The Political Class

[Túrin Turambar]

There is an election coming up in my home state of Queensland on March 24 which is drawing quite a lot of attention from politics-watchers nation-wide. The highest-profile contest is probably the north-west Brisbane seat of Ashgrove, where conservative leader and Brisbane Lord Mayor Campbell Newman is seeking to defeat sitting Labor member Kate Jones and enter the State Parliament.

I was reading the ABC’s profile of the seat, and it included a little bio of Jones. She studied politics and journalism at university, and went straight after graduation to work as a media advisor for the then Minister for Public Works. She was elected to Parliament in 2006, aged 26, and subsequently became Minister for the Environment and Resource Management.

Her resume is hardly unusual for a politician, which reinforces something which has long been troubling me – the number of politicians today who have no work experience outside politics. The study Arts degrees at universities, join the party at 18 and became active, go on to work as a staffer, advisor or campaign manager, and are rewarded for their dedication by being parachuted into winnable seats before they’re 30. Overwhelmingly they come from middle class backgrounds. And many of those that have had a profession before politics were either lawyers or journalists, both of which are elite fields centred around argument and communication. Those who rise up through the trade union movement are overwhelmingly white-collar professionals with degrees in law or industrial relations rather than the workers the unions ostensibly represent.

I have no reason to doubt Jones’ dedication to public service, but it seems to me that these people would make better leaders in the community if they had more experience living and working in it. In this country, many people have pointed to the federal government’s hotshot 30something advisors as being one of the causes of its policy woes. I can see their point. I suspect that all too often, these people are moulded from the start into a mindset that is adversarial, that puts political skills over administrative ones, and that encourages them to view the rest of society as votes to be shifted through campaigns. They all seem to talk in bland platitudes. Obviously we have moved on from a point where we all had to accept the leadership of the aristocracy and gentry, but do we not have a similar problem now?

[axordil]

Interesting. I wonder if that's a consequence of the parliamentary system? The US has its own issues with political types, not just office holders, but not exactly as you describe.

[Cenedril_Gildinaur]

I've long been of the opinion that our class system isn't rich and poor but government and private. And now, as is common with a late-stage decaying empire, here in the US we have the inevitable third class, the praetorian class.

Rise of the Praetorian Class