There’s a bit of journalistic grumbling nostalgia that the newly elected Labor government isn’t playing by what they’d like to think are the rules of the game: the norm that says a change of government resets the clock and a defeated government can be safely forgotten.
Maybe. Or maybe Australian reporting needs less grumbling, more game theory, where Prime Minister Anthony Albanese plays the optimal tit-for-tat strategy in the prisoner’s dilemma.
Last week the Albanese government revealed the “tit”, with two big inquiries, one into robodebt and another into Scott Morrison’s self-appointment to multiple ministries.
Shocked, all of Australia’s big opinionistas leaned in, took a big bite and chewed it over: “Labor must focus on voters, not hounding Morrison,” declaimed the AFR’s Phil Coorey; “political brutalism”, huffed Ten’s Waleed Aly in the Nine mastheads; “a double-edged sword”, cautioned The Australian’s Paul Kelly.
But Albanese isn’t playing by new rules. He’s playing by Tony Abbott’s rules, the ones he set with much less justifiable inquiries into the Rudd-Gillard governments with royal commissions into the pink batts and then trade unions (which functioned as a continued persecution of Gillard‘s 1990s legal work.)
Although our humanities-trained media prefer politics as (preferably dark) arts, sometimes a bit of science can help explain our two-party political systems. Game theory, with its abstruse mathematics, claims to explain what’s going on as it identifies best possible (or least worst) outcomes in strategic competition.
The prisoner’s dilemma is politics by analogy: two prisoners held in separate rooms, not knowing what the other is up to, each with two options: stick solid (“cooperate”) and both go free or rat (“defect”) with the first rat getting reduced time.
In place of prisoners, the century-long strategic competition between Labor and the non-Labor parties has prime ministers and opposition leaders, who play the game of changing governments over and over restrained by norms as much as laws.
In 2013, Abbott’s royal commissions marked a “defection” from the norm of leaving the pre-election past well alone. Seemed cost-free at the time, although it failed to deliver much political benefit.
Game theory suggests the best option for Labor in the next iteration (that is, now) is to put a cost on that 2013 norm-breaking by matching defection with defection, technically known as tit-for-tat.
Counterintuitive to what we understand of politics as a race to the bottom, it’s more likely to restore the equilibrium of the cooperation norm than a turn-the-other-cheek reward of defection with cooperation. Maybe. Or maybe the next prime minister will tit-for-tat in turn and make the Abbott defection the new norm.
Meanwhile, the Albanese government is facing its own post-tit-for-tat iteration over another Abbott-fractured norm: what’s the price for the breach of preelection commitments? Once it was a venial sin, forgiven with a nod to Howard’s “core and non-core” sophism and a chant of Keynes’ (alleged): “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”
The former seminarian Abbott made the once-venial into a mortal sin, wielding the sword of integrity to misrepresent an election best-guess (“There will be no carbon tax under a government I lead”) to a “lie”. Egged on by the increasing right-wing (and climate-denying) slide of News Corp media, Australia’s political reporters followed, making it truly mortal for the Labor government at the following election.
Within a year, Labor got its tit-for-tat when Abbott’s “no cuts” preelection promise turned to “lies” as they crashed into the 2014 budget. It ended the careers of both Abbott and his treasurer, Joe Hockey.
The game theory lens helps explain Labor’s nervousness about the Liberal’s third round of tax cuts. Have the promise/lie fights restored the “rigidity makes bad politics” norm? Or in a more integrity-conscious world, has “broken-promises are lies” become the new norm where defection will exact a similar political cost as last time?
Sometimes you choose your game. Sometimes the game chooses you. Right now, our conflict-addicted media (and over-eager culture warriors) are trying to set up the government and opposition in a game of chicken over the referendum on an Indigenous Voice to Parliament.
So far, Albanese and Dutton have avoided the trap, talking up consensus and consultation (particularly with Indigenous communities). But the media’s “Fight! Fight!” chant to the players, along with the power of right-wing media within Dutton’s backbench, suggests we’ll soon find out how he’s going to face the latest political games.
