Political Amnesia Quotes

“My AFR colleague Phil Coorey sometimes yells out across the office to me: “Oi! Yesteryear correspondent, when did [such and such event] happen?” At some point in the past ten years, I became the veteran staffer who is consulted on “ancient” history.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“I believe that the way the media are losing their memory and no longer providing a reliable contemporary record is more insidiously dangerous for our politics than the attempt by some in the press to become political players.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“Eventually we were all called down, one or two at a time, to Gareth Evans’ office, where he told us how the deal with Kernot had been done over a plunger of coffee. Was it only me who was mortified the next morning to see that same plunger of coffee anecdote spread across every paper in the country? It was the beginning of the formulaic “inside story” (and of course it was later revealed that the story was more complicated than first appeared).”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“In the press gallery, I estimate there have been four or five “generations” of journalists (there is a turnover every two or three years) who do not remember a time when political stories were not framed as leadership stories, or took as their focus how a policy decision would affect the fortunes of the major political parties, rather than giving at least some consideration to whether it is a good or bad policy, and how it might affect voters.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“One long-serving member notes with derision that his leader’s office sends out points for use in the weekly period when MPs make short ninety-second statements in the parliament about electoral matters. The only challenge here is how you, for example, get “We have stopped the boats” into a contribution noting the success of one of your local netball teams in the regional comp.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“I sometimes mention this to staffers and politicians, who invariably don’t know it and cannot fathom that you would pass up an opportunity to pronounce on something, even if you have no idea what you are talking about.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“Yet the quandary is why, when the media have so many hours to fill, and when the platforms on which politicians can speak have multiplied to such a degree, they still argue that it is impossible to get their message out.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“When I ask politicians, and those who congregate around them, why things have become so difficult, the constant culprit named is the “24/7 media cycle.” So often is it cited as the cause of all political evil that it sometimes seems to have ended thought about how political life has changed in other ways. I refuse to believe it is so simple.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“The Victorian Right was at the heart of the 2010 coup. It had brought the factional manouverings to Canberra in an unprecedented way: you executed the person in the same way as usual. It didn’t seem to occur to anyone that the fact he was prime minister made this different to an internal brawl.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“There was no real suggestion in 2010 that policy principle might be at stake, or even policy or political competence. Julia Gillard told us that the government had lost its way. A Labor frontbencher famously summed up the depth of thought that went into it when he said to the ABC’s Chris Uhlmann on the afternoon of the coup, “So, do you think we can win with Julia?” Much later, she and many of her colleagues said it was because Kevin Rudd was out of control. It was about personal hatred and about the polls.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“When Tony Abbott became prime minister in 2013, he announced that he would be a prime minister for indigenous affairs and that responsibility for this area would be moved into the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet. Yet PM&C had no substantial infrastructure for developing or delivering indigenous policy – one of the most difficult areas of public policy. PM&C is a department that specialises in coordinating the work of the rest of the public service, not in running a major area of spending in its own right. To start with the basics, PM&C doesn’t have offices around the country, let alone in remote locations. So it immediately had to assign the delivery of indigenous services to other parts of the bureaucracy.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“The department started a process in which older officials discussed previous episodes with younger ones. Different economic scenarios were war-gamed. This was important, for even by the middle of the first decade of the century, few people were left in Treasury who had experienced the 1990s recession. What’s more, as one official notes, a “belief in government intervention had been largely put beyond the memory of the current generation of politicians.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“A senior public servant notes how the mission statements of departments changed during the 1990s, so that rather than saying something about maximising a particular outcome for the community, they emphasised the implementing of government policy. Ten years earlier, he says, the implicit meaning of the mission statement was that the department’s job was to come up with policies framed around the “national good,” not just the government”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“A new term – “issues management” (meaning a department’s capacity to help its minister kill off an unfavourable news story by 10 a.m.) – appeared on the scene, and was given great emphasis by many ministers.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“A government that was ostensibly trying to find ways to cut back government spending, and completely reimagine how policy would be delivered, was robbed of the very people who could best tell them how to go about this.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“The joke in both Labor and Coalition ranks, before things became so grim they were no longer funny, was that the Abbott government had stolen Labor’s book about mistakes and was systematically going through it, ticking off every disaster.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern

“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.”
― Laura Tingle, Political Amnesia: How We Forgot How to Govern