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Quarterly Essay #60
Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern
Whatever happened to good government? What are the signs of bad government? And can Malcolm Turnbull apply the lessons of the past in a very different world?
In this crisp, profound and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the internet age. Drawing on new interviews with key figures, she shows the long-term harm that has come from undermining the public sector as a repository of ideas and experience. She tracks the damage done when responsibility is "contracted out," and when politicians shut out or abuse their traditional sources of advice.
This essay about the art of government is part defence, part lament. In "Political Amnesia," Laura Tingle examines what has gone wrong with our politics, and how we might put things right.
"There was plenty of speculation about whether Turnbull would repeat his mistakes as Opposition leader in the way he dealt with people. But there has not been quite so much about the more fundamental question of whether the revolving door of the prime ministership has much deeper causes than the personalities in Parliament House. Is the question whether Malcolm Turnbull - and those around him - can learn from history? Or is there a structural reason national politics has become so dysfunctional?"-Laura Tingle, "Political Amnesia"
Laura Tingle is political editor of the "Australian Financial Review." She won the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism in 2004, and Walkley awards in 2005 and 2011. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the John Button Prize for political writing. She appears regularly on Radio National's "Late Night Live" and ABC-TV's "Insiders."
In this crisp, profound and witty essay, Laura Tingle seeks answers to these questions. She ranges from ancient Rome to the demoralised state of the once-great Australian public service, from the jingoism of the past to the tabloid scandals of the internet age. Drawing on new interviews with key figures, she shows the long-term harm that has come from undermining the public sector as a repository of ideas and experience. She tracks the damage done when responsibility is "contracted out," and when politicians shut out or abuse their traditional sources of advice.
This essay about the art of government is part defence, part lament. In "Political Amnesia," Laura Tingle examines what has gone wrong with our politics, and how we might put things right.
"There was plenty of speculation about whether Turnbull would repeat his mistakes as Opposition leader in the way he dealt with people. But there has not been quite so much about the more fundamental question of whether the revolving door of the prime ministership has much deeper causes than the personalities in Parliament House. Is the question whether Malcolm Turnbull - and those around him - can learn from history? Or is there a structural reason national politics has become so dysfunctional?"-Laura Tingle, "Political Amnesia"
Laura Tingle is political editor of the "Australian Financial Review." She won the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism in 2004, and Walkley awards in 2005 and 2011. In 2010 she was shortlisted for the John Button Prize for political writing. She appears regularly on Radio National's "Late Night Live" and ABC-TV's "Insiders."
168 pages, Kindle Edition
First published December 1, 2015
11 people are currently reading
81 people want to read
About the author
Laura Tingle
10 books9 followersLaura Tingle is chief political correspondent for ABC TV’s 7.30. She won the Paul Lyneham Award for Excellence in Press Gallery Journalism in 2004, and Walkley awards in 2005 and 2011. She is the author of Chasing the Future: Recession, Recovery and the New Politics in Australia and four acclaimed Quarterly Essays, Great Expectations, Political Amnesia, Follow the Leader and The High Road.
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Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews
January 16, 2016
5★
“Yesteryear Correspondent!” is the name fellow journalist Phil Coorey calls out to Laura Tingle across their office at The Australian Financial Review, and with good reason.
Tingle started reporting politics in 1980 and says “All that has happened in the following thirty-five years has shaped the way I see politics. Sometimes you realise with a rude shock that all the stuff you carry around every day in your head isn’t in everyone else’s head.”
I remember her telling the story, (included in this essay), on ABC’s Insiders panel program that before a 2012 radio interview she’d been warned not to presume her audience had much political memory . . . for example they might not know who Paul Keating was. Shock, horror! But people under 30 had no adult memory of him.
Her essay is not about the absence of the public’s memory, it’s about the loss of Parliament’s and the public service’s. The Australian Public Service (APS) used to serve the nation as the backbone of research and policy formation and support for the ministers of the day. And it still should.
In recent times, however, successive governments have tended to shuffle departments and weed out senior bureaucrats they thought weren’t sympathetic to their shade of politics and replace them with tamer workers.
This has resulted in a dreadful loss of irreplaceable institutional memory, loss of continuity, loss of experience. Hence, people come up with whizz-bang ideas of reform that were actually tried in the recent past but everybody in the department forgot about it.
