Building a nation requires the establishment of civil and legal institutions as well as a political culture within which some sort of collective vision of national destiny might be forged. These are the essential prerequisites for nation-building as they provide both the forum and the instruments for the articulation of public policy and the pursuit of policy goals through implementation. In this chapter, I examine those features of Australia’s political culture and institutions that diminish deliberative processes and thereby compromise the capacity of the Australian polity to collectively determine any future nation-building agenda.

Australia’s present political system was formed in the early twentieth century. The formal structure emerged roughly from 1909 when Free Trade and Protectionist parliamentary groups merged. The architecture of executive-administrative power that was then constituted persists to this day. At its establishment, this architecture reflected prevailing political narratives and social cleavages. Socio-economic class was then the dominant political fault-line. Socialism and social liberalism were the dominant narratives. Present Australian cleavages and narratives bear little relation to those of the early twentieth century. Australian society is more differentiated at every level: ethnically, economically and in citizen aspirations. Socio-economic class has ceased to be the only, or indeed — depending on the issue — the primary, determinant of political orientation. There are no comprehensive political narratives. Think of alignments on WorkChoices, climate change, indigenous reconciliation, refugees, same sex marriage, education and a host of other issues. The first theme of this chapter concerns the need to better align the formal structure of politics to a more pluralised social base. The formal system no longer sufficiently engages this base in the national conversation about policy choices and options. But how might this outcome be achieved? What form might an amended structure take?

A second theme concerns the likelihood of change actually happening. Several scenarios can be imagined. Some involve a turn away from the major parties on the part of electors. But another scenario, albeit perhaps more remote, involves action by political elites themselves. They might yet come to see moves down this path as being in their own political interest. The seven policy U-turns of the Howard government from early 2007 provide powerful evidence of the profound gap between the present formal system and the surrounding society. This gap is a threat to any government with an ambitious policy agenda.

The discussion proceeds as follows. The first section discusses the importance of an informed public from the specific perspective of the policy choices that are available to the executive. It also discusses recent changes in the dynamics of opinion formation. This summarises and extends arguments that I have developed at greater length elsewhere (1985, 1995, 2006, 2007, Marsh and Yencken, 2004). A second section reviews three underlying symptoms of ‘dysfunctionality’ in the present formal policy-making structure. Drawing on Australia’s experience pre-1909, the third section discusses the possible form of an amended system. The formal structure of policy-making would be augmented by what Michael Keating has termed a ‘contemplative phase’. In this phase two key tasks would be initiated: on an analytic plane, the issue would be introduced to the public agenda and its broad scope defined; in parallel, on a political plane, the engagement and mobilisation of interests would commence. Neither of these tasks is routinely part of existing processes. A concluding section briefly reviews some scenarios that might be associated with such structural change.