A leader takes people where they want to go. A great leader takes people where they don’t necessarily want to go, but ought to be

Former First Lady, Rosalynn Carter

Over the last few years, I have thought long and hard about what leadership means and this quote sums up both my thinking and my frustrations at the current state of politics.

For me, being a leader is not about making the easy decisions that polls and focus groups tell you people want. It’s not about finding populist answers to hot button issues. It’s not about just taking the easy route.

No, a real leader takes people with them, inspires them, and shows them that we can be better than we are. A real leader doesn’t shy away from hard answers because the might not be popular. A real leader, makes their decisions, and states their case for doing so.

The Australian political scene, in 2022, is a desert of leadership. Morrison is more concerned with the perfect PR opportunity than actually being a real leader. Adam Bandt, the leader of the Greens in the House of Representatives, tells a story of suggesting to the PM, shortly after being elected leader of the Liberal Party, that they have a coffee to discuss policies they could work on together. The story goes that the PM’s response was simple bemusement, telling Bandt that he was ‘a transactional PM’, that is if there was nothing in it for him there was simply no point.

This is not leadership.

The electorate in Australia is a funny beast at times. We have a proportional representation system where we, as electors, elect representatives to Parliament, the party (or coalition of parties) with the majority elect their leader who is thusly sworn in as Prime Minister by our head of state, the Govenor-General. This system means we don’t elect out leaders directly, unlike a direct representation presidential model, such as the USA.

That being said, a fair chunk of the electorate believe that they chose the Prime Minister, indirectly. In a way that’s true – election campaigns are about party leaders more than individual candidates, and in a de facto two party system (even if one of those parties are by definition two separate political entities), local candidate’s views get drowned out by the party-central messaging. So it’s easy to see why people believe that we, in effect, elect our PM directly.

But this belies the fact that the Prime Minister serves purely at the pleasure of the governing party. A fact that John Howard knew very acutely, going on record saying just that. And although he never took his mandate from the Australian people lightly, he acknowledged that at any given moment, his tenure as PM was as much about the whims of the party room as the ballot box.

Like him or loathe him, Howard was a leader. He had been ideologically predisposed to a consumption tax for decades and when he became PM in 1996, wasted no time in formulating that ideology into the Goods and Services Tax we are so used to today. Indeed, he took it to the 1998 election and won; even if only through a quirk of our election system where losing the Two-Party Preferred vote meant little if that vote didn’t also play out on an individual seat basis. That the Australian Labor Party could not run a uniformly successful election campaign against the introduction of a new tax is mind-boggling in the current climate.

Since Howard there have been five Prime Ministers. All but one I would not regard as real leaders. The one that had that potential, Julia Gillard, was hamstrung by firstly being female in a political climate where males still dominate and secondly by a media narrative that sought to drag her down at any and every opportunity. The next closest was Malcolm Turnbull who was hamstrung by being a moderate in a political party increasingly being drawn to the right.

The other three (Rudd, Abbott, and Morrison) were all populists and spent more time trying to do what the focus groups and polls were telling them. Again, this is not leadership.

So where is the state of Australian leadership in 2022? Not in a good place.

For one, the current climate (thanks to, in part, a global pandemic) is one of trepidation. Big visions are scary when people can’t see a future. Plus, there is a yearning for getting back to how ‘life used to be’.

Further, business and consumer confidence is at its lowest ebb than I can remember. Such conditions do not lend themselves to a leader who wants to carry people on their shoulders. People want to be told everything will be ok despite an outlook that increasingly blurs when that may be.

Real leadership is in short supply the world over. Joe Biden tried to put forward a big agenda and has gotten nowhere due to the political climate in the US, helped along by forces within his party, the Democrats, pushing their weight around in the Senate. From the outside looking in, this looks to be more in response to a reading of the populace of their representative states and desire to save one’s own bacon. Once again, that is not leadership.

A lot of this is our fault. There is a long held belief that when we elect representatives, they are there to simply represent us; which is in turn misappropriated into meaning representing our beliefs on any given issue. However this is not what elections do.

We elect people and parties based on platforms they put to us as voters during their campaign – whether that be a party message or an individual candidates message. Once that election is over, they have won their seat based on the execution of their campaign. It is therefore not up to them to canvas the public’s opinion on every issue, but to respond to those issues based on the platform they were elected on. If that runs counter to the mainstream view in their electorate, it is then up to them to convince the mainstream why their view was what it was.

And if they are unable to do that, the voters will let them know at the next election.

This is how representative democracy should work.

Let’s see if in 2022 we can get back to that. I won’t hold my breath.