In one of the first pages, she comments on a 2012 “emergency childcare summit” during the Gillard government where someone proposed funding childcare providers instead of parents. For the next 24 hours, the media was full of discussion, and the author said:
“I watched on, puzzled. ‘Am I the only person,’ I asked a senior public servant, ‘who remembers that this is the way child care used to be funded?’ ‘Probably,’ was his sardonic reply.’"
She quotes philosopher George Santayana who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But that’s not the whole quote. What he said was, and note how apt it is right now with politicians' distrust of the public service:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
In Australian politics, infancy has been perpetual for a while now . . . too long. Another saying I like myself is “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” No idea who said it.
Great essay!
“Yesteryear Correspondent!” is the name fellow journalist Phil Coorey calls out to Laura Tingle across their office at The Australian Financial Review, and with good reason.
Tingle started reporting politics in 1980 and says “All that has happened in the following thirty-five years has shaped the way I see politics. Sometimes you realise with a rude shock that all the stuff you carry around every day in your head isn’t in everyone else’s head.”
I remember her telling the story, (included in this essay), on ABC’s Insiders panel program that before a 2012 radio interview she’d been warned not to presume her audience had much political memory . . . for example they might not know who Paul Keating was. Shock, horror! But people under 30 had no adult memory of him.
Her essay is not about the absence of the public’s memory, it’s about the loss of Parliament’s and the public service’s. The Australian Public Service (APS) used to serve the nation as the backbone of research and policy formation and support for the ministers of the day. And it still should.
In recent times, however, successive governments have tended to shuffle departments and weed out senior bureaucrats they thought weren’t sympathetic to their shade of politics and replace them with tamer workers.
This has resulted in a dreadful loss of irreplaceable institutional memory, loss of continuity, loss of experience. Hence, people come up with whizz-bang ideas of reform that were actually tried in the recent past but everybody in the department forgot about it.
In one of the first pages, she comments on a 2012 “emergency childcare summit” during the Gillard government where someone proposed funding childcare providers instead of parents. For the next 24 hours, the media was full of discussion, and the author said:
“I watched on, puzzled. ‘Am I the only person,’ I asked a senior public servant, ‘who remembers that this is the way child care used to be funded?’ ‘Probably,’ was his sardonic reply.’"
She quotes philosopher George Santayana who famously said, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
But that’s not the whole quote. What he said was, and note how apt it is right now with politicians' distrust of the public service:
“Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.”
In Australian politics, infancy has been perpetual for a while now . . . too long. Another saying I like myself is “If you don’t know where you’re going, how will you know when you get there?” No idea who said it.
Great essay!
March 1, 2020
The essay describes changes over recent decades that have weakened our political institutions - the rise in the power of often young and inexperienced political staffers, the lack of respect by politicians for the public service, the hollowing out of the public service, the disappearance of in-depth political and policy analysis, the focus on immediate concerns like leadership tensions rather than important policy issues, and the loss of knowledge and context from learning from history. Written in 2017, Tingle sees potential hope for improvement with the ascension of Turnbull to the prime ministership. What would she say now?
August 29, 2019
Laura Tingle again provides an excellent insight into why politics in Australia is where it's at. Her essay explains how changes to the structure and responsibilities of the public service, as well as the new media landscape, has led to a loss of institutional memory in public policy circles. Another essential essay for anyone seeking to better understand the Australian policy/political landscape.
December 27, 2015
In Political Amnesia, Tingle traces how Australian politics lost its "institutional memory" and the effects that this has had on good government. Tingle focuses mainly on the devastation caused by disastrous decisions made by successive federal governments over the past few decades that have had the effect of obliterating corporate memory from the public service - to such an extent, that the public sector no longer has the content expertise to formulate good policy and to provide timely and wise advice to its political masters.
In addition to considering the public service, Tingle also outlines the related changes that have occurred in the way executive government and the press gallery functions - both also affected by the loss of institutional memory.
From my perspective as a retired public servant, Tingle's analysis is spot on. Indeed many of the aspects Tingle writes about, I observed first hand, albeit in a different public service.
This essay is an important contribution to the debate on what needs to be done to create a better politics in Australia - a politics that currently only considers the immediate present, and knows little of those good (and bad) policies and practices of the past. Tingle concludes: "It is time to start learning to remember."
