Wish reality was more
IDIDN’T want to watch The West Wing. Not that I knew much about it. Put off by the stirring theme music and overwhelming presence of stars and stripes in the opening credit sequence, I assumed the television show was not for me. Night after night, I stayed working at the kitchen table while my husband retired to the couch.
This was a while ago now, back in the days when bingewatching happened not via Netflix, but by way of box sets rented from Video City. As my husband worked his way through the DVDs, snippets of snappy dialogue drifted in from the living room and I began to find myself hovering in the doorway. Then I was perched on the couch – just on the edge, you understand. Soon, I was the one insisting – at 11.15pm – that we could manage one more episode before bed.
As those of you who’ve seen it will know, Aaron Sorkin’s television series is a Democratic fantasy of life in American politics where an honourable, intellectual president struggles against the vicissitudes of public life with the help of a team of whip-smart, good-hearted and mostly loyal deputies.
My favourite sequence of episodes concerns right-wing lawyer Ainsley Hayes (Emily Procter), who is asked to join the team to ‘speak Republican’ to, and on behalf of, the Democratic staff of the White House. Her presence on the show drives situations in which the left-wing president and his team, and by extension the audience, are forced to examine and refine their beliefs.
The episodes in this sequence dramatise a tendency, in characters on both the right and left of politics, to dismiss their opponents as ‘stupid’ or ‘worthless’. But what enables Ainsley Hayes and the Democrats of The West Wing to respect each other, even in the heat of robust political disagreement, and even though they know there are issues upon which they will never find common ground, is the recognition that they are all intelligent, and worthy. They come to their jobs with a genuine desire to do good work on behalf of the people they serve.
In recent years in Australian politics, there hasn’t been much in the way of either agreement or constructive disagreement between the two major parties. Bickering and fearmongering, on the other hand, have been plentiful.
The result of last weekend’s election was a repudiation of that destructive partisanship and divisiveness. Our new parliament is one of unprecedented diversity, and it includes people – from all sides of politics – with talent, good ideas and true hearts.
How good will it be to have the cool-headed and diplomatic Penny Wong as our Foreign Minister? How awesome is it to see the Indigenous Affairs portfolio held by Wiradjuri woman Linda Burney? How great is it to see the Liberals’ Bridget Archer, who had the guts to defy her party and cross the floor over the rights of trans kids, hold onto her seat of Bass? How exciting is it that Melbourne MP Adam Bandt will now be joined by a team of other Greens on the crossbenches?
If we look at our parliament through this multifocal lens, then perhaps we can say it’s a shame the electoral system didn’t allow us to have both former treasurer Josh Frydenberg and teal newcomer Monique Ryan. Likewise, that electors had to choose between Labor’s Kristina Keneally and incoming independent Dai Le.
Both Frydenberg, who failed to retain his seat, and Keneally, who didn’t manage to snare the one she was parachuted into, strike me as the kind of passionate politicians we would want in a genuinely collaborative and constructive parliament; smart people who could disagree in the service of their country. But alas, in Kooyong and Fowler, as in every electorate, there can be only one.
There’s been a lot of talk in the past week about the potential, in our new parliament, for collaboration and co-operation between MPs of different stripes. While we can and should hope for genuine multi-partisanship, especially on issues like the longoverdue adoption of the Uluru Statement from the Heart and on the mother of all issues – action on climate change – we shouldn’t expect, or even want, a cosy world of everyone agreeing on everything. Disagreement and debate, when done intelligently and well, are critical parts of our political process.
In Sorkin’s The West Wing universe, there’s a place within partisan politics where spirited debate between smart people who disagree leads to better and more nuanced decisions, where scrutiny and challenge prevent the incumbents from sliding into the comfort of unexamined orthodoxies. A constructive opposition isn’t necessarily one that agrees with or supports government policies but might instead strengthen and improve those policies through honourable resistance.
If we can conceive of our parliament as a pool of talent, rather than a scrum of reds and blues with a few greens and greys stuck in the middle of their brawl – or, more importantly, if our elected representatives can conceive of themselves as something nobler than this – then there might just be a lot to look forward to in the 47th parliament of Australia.