Tingle, however, has not confined herself to the turmoil in Australia, and nor is she only interested in a reckoning of individual office holders. Her purpose extends to a wider-ranging meditation upon the nature of leadership: ‘It is worth stepping out of the Australian realm for a time to consider what leadership is, and what defines it and confines it.’ It is quite a task. Writers on leadership frequently succumb to the powerful gravitational pull of turning back to individual actors. And neither is it easy to seamlessly navigate between local and international spheres.

The oscillations are evident early as Tingle sketches a troubled picture of contemporary politics and leadership. A core proposition is that there is an unhealthy preoccupation with individual leaders. In political science, terms like ‘personalisation’ are applied to this trend. Tingle tentatively dates the phenomenon in Australia to John Howard’s prime ministership (1996–2007): ‘maybe it was Howard’s ultimate political dominance over his government – the perception that he alone was the master tactician and author of its fate – that helped shift the way governments were reported towards an obsessive focus on the leader’.

The suggestion is symptomatic of a frustrating feature of the essay, namely, that it bypasses the literature in the field. It is well documented that leader-centralising developments, such as the augmentation of executive resources around prime ministers and the shift to presidential-style election campaigns, began much earlier. Howard’s predominance was built on long-established trends.

Tingle signals that Australia and other contemporary democracies are also beset by devilish policy problems (for example: climate change, population movement, a geopolitical world order in flux) and political gridlock. They are conditions ripe for the ‘strongman’: a perennial nightmare figure of liberal democracy. Few could disagree with Tingle’s contention that this is what we are currently witnessing with the proliferation of authoritarian populists who seductively preach black-and-white solutions in the face of complexity and uncertainty and who promise to crash through political paralysis.

Circling back to Australia, Tingle suggests that leadership has also become more challenging because of transformations in political parties and the media. With their bases in long-term decline, the established parties have lost philosophical clarity and a sense of common purpose, rendering them vulnerable to outbreaks of self-destructive indulgence. A disrupted media landscape is not only hyper-paced but fractured and fractious. For leaders, this means they have less effective instruments for building and holding together a broad-based constituency for change. In addition, we live in a milieu denigrating traditional institutions and knowledge. Leaders are left to occupy the void: ‘to move into the moral realm … to define the nature of our culture and national values’. It evokes an observation by the late Australian political psychologist Graham Little three decades ago: ‘[it is] as if politics and its leaders have to fill a space left by God and religion’.

Tingle’s essay is most interesting when reflecting on the type of leadership best suited to guide us through these intractable times. She alights upon a quarter-century-old study by US scholar Ronald Heifetz. He distinguishes leadership from formal, authority-based, top-down prescriptive decision-making. Leadership is about coaxing civil society to engage with complex and contentious issues, to acknowledge and work through differences and to create solutions. It is a process of orchestration and capacity building, with the leader performing the role of enabler. Or, as Tingle explains, Heifetz ‘defines leadership as helping a community embrace change … a leader is the facilitator of a group that has to confront an issue’.

US President Donald J. Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, July 16 2018 (photo by Shealah Craighead)

Plainly, it is a notion of leadership that is the antithesis of the strongman. Donald Trump is not, it follows, the leader we need for these times: his likely legacy is further division and a weakening of democratic institutions. Yet, Tingle seems to suggest, neither was Barack Obama’s approach the solution, since he ultimately shied away from wrangling change. Instead, Tingle looks to Germany’s Angela Merkel and France’s Emmanuel Macron as alternative, if contrasting, leadership types. The former has ‘mastered the art of letting a debate yell itself out until she saw an opportunity, or sensed a need, to intervene’. Macron, on the other hand, tends ‘to lead from the front, the sides and the middle’. He has spoken of a renewal of symbolic politics, of the quest for ‘a new kind of democratic heroism’ and the revival of ‘grand narratives’. Tingle doesn’t quite say it, but perhaps what is required is an elusive harmonisation of Merkel’s unobtrusive, strategic orchestration and Macron’s audacity. The former offers a way to step through complexity and conflict, while the latter may fulfil the yearning of an unsettled public for leadership heroism.

It might have been profitable to develop this theme. For instance, can we also find instructive leadership lessons across the Tasman or in our own history? Instead, a section follows headed ‘Middle Power’. Its gist is that prime ministers are confronted with pervasive and difficult issues in an unstable geopolitical environment and when our relationships with the United States and China are in tension. Moreover, they have to cope with maverick strongmen: a point Tingle illustrates by reproducing in entirety the transcript of the discombobulating phone call between the newly inaugurated Trump and (an admirably composed) Turnbull.

Laura TingleThe essay’s final section is also chiefly Australian-focused. Tingle laments the clichéd endeavours of our leaders to project authenticity. Research shows that it is a quality prized in leaders, but contrived displays of loyalty to a sporting team or addressing journalists as ‘mate’ are not persuasive expressions of it. Establishing authenticity, like leadership as a whole, demands time and space. Yet, Tingle notes, we have a generation of impatient politicians. She benchmarks current and recent leaders against Heifetz’s template to find them mostly wanting. Predictably, the divisive and destructive Abbott comes up worst. But she is too grudging towards Gillard, who, among the prime ministers of the last decade, was the most adept orchestrator of reform.

In her acknowledgments, Tingle declares this ‘the most difficult of my three Quarterly Essays’. One suspects it suffers from a paucity bedevilling politics: a shortage of time and space to address complexity (leadership is a notoriously difficult field). Her appeal for us to rethink our expectations of leaders, and for them, in turn, to recognise that leadership is about empowering others, beginning with opening up the national political conversation, is timely nevertheless.