In addition to considering the public service, Tingle also outlines the related changes that have occurred in the way executive government and the press gallery functions - both also affected by the loss of institutional memory.
From my perspective as a retired public servant, Tingle's analysis is spot on. Indeed many of the aspects Tingle writes about, I observed first hand, albeit in a different public service.
This essay is an important contribution to the debate on what needs to be done to create a better politics in Australia - a politics that currently only considers the immediate present, and knows little of those good (and bad) policies and practices of the past. Tingle concludes: "It is time to start learning to remember."
February 21, 2017
Laura Tingle writes a trenchant essay critiquing modern politics and decries the loss of institutional memory which has created a situation where failed solutions to policy problems continue to be tried because our politicians do not learn from the past.
Tingle identifies the Public Service as the body that fulfilled this role in the past. The politicisation of the public service has neutered it as a source of policy advice. Tingle identifies a number of factors here: Ministers relying on outside political advisers instead of public servants, supposedly independent department heads being fired for being cosnidered insufficiently loyal to the government, and the perception that working in policy development is detrimental to a public servant's career.
What Tingle misses, I think, is the blleeding obvious. Political parties repeatedly try failed policies because of ideology, not forgetfulness; they cannot admit that their own ideas failed in the past, and insist that the only problem is one of communication, not that their solution is unworkable.
Tingle identifies the Public Service as the body that fulfilled this role in the past. The politicisation of the public service has neutered it as a source of policy advice. Tingle identifies a number of factors here: Ministers relying on outside political advisers instead of public servants, supposedly independent department heads being fired for being cosnidered insufficiently loyal to the government, and the perception that working in policy development is detrimental to a public servant's career.
What Tingle misses, I think, is the blleeding obvious. Political parties repeatedly try failed policies because of ideology, not forgetfulness; they cannot admit that their own ideas failed in the past, and insist that the only problem is one of communication, not that their solution is unworkable.
February 5, 2019
Important reading for anyone with a more than a passing interest in Australian politics.
Tingle shows how the gradual de-fanging and disparaging ('cut the red tape' etc) of the public service has led to a loss of the most senior and capable bureaucrats, and deterred promising young talent.
The loss of these bureaucrats has, Tingle argues, led to a loss of collective memory of what policies work, which fail, and why. Since Howard policy making has been torn from the service, previously a bastion of apolitical research and rigour, and moved into the partisan and near-sighted executive.
Tingle argues with this loss comes political amnesia, and the litany of recent policy failures on both sides of government.
Tingle shows how the gradual de-fanging and disparaging ('cut the red tape' etc) of the public service has led to a loss of the most senior and capable bureaucrats, and deterred promising young talent.
The loss of these bureaucrats has, Tingle argues, led to a loss of collective memory of what policies work, which fail, and why. Since Howard policy making has been torn from the service, previously a bastion of apolitical research and rigour, and moved into the partisan and near-sighted executive.
Tingle argues with this loss comes political amnesia, and the litany of recent policy failures on both sides of government.
December 31, 2016
Interestingly dated, having being written at the beginning of Malcolm Turnbull's leadership. A short, but satisfying, institutional analysis on the decay of continuity in Australian politics as a result of a traumatised public service, insatiable media and a move toward executive government.
Despite the cliche that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", it really made me feel the need to read in order to better understand my identity as an Australian, a teacher and a young person who hopes to, in a small way, shape the future.
Despite the cliche that "those who forget history are doomed to repeat it", it really made me feel the need to read in order to better understand my identity as an Australian, a teacher and a young person who hopes to, in a small way, shape the future.
November 26, 2016
"History and memory are potent weapons..."
The key message of the essay is that institutional memories of public institutions are being lost - to the public's detriment. This is due to the political tendency to replace public servants with each successive government, to privatisation, and to a general trend towards Small Goverment.
I do not recall the details of the essay, partly because my memory is not that great and partly because I am only making notes five months after reading it. But the conclusion I came to waa that our politicial system should try to respect and understand institutional history before rashly making changes that look good upfront but have unintended consequences down the track.
The key message of the essay is that institutional memories of public institutions are being lost - to the public's detriment. This is due to the political tendency to replace public servants with each successive government, to privatisation, and to a general trend towards Small Goverment.
