I had been planning to write a blog piece reflecting on the way that current political discourse was eching “Yes Minister”‘s Jim Hacker: “It’s the people’s will. I am their leader. I must follow them.”
Only the Sydney Morning Herald’s Peter Hartcher not only beat me to it, but cited a much more erudite source for the same sentiment – “It’s the sort of leadership that the 19th-century French democrat Alexandre Auguste Ledru-Rollin described: ”There go the people – I must follow them, for I am their leader.””
In the asylum seeker debate, political leaders are scrambling to follow “the people’s will”, as expressed in its most knee-jerk shape and based on scare campaigns and misinformation. Xenophobia may be widespread in Australian society, but it also tends not to be very deep-rooted. Once it’s brought face-to-face with a three dimensional response, with facts and human beings rather than shadows, it tends to dissolve.
But why bother with that kind of complexity when it is so much easier to pat people on the head and tell them that you understand their anxieties. That kind of leadership is not a way of showing people respect – it’s feeding them bullshit.
2 Comments
Imagine a footy coach who understood leadership as a popularity contest where you follow, not lead. Or a CEO. They’d be sacked in no time.
And the media don’t help with their constant whining as if we are being over run when it is in reality less than 10 people per day compared to the 20,000 other people who come here every day.
And they always whine about policy and forget the law. The law is that under Article 36 of the migration act a person has to be in Australia to seek our protection.
End of the story.