William and Kate to Lead a More Optimistic Government?

By Victor Perton

This week Jason Knauf retired as head of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge's Royal Foundation and said "I've been so proud to support the unique, optimistic leadership of the Duke and Duchess during a period where we've confronted a pandemic, the climate crisis, a seismic shift in our attitudes to mental health, and so much more."

If Australia remains a monarchy, it’s good to see our future King and Queen will be characterised by optimistic leadership.

 Five years ago, mystified by the negative perceptions of Australian leadership in Australia, a group of us founded the Australian Leadership Project.  

 After two years of interviews, we concluded Australia’s leadership from the community to business to government was pretty good. However, we observed that leadership quality is obscured in a fog of pessimism, led by increasing negativity in language and an increasing pessimism bias in the Australian news media.

 Looking at decision-making by Australian governments during COVID, we should be grateful for the relatively low Australian death rate and infection rate.

 However, two years into the pandemic, people are bewildered by the policy-development and procurement practices by governments, state and federal.

 Locking up the world’s number one tennis player, Novak Djokovic, in immigration detention has us bewildered as to why the Victorian Government and the Federal Government could not reach a joint position on his attendance before his well-publicised flight to Australia.

 After enduring the most prolonged lockdown in history, Melbournians are expressing confusion and anger at the inconsistencies of health policy and health orders.

 Why couldn’t Scott Morrison and Dan Andrews pick up the phone and sort out the Djokovic issue without it becoming an international object of ridicule?

 Frustration with government leadership is not unique to Australia.

 Around the world, from Kazakhstan to Sudan to the USA, there is disquiet about the state of the body politic, government and institutions. 

 Despite these challenges, there is an opportunity for renewal and growth as Australia emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic if we can reframe the current narrative to an optimistic, collaborative and care-driven one. 

 The Australian national narrative remains framed in old behaviours: state-federal squabbling over policy and service responsibility, hand-outs supposedly addressing market failures, institutional inertia, and short-run responses to crises.

 Why couldn’t the National Cabinet sort out issues relating to major sporting and business events?

 Established in March 2020, the National Cabinet looked to be a great initiative.  

 Facing the most significant national and global crisis since World War 2, it looked like the heads of government could cut through any inefficiencies of the century-old federal system. 

 However, it has looked weak in the daily circuses of COVID press conferences, with  journalists playing sport by provoking trading of insults and playing up apparent inconsistencies.

 Our recent poll asking Australians about leaders who inspire them had a surprising result: The top-nominated leader was Angela Merkel. Angela Merkel adopted an optimistic mindset seeing opportunity in drawing the old West and East Germany together. On the international platforms of the G8, G20 and the EU, she was brilliant at pulling people together in conversation. She had 16 years in office; in the same period, Australia had 6 Prime Ministers.

 Optimism owes more to mindset, life experience, faith, and family than to politics or economics; it is the fuel that drives people and the foundation upon which leaders build greatness. 

 Building a more optimistic nation or community requires leadership that fosters and generates a mindset for collaboration and harvesting the essence of the community’s optimism.

 Scott Morrison and Anthony Albanese are on record as optimists. Scott Morrison, in particular, talks about Australians as an optimistic people.

 The time of COVID fear and anxiety has to be put behind us.

 It’s time for a shared vision for a future built from an optimistic mindset that reframes challenges as opportunities rather than constraints, which brings people together on the journey and is aligned to new possibilities that are limited only by individual and collective imaginations.

 In short, a future where optimism is the fuel for a better normal.

Victor Perton is the Director of The Centre for Optimism. He served 18 years in the Victorian Parliament; He is a former Victorian Commissioner to the Americas and worked as a Senior Adviser to the Australian G20 presidency.

Read More: Framing a New Optimistic National Narrative by Anand Kulkarni, Robert Masters, Kay Clancy, and Victor Perton