I do not recall the details of the essay, partly because my memory is not that great and partly because I am only making notes five months after reading it. But the conclusion I came to waa that our politicial system should try to respect and understand institutional history before rashly making changes that look good upfront but have unintended consequences down the track.
June 23, 2020
Really good essay on governance and Australian politics, including the public bureaucracy and the role of the media. Interesting comments on the cross bench (who have to quickly develop an detailed understanding of various policy issues). Jacquie Lambie and Ricky Muir among other independents and minor parties tend to be pretty capable and hard workers in Parliament, in my opinion (even without a political background to prepare them). Also an interesting comment on institutional memory (including in bureaucracy or in Parliament). You want to get some turnover to bring in fresh ideas, but you should also want to retain members who remembered the old debates. Probably in my top 5 Quarterly Essays so far (reading in order).
April 24, 2025
A bit dated now but a fascinating look at the failures of Australian political system and consequences of hollowing out the public service.
December 13, 2015
Everyone agrees that Australian politics has a problem, but beyond some widespread but superficial claims ("it's all the media's fault/every politician is hopeless") there is little consensus on the cause. In 'Political Amnesia: How we forgot how to govern', Laura Tingle points to the role of memory, and in particular the public service as the residence of institutional memory for governance in Australia.
This is a compelling argument, given how damaged the public service has been, and yet how central it remains to the development, promotion and execution of policy today. Though the public service has been hardest hit, Tingle traces the thread of memory through other key areas as well, our politicians mentor less, our media know less, and the public, well many have given up even trying to follow along. Every part of our political landscape is thus engaged, not for the sake of blame but showing a collective failure to recall and play their necessary role.
At the heart of Tingle's argument is an attempt to draw the link between the harm done to the public service with the move to an open economy. Instead of service delivery, we have contracts and contractors, in a service required to undertake generalised, transactional management instead of developing long term policy expertise.
While I agree these factors have gone together in the Australia experience, I don't think the link is automatic (a question Tingle doesn't really address). Neo-liberal change may have harmed our public services' capacity and recall, but a small government can still be a deeply experienced one. Indeed, Tingle highlights the experience of the Chifley and Menzies years as highlights, periods when major departments had staff in the mere hundreds (Defence had just 57 staff in 1938 for instance). It may even be easier to keep high quality staff over a longer period in a small department. Getting 100 issue experts to manage a policy area is easy, getting 17'000 (as Defence has today) is simply impossible.
Instead, the problem is less the ideology of the change, and more the manner of its implementation. Some of the disruption was inevitable, but too much of it was mindless. A rush to change and rewarding of ideological cohorts led to massive waste and upheaval. For all that the Howard years today has a reputation for quality of governance, the experience of those in Canberra for most of their term was of a gang who couldn't shoot straight. Still, Australia's experience is at least better than that faced by the US, where the old joke was that that Reagan and co 'believed government didn't worked and set out to prove it'.
Overall, this Quarterly Essay is an important contribution, and as always, finely written by one of Australia's master journalists. If you're interested in Australian politics, this is one of the important reads of 2015.
This is a compelling argument, given how damaged the public service has been, and yet how central it remains to the development, promotion and execution of policy today. Though the public service has been hardest hit, Tingle traces the thread of memory through other key areas as well, our politicians mentor less, our media know less, and the public, well many have given up even trying to follow along. Every part of our political landscape is thus engaged, not for the sake of blame but showing a collective failure to recall and play their necessary role.
At the heart of Tingle's argument is an attempt to draw the link between the harm done to the public service with the move to an open economy. Instead of service delivery, we have contracts and contractors, in a service required to undertake generalised, transactional management instead of developing long term policy expertise.
While I agree these factors have gone together in the Australia experience, I don't think the link is automatic (a question Tingle doesn't really address). Neo-liberal change may have harmed our public services' capacity and recall, but a small government can still be a deeply experienced one. Indeed, Tingle highlights the experience of the Chifley and Menzies years as highlights, periods when major departments had staff in the mere hundreds (Defence had just 57 staff in 1938 for instance). It may even be easier to keep high quality staff over a longer period in a small department. Getting 100 issue experts to manage a policy area is easy, getting 17'000 (as Defence has today) is simply impossible.
