The ship of state might be better scuttled

There is no special desire for a Labor government, or an Albanese government, though a good many are not particularly afraid of that prospect, particularly given the sacrifices Albanese is prepared to make to get elected. It is getting Morrison that matters. But the aim would not be achieved by yet another party coup or leadership transition, because almost everyone in the Coalition government has become infected with the culture of lawlessness and government by discretion that the Morrison model has involved.

Look, for example, at the willingness of Morrison ministers, and the prime minister's office, to pork barrel and misappropriate public money to Liberal Party purposes at the last election. More significantly, look at the utter lack of shame or contrition demonstrated by any of the Morrison ministers as the rorting has been uncovered by the Auditor-General and others. Look also at the complicity of some of the younger ministers, from the Treasurer, Josh Frydenberg down, reckoned by some as having the honesty, decency and integrity to be future worthy leadership prospects.

As things stand, does anyone honestly expect that Scott Morrison, or any of his ministers or advisers, will be any less predisposed to rort the system by trying to divert taxpayer money to Liberal Party purposes so as to win the next election? If Morrison were to fall under a bus before the next election, does anyone honestly think that any of his possible successors would shrink from the blatant abuses of 2019?

It is quite true that it is difficult to fool the Australian electorate for very long, particularly when one is as blatant and shameless as the Morrison government. Yet the sums of public money such figures have been prepared to divert to partisan purposes - and without a bleat from the formal deeply compromised public administration - raise the prospect of whether an election can be bought - and with the electorate's own money.

It is not a new situation in Australia, although mostly it has arisen at state level, where, however, there are some checks and balances against a complete culture of abuse. Any student of NSW politics would have noticed, for example, that it only takes two or three terms of being in power for a party to become complacent and corrupted, contemptuous of the electorate and the public interest, and, generally operated by vested interests and unaccountable lobbies through the political machine of the party in power. At that point it is best to throw the party in power out, and to put the other party in power.

The new party will not usually have been much reformed by its time in the wilderness - or even by the odd former minister having been jailed for their personal role in the more egregious corruptions of the past. But they will have become somewhat more careful and circumspect, not least because, in NSW at least, the theme of the turnover election will have been the blatant and obvious corruptions of the lot now needing to be tossed out. By the time the new government has become unafraid of public opinion, unconcerned about the public interest, and inclined to think that public goods, money, discretions and jobs are disposable by tender to party machine figures, party donors and cronies of the players, it is time to throw them out again.

Provided there is a fairly regular turnover, the quality of government, if far from perfect is far less corrupt than, say, American government at any level, or Westminster government. This is not because modern Australian politicians are better women or men, or less corruptible to venal purpose than their counterparts in the British or American political class. But our smaller scale makes discovery more likely. For all of the absence of some desirable checks and balances, we have some better-established traditions, not least in restraining complete capture by the lobbies, while in politics. And, at least until recently, some of our checks and balances, including our legal and administrative judiciary, have been more effective than in those jurisdictions.

The development of anti-corruption and integrity bodies in many states, if not at Commonwealth level, has played a role in exposing some of the more blatant rorting. Moreover, the Australian temper is cynical and suspicious of politicians of either side, and that often counteracts the worst excesses of tribalism. Witness, for example, the pleasure NSW voters took in throwing out most of a very shop-soiled Labor administration in 2011. It was business as well as personal, and some of those who deserved to go to jail were actually sent there. But the Berejiklian government is now more affected by its own corruption scandals, and it is not the past but the present which is the biggest obstacle to a Labor return to power.

One can go around almost all of the states to find similar cycles of power gained and power lost, as often as not because politicians became complacent, corrupted by incumbency and the undemocratic mechanisms of party government, including factions, cronyism, branch-stacking, and the abuse of patronage. Or, as someone once put, the tendency to think that one holds one's position freehold, rather than leasehold.

In both sides of politics, relatively faceless machine people - including at federal level over the years, people such as Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese - have considerable power to control pre-selections and advance or cut short careers. Parties are increasingly in the hands of "professional" marketing people, rather than of the grassroots, and the path to power for "suits" of either sex involves working in partisan lobbies, or as ministerial advisers. That may make them more ruthless, less consultative and a lot less in it for an idealistic purpose - "to make a difference" - rather than to accumulate and exercise power. There's more focus on image than on ideals, on slogans rather than policy analysis, on the light in the Captain's Club rather than on the Hill.

