Newly-elected Tasmanian independent MP Andrew Wilkie is basing his quest for power on ethical conduct. There’s nothing new in this. As we have been reminded many times, former prime minister Kevin Rudd promised to address climate change because it is ‘the greatest moral challenge of our generation’. His failure to do this cost him his job and his party majority government.
Wilkie’s point of difference appears to be that he quickly follows his words with action. In 2003 he resigned from his job at the Office of National Assessments and blew the whistle because he believed the Howard Government was deceiving the Australian people. He said it was falsely claiming that intelligence reports supported claims Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction.
Faced with a difficult decision last week, he did not disappoint those who welcome bold principled action. Tony Abbott offered $1 billion to build a new hospital in Hobart, as part of an attempt to gain his support. Instead Wilkie opted for $340 million from Jullia Gillard, which was only enough to renovate the existing hospital. He considered Abbott’s offer an extreme example of pork-barrelling. Gillard’s winning $340 million was much more equitable, as it formed part of a $1.7 billion package spread over a range of hospitals around the country.
Wilkie said afterwards that it was ‘quite intoxicating’ to have been offered that amount of money, but ‘I’m smarter than that. We need to make sure this is not just an instance of pork barrelling.’
Many other politicians would have just taken the money, and indeed Wilkie has some explaining to do to his electorate after turning down a brand new $1 billion hospital. But as we know from the electoral backlash Rudd suffered after retreating from the climate change moral challenge, voters do care about matters of principle. Wilkie has also made it clear that he cares about the treatment of asylum seekers and wants to see an emissions trading scheme, so it’s quite likely we could see action on those fronts.
His role is more that of an agitator rather than a leader. Although the imminent decision of the three country independents could return him to obscurity, it’s just possible that he could prompt Abbott, Gillard and others to adopt a form of leadership that gives all of us ownership of the difficult decisions that face us as a nation. It is in the nature of many Australians to want