Instead, the problem is less the ideology of the change, and more the manner of its implementation. Some of the disruption was inevitable, but too much of it was mindless. A rush to change and rewarding of ideological cohorts led to massive waste and upheaval. For all that the Howard years today has a reputation for quality of governance, the experience of those in Canberra for most of their term was of a gang who couldn't shoot straight. Still, Australia's experience is at least better than that faced by the US, where the old joke was that that Reagan and co 'believed government didn't worked and set out to prove it'.
Overall, this Quarterly Essay is an important contribution, and as always, finely written by one of Australia's master journalists. If you're interested in Australian politics, this is one of the important reads of 2015.
December 9, 2015
‘Political Amnesia’ is ‘The Book of Laughter and Forgetting’ by Milan Kundera - turned into an Australian political essay. The novel contains a section in which one character is stranded inhabited only by children who combine both innocence and cruelty. It is a satire on the old Communist regime’s intense veneration of ‘youth’ and enforced orientation towards the future while erasing ‘useless’ past experience. All authoritarian regimes, Kundera concludes, prefer their citizens to be perpetual children. Because a child is all future and no past, something that even the gerontocrats of late Communism still found useful.
Laura Tingle’s essay on policy development and institutional memory in the Australian Public Service might seem a world away from magical realism - however her point is that the environment of the public sector after over thirty years of enforced ‘responsiveness’, outsourcing, privatisation, consulting contracts, professionalised senior executive services etc is that of a perpetual present. Politicians never seem to ‘learn’ from their predecessors, because there is often no-one around to tell them. Instead their governing advice comes from deeply inexperienced (and often very young) policy advisors in Ministerial offices. We have dispensed with Sir Humphrey Appleby of ‘Yes Minister’, but replaced him Malcolm Tucker from ‘The Thick of it’. Policy success is now supposed to be achieved by sheer, aggressive will - the ultimate in magical thinking.
Laura Tingle’s essay on policy development and institutional memory in the Australian Public Service might seem a world away from magical realism - however her point is that the environment of the public sector after over thirty years of enforced ‘responsiveness’, outsourcing, privatisation, consulting contracts, professionalised senior executive services etc is that of a perpetual present. Politicians never seem to ‘learn’ from their predecessors, because there is often no-one around to tell them. Instead their governing advice comes from deeply inexperienced (and often very young) policy advisors in Ministerial offices. We have dispensed with Sir Humphrey Appleby of ‘Yes Minister’, but replaced him Malcolm Tucker from ‘The Thick of it’. Policy success is now supposed to be achieved by sheer, aggressive will - the ultimate in magical thinking.
January 23, 2016
Tingle is one of the few genuine political journalists in Australia and anything she writes on Australian politics deserves to be taken seriously. Her essay is a very good recounting of some of what's wrong with the Australian political system, but it is long on symptoms and short on suggesting causes, still less solutions. I would like to see, in addition to what is in the essay, research on similar problems in other western democracies, and a discussion on whether those problems are (as I suspect) local eruptions with the same pathology. Similarly, some discussion of the thoughts of modern political theorists would perhaps shed some light on what is happening in Australia. I'm thinking especially of Fukuyama on trust and political order (and not so much the stuff on neoconservatism) and Judt on post WW2 Europe.
March 22, 2016
The premise behind this Quarterly Essay was good - a major part of the problem in how Australia is being governed is due to the erosion of the performance, capability and memory of the public service. But the essay is very uneven - parts were good, then circular, then a bit of a filler and back to being good.
February 5, 2016
While a compelling argument in favour of reforming many aspects of our system, it remains too cerebral to excite the emotions for what will be an arduous (even Sisyphean) task, and provides very little in the way of suggestions as to how the work might be accomplished. It's fine as far as it goes, but even as a diagnosis, it doesn't go far enough.
August 13, 2016
For our democracy to survive the public needs to realise true value from 'our' elected representatives and the public service that is there to support them. Articles and books such as Tingle's must be read and understood otherwise the continued output of poor public policy will lead to greater cynicism and attacks on democratic institutions.
February 5, 2016
As always LaTingle delivers! Malcolm Turnbull would do well to read this QE - very good advice about institutional memory in the Public Service
April 14, 2016
Very interesting. Thought provoking.
December 30, 2015
Excellent article. Should be compulsory reading for everyone of or near to voting age.
Displaying 1 - 19 of 19 reviews