“When the facts change I change my mind” – John Maynard
Keynes
The most thoughtful a contemporary Australian politician
gets about trust is conceiving it as doing exactly what you said you would on
the campaign trail. This is doomed to failure for so many reasons. The reason I
want to focus on here is because in opposition you do not have access to all
the facts. You do not have treasury modelling. You do not have ministerial
staff budgets. You do not have anywhere near the access of the government to civil
servants, intellectuals, lobbyists and all the other people that might send you
information. These and their attendant facts will come to you when you are in
government, and you will thus change your mind once you are in government
because you will have all the facts.
Politicians do not respond to this change in their
circumstances with Keynes’ logic—when the facts change I change my mind. Instead,
they continue to prosecute their campaign promises, which they now know to be
incorrect, so that they can do what they said they would. But of course what
they said they would do is wrong, and as their time in office drags on, they
will be reminded of this by the experts and the public will become aware of it
because of those same experts. Politicians will hold the course, terrified of
giving their opponents a chance to yell ‘liar!’ in question time, as though
this matters to citizens.
The result is that politicians end up being incompetent and
reeking of misdirection for reasons that are entirely within their power to
avoid.
If politicians instead told the public how the facts had
changed, explained why this necessitated a change of policy and then introduced
a policy that worked, they would be perceived in the long-run as both
trustworthy and competent.
It is critical to underline here the notion of trustworthiness. A trust worthy
politician is someone who consistently has your best interests in mind, and won’t
deceive you when acting as your agent. Under the facts at time 1, such a person
would, in an earnest and genuine attempt to solve your problems, propose policy
A. Upon receiving the new facts at time 2, they would realise that their
earlier proposal is incorrect from the point of view of your interests. As they
respect your interests, they will then come back to you and explain how the
situation has changed and how under these circumstances some different policy
is the best for you. They will not hide the truth sheepishly, ducking and
weaving from telling it to you straight, as our politicians do. Imagine if your
parent, child, partner, boss or subordinate did this? You would be furious. You
would instead want them to come clean so that you can work together towards a
better outcome. Politicians instead think the public will force choke them for being
the bearer of bad news, as though your average punter behaves like Darth Vader.
This kind of honestly and leadership is completely missing
from contemporary politicians. In part, I think it is because they are
incompetent at governing, being skilled only at politics. They cannot come up
with a good policy at time 1 or time 2. As such, they look around not for a
good policy, but for a policy that they can sell. Spin is built into their
process.
This is exacerbated by the fact that politicians are not
only incompetent at governing, but actively relish politics. Governing bores
them. It takes an act of will on the part of such a person to engage in the
business of governing rather than mere politicking. It is easy for such a
person to excuse their lack of attention to matters of policy by blaming the
fickle winds of politics because in the background is their great love of those
winds, which they themselves fan. Ultimately, politicians (and their cousins in
the media) end up believing that their business is to play and spin rather than
govern.
So it seems the crisis of confidence that we have in
politicians is both a function of their untrustworthiness and their incompetence, and that the first step to solving it is to
become competent. A great place to start would be for the parties to recruit to
their offices people with actual expertise in policy (and perhaps fewer
lawyers). At the very least, have your hacks do your politics and your wonks do
your policy, rather than having only hacks doing both.
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