence, mismanagement and maladministration might not excite more than the usual deploring of the blindness of many in rural constituencies to how their representatives continually split in their faces.

But these are but outliers on a narrative Labor could develop about how the Liberal Party has used its power not to promote a more fair, or more equitable economy, but the interests of major donors and interests. Three prime ministers, economic ministers, seem to have been creatures of banking and finance industry donors. They continually denied that ordinary Australians were being systematically ripped off, then, once denial was impossible, pretended that they were the ones best fitted to supervise the clean-up. The creators of a culture of "light regulation" - made the more certain by depriving the bodies that could have blown the whistle of the investigatory resources to detect abuses.

The scandals in Australian banking did not happen because Liberal ministers were too dumb to realise that their mates, and major party donors, in banking and finances would behave dishonourably if given half a chance. They occurred because forces within the government were actively enabling them.

Mathias Cormann, as finance minister, set out to destroy consumer protections and notions of a fiduciary duty to act in the interests of clients. Josh Frydenberg, in his first very junior ministerial incarnation, was the regulation buster and bonfire maker. Tony Abbott, Joe Hockey, Malcolm Turnbull and Morrison claimed that only they understood business, and created the legal and moral environment to permit all of the abuses to occur. They invoked all of the powers of government, including the reputation of the administration, in attempts to smother and repress screams from the victims and demands for thorough inquiry.

Scott Morrison for one does not care to be reminded of his own vital role in attempting to head off inquiries. Determinably looking ahead, he thinks that his failure to secure the public interest for so long must be forgotten because he ultimately, if reluctantly, gave way to pressure he, and the government, could no longer withstand. To him, the past is the past, and only the future is relevant. The sinner, if he sinned at all (which he denies) is shrived; only the future matters. At one moment insisting that he and the administration were well aware of what was happening, seeing no reason whatever for an inquiry, he has now taken refuge in the claim that he had no idea of the larceny, fraud and bad stewardship occurring.

It is not beyond the wit of Labor strategists to argue that the Coalition's partnership in the major rip-offs by themselves invite and answer questions about its capacity to govern fairly for Australians, and its fitness, even assuming a technical capacity, to be allowed to do so.

But it is far from the only area in which big players and donors in major industries, including the media, have seemed to be able to get ministers to dance to their tune. The astounding thing, from the point of view of some conservatives of a different generation, is about how few even seem to understand basic rules. About conflict of interest. About public interest. About respect for the institutions.

There was a time when Attorneys-General appointed the best people to judicial and quasi-judicial institutions, not people judged firstly for Liberal partisanship. There was a time when former leaders of the Liberal party would know it was unthinkable that the director of the Australian War Memorial would be in the service of a foreign arms manufacturer. When ministers of the government were not involved in complicated offshore tax dodging arrangements. When former ministers did not immediately become lobbyists prostituting their inside knowledge of and access to ministers. There was even a time when senior public servants did not provide cover for such activities.

Most of all, we probably need some villains, and some pyres, merely as a signal that the rules have changed, and as a reminder to all of the folly of serving too loyally the fashions of the moment.

Such cleansings were once taken for granted. When, after a change of government in England 464 years ago, one of those heading to the auto-de-fe remarked to his colleague, "Be of good comfort, Master Ridley, and play the man; we shall this day light such a candle as shall never be put out'.

jwaterfordcanberra@gmail.com