In 1758, the Sultan of Yogyakarta, a man with power, money, and more or less everything, decided to build a beautiful water palace for his many concubines. Today only the central bathing complex remains standing, but at one time it consisted of artificial lakes, islands, and tunnels linking resplendent gardens and pavilions. It was more beautiful than anyone could have imagined. The only thing wrong was the height of the doors in the royal apartments: it had lintels too low to walk through while standing.
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The story goes the monarch wanted to remind everybody - even himself - to be humble. Anybody who wanted to enter needed to bow, otherwise they'd slam their head.
It's a story that might usefully be remembered the next time anyone decides to modify Parliament House. It's worthwhile recognising that even the greatest politicians are capable of mistakes.
A similar problem surrounds "vocational awe". This is the idea that individuals (and structures, like the Defence Force) somehow automatically embody the ideas, values and assumptions they claim to hold. Just because government is necessary and (sometimes) effective doesn't mean it's inherently good or beyond critique.
With every step up the promotion ladder people become more and more divorced from reality; more and more trapped into a world of formulation. The causal shorthand of broad concepts morphs until it becomes accepted as an explanation of the way the world works. It then becomes a surprise when things go wrong, even though exactly the same thing happened last time.
Take raising interest rates. We know these hit the poor hardest and yet, devoid of any other levers, institutions continue using these as a means of regulating the economy.
We know these don't work yet instead of a broader discussion about how things could be done differently, we distract ourselves by examining each new bit of economic data as if it might somehow reveal success.
We'd be better served by consulting crystal-gazing clairvoyants. At least then nobody would be surprised when predictions don't come true. We'd also be spared the litany of excuses explaining why models really do work, even though they never do. We need to look for ways to make things better: not dig in and justify the failed ideas of the past.
Peter Dutton proposed allowing people to engage in a few hours work without it affecting benefits. Treasurer Jim Chalmers couldn't bear to admit the Opposition Leader might have inadvertently tumbled across a good idea, but watching him scrabbling round for excuses was pathetic. His attacks simply served to show the way we do things at the moment can be improved.
We get through life by making assumptions rather than thinking. We take it for granted, for example, that school is useful because children "learn" things. That's not what it's really about. Education is instead a deep process of unconscious indoctrination - both good and bad. The point is to understand what's going on. This is increasingly important now that children are beginning childcare so early.
This certainly ensures some children will be better cared for, but the point is it is, effectively, a huge social experiment. We don't yet know how it will turn out. Children in Finland for example are, famously, happier and better learners yet they've entered the formal education system much older than in Australia.
You'd never know this from listening to the discussion about the need to improve our system here. Instead talking points stress improvements that replicate the same strategies that have consistently failed to engage students' imaginations in the past. More time in school, more exams, more rote learning. Back to basics. These sound bites resonate deeply in focus groups - but they're not prescriptions for changing society for the better.
Unfortunately we're not tackling these bigger questions. Society has a great, gaping hole at the centre, where these sorts of issues should be being debated in a way that's free of cant and instead genuinely embraces new alternatives and new ways of doing things. Unfortunately, in the past two decades of writing this column, there's been absolutely no indication that we are prepared to engage in this new approach to pervasive problems.
Things are instead getting worse.
According to CoreLogic research, during this period wages have increased by almost 82 per cent. Which sounds fantastic, until you realise that in the same timeframe the cost of a house has increased by more than 193 per cent.
The government insists we need more immigrants to provide the workforce to care for an ageing country. It fails to explain where such workers will live or who will care for them as they grow older. Nobody bothers to address these big questions because everybody is too busy focusing on resolving their tiny part of the puzzle, even if they implicitly understand that doing this will increase the pressures elsewhere.
Take the government's atrocious bankrolling of carbon capture and storage projects - a panacea technology that, quite simply, doesn't work. Translating the process from theory to the real world has proved impossible, yet Anthony Albanese is one of its biggest boosters for a good reason.
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By pretending it might work, somehow, sometime in the future, he gives himself an out that allows the development of more coal. This allows the government to ignore the impending climate crisis that's almost upon us as the climate changes irrevocably.
It's the job of columnists to look beyond the immediate imperatives and attempt to look slightly further down the track. To examine alternatives that don't come from the gallery of political templates but consider other possibilities that might allow us to escape the trap of repeating the past, over and over again.
Unfortunately, if that's the case and judging from the present political debate, this column's existence has been a complete failure. Instead of moving to a more civilised conversation where ideas are valued for what they are, we seem perpetually mired in a place where everything is analysed according to the dogma it advances or who's advancing it.
Maybe my last column can change all that. It seems worth a try.
- This is one of Nic Stuart's last regular columns for this paper. He is the editor of ability.news