Paul Murray: Failed Voice referendum shows Canberra’s bureaucrats are so incognisant they need to be evicted

West Australians could be forgiven for thinking the Australian Capital Territory is a foreign country or that Canberra is a town populated overwhelmingly by aliens. The results of last weekend’s referendum suit both perceptions. The residents of the capital are so out of step with the rest of the country that their vote on the Voice was the direct opposite of the national ballot that so convincingly rejected Labor’s attempt to rewrite the Constitution. It has been well reported that the Australian Capital Territory’s overall 60.8 per cent Yes vote reversed the national preference which was 60.8 per cent No. That’s only part of the story. In the Federal seat of Canberra — of the three electorates in the ACT, it’s where most public servants live — the vote was 70.3 per cent Yes. It was one of the few Labor-held seats nationally that supported the Labor Government’s proposition. So if the argument, as advanced often on the ABC this week, is that the intelligentsia voted Yes, who is electing Labor governments? One polling place at a primary school in Lyneham, a Canberra suburb created in the late 1950s to house the rapidly-burgeoning influx of public servants, recorded a Yes vote near a national high at 78.96 per cent. Comparatively, a rock-solid Labor seat in WA like Brand — centred around former premier Mark McGowan’s now-vacated seat of Rockingham — voted 69.58 per cent No. At the 2022 Federal election, the seat of Canberra voted 44.88 per cent Labor and 24.69 per cent Greens to give the incoming government’s MP a 72.46 per cent two-party preferred vote. Nationally, Labor polled 32.58 and the Greens 12.25. So the section of Canberra’s suburbs where there is a concentration of public servants is a real watermelon-flavoured bastion of the Left — on the taxpayers’ dime — but never so obviously as last weekend. The other two ACT seats on Canberra’s outskirts went 57.07 and 55.92 Yes. The Left bangs on endlessly about the need for diversity, but in practice doesn’t support it other than within the blinkered confines of its own political prism. Canberra and its public-service class is clearly not reflective of, and therefore not representative of, the nation’s political diversity. Considering the public service advises on national policies and then implements them — including the ones failing Indigenous people that, ironically, created the referendum — its political complexion is important to all of us. Public servants do those vital tasks in the splendid isolation of a city in a sheep paddock, far away from the cares of ordinary Australians, a virtually unsackable workforce immersed in its own group-think. The pinking of Canberra has been paralleled by the politicisation of the public service over recent decades. So how did Canberra get to be like this? Jealousy between Sydney and Melbourne meant that neither could be the national capital after Federation in 1901, so perfectly good farming land in the NSW hinterland was chosen. Australia was governed from Melbourne as the home of the national parliament until May, 1927, but all government departments were eventually centralised in Canberra by the 1950s. So they left the Australian heartland for an isolated cocoon. They formed an artificial city with no real economic purpose other than to enable politicians and public servants. And it shows. Now, approaching 100 years as the host of the national parliament, the territory is a self-governing polity that looks nothing like the rest of the country. And that shows too. For a start, the ACT has the nation’s only Labor-Greens government and has had since 2008. Labor has 10 seats, the Greens six and the Liberals nine in a unicameral parliament established in 1989. Bob Hawke forced self-government on the ACT because he got sick of its continual demands for more money. The ACT Parliament has been formed since 1995 under the controversial Hare-Clark electoral system, a form of proportional representation also used in Tasmania, where it was devised. There, it has led to unstable minority governments and in the ACT it allowed the Greens last election to demand three of the nine Cabinet posts, including Attorney-General. Think Brittany Higgins. On the Federal scene, Labor paints the Greens as a bunch of economy-wrecking ideologues — particularly Prime Minister Anthony Albanese who is under threat by them in his own NSW seat — but in the ACT it embraces them as partners. Labor has been in power for the past 22 years and Chief Minister Andrew Barr has led the ACT government since 2014, progressively taking it to the far left. He is on record saying he “hates” journalists, which is a small manifestation of his disdain for accountability. The Australian’s chief political correspondent, Geoff Chambers, in June wrote that the ACT Government was “out of control” and called on Albanese to intervene. “It has ignored police advice to not decriminalise hard drugs, banned gas from homes, imposed a rent cap, forced pet owners to keep their cats locked up 24 hours a day, installed speed cameras on 40km/h roads in the city centre and claims 100 per cent renewable usage despite drawing the bulk of its energy from the National Electricity Market,” Chambers, a Canberra resident, wrote. “Barr — who slugs Canberra homeowners with massive quarterly rates bills while offering free registration to those who can afford zero-emissions vehicles . . . announced a $442m deficit in a Budget underpinned by a “wellbeing framework”. “In recent weeks, the Labor-Greens government has forced the Catholic-owned Calvary Health Care to hand over its hospital despite operating one of the nation’s most dysfunctional public health systems. “Canberra has become a left-wing paradise under a Labor-Greens government that shirks its primary responsibilities: balancing the books and delivering better health, education, transport and waste services. “Backed by current and former public servants, the Labor-Greens coalition will be confident of another term at next year’s ACT election.” The Left outside the national capital loves the ACT Government as confirmed by its bible, The Guardian, which hails Canberra as Australia’s “most progressive city.” “Because Canberra is a city designed for career growth, Canberrans tend to be better educated, on average, than Australians in other jurisdictions,” The Guardian’s Amy Remeikis reported in June. “But with that growth has come one of the downsides of progressive politics — housing paralysis. “Canberrans, in the aggregate, are more likely to work as full-time professionals and to be paid higher salaries — which they need as living in Australia’s most progressive city doesn’t come cheap. “Nearly one in every 150 residents are (sic) on a waiting list for public housing. Just under 10 per cent of the population are living in poverty, with housing costs one of the major drivers.” However, many people discovered last weekend they were not alone in pushing back against the woke stupidities of modern politics. Jack Waterford is a former editor of The Canberra Times who went to the national capital to study law in 1970 and stayed to carve out a remarkable career in journalism. In 2014, to celebrate the centenary of the naming of the city, he made a speech in Parliament House entitled “Canberra and the Parliament: An Increasingly Uncomfortable Marriage”. Most of it was a paean to a city he loves and a defence of its often-derided residents, but it contained this gem about the hotbed relationship between the media and politicians in Parliament House: “With the business of high government decision-making increasingly transacted by ministerial staff, more often than not communicating electronically, there is less of a need for interchange, even with public servants, let alone representatives of the so-called real world,” he said. “I have long thought that the processes of government would undergo beneficial revolution if both the executive government and the parliamentary press gallery were expelled from this House, given ready access but forced to headquarter themselves elsewhere, out in the real, if apparently still rarefied, air of Canberra.” Hear, hear. Such a decentralised and objectively-separated relationship could be seen as a microcosm of what Canberra’s should be with the rest of the nation. Every time the coalition when in power tries to reform the Federal public service, the most unionised part of the Australian workforce, it has met intense union opposition and retreated. The pandemic proved that in many cases, people who are part of tasked teams no longer need to work cheek-on-jowl in one office. Waterford noted that nearly 20 years ago. Albanese could move much of the public service out of Canberra and into direct contact with those they serve, which would benefit of the nation. But he never will. It would save generations of children from being brought up in a monotheistic ideological ghetto divorced from mainstream Australian attitudes. And it might lead to a public service that reflected the nation instead of incestuously reproducing itself as an aloof, inward-looking elite.