It is not in the ordinary business community - among those with whom the coalition normally measures its stocks - that a strong sense of urgency about getting rid of the Morrison government runs strong. Many of these have done well under the Morrison government - and the Turnbull and Abbott governments which preceded it. Even the pandemic has led to an explosion of public cash going into it - and without much in the nature of red tape or accountability. Quite a few in the private sector are as indifferent to complaints about process, about proper controls over spending, about transparency and accountability as many members of the ministry are. If there is any pressure to improve the act, it is about appearances, opinion polls, and the potentially fatal impression of not having a strong control of events, including vaccine supply and the vaccination campaign.

The damage is being done among conventional conservatives, including many moral conservatives, and those who believe rather more in limitations on government than limited government. The Morrison government may portray itself as one which is shedding functions, but it is one which is actually accumulating power, not least over people's lives. It is less and less accountable - even in the courts - for the way that it exercises power. It is less and less concerned about doing things the right way, including the way set down by law and tradition, and more and more concerned with the outcomes. It is much more inclined to the short cut, to dispensing itself from the usual rules, to denying that power must be exercised cautiously and carefully and for the right reasons. At the federal level, power is now more arbitrary and less constrained by rules and law. Ministers and their minders are more closely involved in both the making of policy and in its implementation, and public servants are being excluded from the process. There is open contempt for concepts of conflict of interest, independence of judgment and long established constitutional and financial principles about proper stewardship of money. This week ministers who should have known better were pretending that parliament had vested ministers with the power to do whatever they liked, and that the public could not complain if they had done just that.

It's a nice situation if the primary purpose of political power is to spend money on one's own side and not with regard to any overriding principle or public interest. It's a nice situation if one dispenses with the idea that politics is about the proper stewardship of public resources. It's a nice situation if one is in power, rather than out of power. It's a nice situation if one can use incumbency to stack the deck against the other side.

Alas, experience has shown, in Australia as much as anywhere, that it is a path to tyranny, to personal and sectional corruption, and the transferring of public resources to special interests, mostly those who cannot sustain a case out in the open. An authoritarian and dominating government up for sale to the highest bidder, and showing tenderness and mercy only to its owners. A party virtually unable to be constrained by law both because it has stacked the judicial system, and because it does not write laws that imposes controls. A government which does not hesitate to use its extensive coercive power to force its way. One which, perhaps, may provide fewer services of good government - such as in health, education and policing - but which puts a toll, demands bribes and donations, and imposes uneconomic red tape - on the exercise of power by others. Right now it might suit some interests; down the road the apparent beneficiaries will be the first to claim they have been enslaved.

Those who watch such developments with alarm see the nation becoming as corrupted, uneconomic and inefficient as Queensland under the Bjelke-Petersen government, Western Australia under WA Inc, or in a NSW where, 10 years ago, ministers were handing valuable coal leases to mates and other politicians, and getting kickbacks and bribes for development decisions. Unless controls are re-established, and a new public morality emerges, the seizure and re-distribution of power by the present government will be the instruments of despotism.

It is fear of such outcomes, not pleasant anticipation of Labor in power, that has done much more to create a constituency for a strong and effective - and terrifyingly open - anti-corruption commission. It is the knowledge that the Coalition's plans for a limited, secretive and impotence commission come from an arrogant intention that the commission will constrain no-one while giving a superficial impression of reform and accountability.

In fact most of the proponents of a strong integrity body have little faith that Labor in power will have one. Mark Dreyfus, the shadow attorney-general, now mouths the words about a tough commission, but had no enthusiasm at all for such a project when he was in power. Indeed he denied that corruption was an issue at the Commonwealth level. Nor was he a memorable champion of the sort of human rights which made a difference - including (at a time when Labor had the power) same-sex marriage.

Three decades ago, an early crusader for strong Freedom of Information legislation, Gareth Evans, promised he would have reform legislation before the parliament very quickly. He joked that he wanted to do it before Labor ministers were "got at" by their departmental advisers. He didn't move fast enough, and he was right, and his reform package fell well-short of his promises. In recent federal history, only John Faulkner could be said to have advanced reforms which limited the patronage power of governments and made them more accountable. Typically almost all he achieved has since been undone - whether by starving the watchdogs of funds, by the subversion of a public service hostile to transparency, and by the subversion of the public service by ministers wedded to secretiveness and hostile to any notion of the public having a right to know.

The prime minister has had a miraculous trichological transfiguration, and is commencing a process of attempting to make over an image battered by practical failures during the pandemic, and revelations about his character and style through incidents as diverse as the bushfires, the sexual assault of women and his own creation, robodebt. But it's not a matter of announcements without substance, photo-opportunities or fresh opportunities to show himself as a warm, caring and sharing, empathetic leader. We do need to civilise the coronavirus. But equally urgent - actually more urgent - is the need to civilise government before it's too late.