Jonar Nader joins a panel on ‘Sunday Spectrum’ to discuss the function of power, control, and influence. Here are some excerpts from the television program wherein Jonar says that we do not live in a democracy. He also dismisses the maxim that ‘power corrupts’, and says that ‘corruption is powerful’. A transcript of the show is included below.
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Transcript of ABC TV Sunday Spectrum, recorded in Canberra 13 April 2003.
Power. There was a time when we trusted those in power, believing that they knew best and we relied on their judgment. But now the complexity of modern life leaves many confused, anxious and directionless. How can we possibly feel in control of our own lives?
MR PAUL COLLINS: There was a time when we trusted those in power, believing that they knew best and we relied on their judgment. But now the complexity of modern life leaves many confused, anxious and directionless. Today on Sunday Spectrum, we ask – who’s really in charge here?
Hello, I’m Paul Collins. There seems to be an organisation or institution ready to exert power and influence over every aspect of our lives. Our governments have the power and authority to make laws; the Church exerts its influence on our spiritual and moral code. Many believe the media and big business to be the ultimate driver of world affairs. In the face of these powerful bodies, how can we possibly feel in control of our own lives? How can personal power bring its influence to bear on our relationships, our workplace and even on the society in which we live?
In a moment, I’ll be talking through power, control and influence, how it’s acquired, how it’s protected and how it’s used. This morning’s panel – Federal MP Bruce Baird, business consultant Jonar Nader, Anglican bishop George Browning and social researcher Kate Reynolds – but first let’s consider how power and influence is part of our day-to-day lives.
NARRATOR: At the apex of our democracy sits the Parliament, the most powerful body in the land. In principle, the Parliament exercises its power at the behest of the people, yet many Australians are unhappy with how the country is being run.
MR ROBERT CUMMINS: It’s simply that people generally have a low level of satisfaction with institutions in their society.
NARRATOR: Bob Cummins is part of a research team that produce the national well-being index, an indicator of how Australians feel about their lot in life, from public affairs to private relationships.
MR ROBERT CUMMINS: There are a number of aspects of ourselves that lie right at the heartland of how we maintain our well-being, and relationships is one of the major ones. We’re naturally a social animal, and so we need relationships. Most people need at least one good intimate relationship.
NARRATOR: The conclusion – on a personnel level we’re pretty happy overall but feel a sense of powerlessness over the institutions that surround us. For social psychologist Penny Oakes, power can be exerted in two ways, either through influence or coercion.
MS PENNY OAKES: I think power is good. People need to feel that they have some power over their lives. A huge amount of manipulative power goes on, particularly in political systems and business systems involving things like very non-transparent processes of governance, manipulation of the kind of information that we are allowed to share and we are not allowed to share, which really restricts our feeling that we’re making informed decisions about things.
NARRATOR: Of course, power struggles are now just confined to the boardroom or the Cabinet room. Our relationships rely on a shared sense of identity and an understanding of the appropriate use of power, influence and control. Counsellor Mary Pekin deals with relationships in crisis.
MS MARY PEKIN: There’s a power that you exercise over other people that can leave them feeling silenced, diminished, worthless – you know, lots and lots of words like that. Now that power is going to be really unuseful, poisonous to a significant relationship.
MS PENNY OAKES: I think a sense of control over one’s outcomes and what one is able to achieve in any social situation is absolutely crucial. And a state of affairs that people find seriously aversive is not having that sense of control, feeling that their choices and their actions really end up being at the whim of someone else who has power over them rather than a matter of their own choice.
NARRATOR: But how do we determine our own personal power? Where does it come from? And how can we develop it?
MR ROBERT CUMMINS: A sense of self is absolutely essential to our sense of well-being. It’s absolutely at the heartland. If we lose the sense of ourselves, if we lose the sense that we’re important people, that we’re better than most other people – all of these wonderful things that we think about ourselves – then our well-being suffers quite severely.
MS MARY PEKIN: Most of us don’t really get much of a chance to think about our own personal ethics but, if you ask people, mostly we’ve all got our own personal ethics that really determine what the effect of our behaviour will be on other people.
MS PENNY OAKES: I believe very strongly that power, to put it in the simple sense of power, is a very, very positive force. I think it’s vital. We can’t move our lives forward; we can’t achieve the things we need to achieve in life without a sense of power.
MR PAUL COLLINS: I’m going to be begin with a little bit of the Bible this morning. Three of the gospels – Matthew, Mark and Luke – all say that people who heard Jesus “were astonished at his teaching for he taught them as someone who had authority, not like the scribes”. Now, Bishop George Browning, not to suggest for one moment that you’re in any way like the scribes –
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: Thank you very much.
MR PAUL COLLINS: It’s a pleasure. Given that they base their power to teach on their religious and institutional position, is the gospel really making a kind of a distinction between a prophetic Jesus, a guy whose authority comes from himself, and those who merely use their power in an institutional sense?
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: I think a distinction between authority and power is useful. The most obvious contemporary example would be Nelson Mandela, who has authority because he’s been through the fire of imprisonment himself and in his own being he carries authority not just with his own community but with the world. And I think the same applies to the Christian gospel, that Jesus has authority partly because of the quality of his words but more particularly because of his life and what happened to him and the effect that it had upon his followers.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Does this mean that institutional power is a bad thing?
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: No, at some point I might try to push the difference between power and energy because I think that an institution , if it exercises power by sucking it out of other people, then it’s a bad thing. But if an institution uses its power to give energy to those for whom it’s responsible, then it’s not only a good thing but a very necessary thing.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Bruce Baird – I suppose in some ways I immediately have to apologise as I did to the bishop because you’ve exercised power institutionally also. You were Transport Minister for seven years in NSW and you’ve been through the seering process of being a backbencher – they say it’s seering at any rate. How does power work in a democracy? Given the way that government works in Australia, do we actually have a democracy, do you think?
MR BRUCE BAIRD: We do, but very much the power has been centralised into the executive in terms of the parliamentary scene and there’s less and less power to backbenchers, although backbenchers can organise themselves into groups and start a lobbying process. I’ve watched them be very effective and I’ve been part of the one or two that have been successful too. But there are other people who’ve been very effective. If you look at the Allan Jones, the John Laws, newspaper columnists and the lobbyists that we have right across the country – they influence power in various forms and certainly a radio commentator with some profile has far more power than your average parliamentarian.
MR PAUL COLLINS: But in a way though they depend on institutions also. They need the media to be their mouthpiece and certainly lobbyists need the money that’s behind their lobbying. You say they have power, but do they have much influence, do you think?
MR BRUCE BAIRD: They certainly have. If you take somebody such as Allan Jones or John Laws, their statements on various issues can change government policies. I’ve seen it at the State level and I see it at the federal level.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Are pollies really scared of them?
MR BRUCE BAIRD: I think it’s that they can influence public opinion. If you’ve got a very big audience – Allan Jones has got half a million people in Sydney – if you constantly come out with a policy line which is different from the government’s then people say, “How strongly do I want to feel about this and do I want to get back into government?” So I think they choose the latter.
MR PAUL COLLINS: I’ll looking forward to this. He’s giving me ideas. I wonder if I can become the Allan Jones of Sunday morning. Jonar Nader, you have an interesting view of leadership because you kind of see it as a ‘visualisation’, I think that’s the word that you use. That is the leader visualises the future for the organisation. Does that mean that real leaders are busy kind of carving out a new path rather than exercising power over people?
MR JONAR NADER: I need to first define how I see power. My function of power is to generate momentum. Bishop George was talking about energy. But then we get into democracy. I don’t think you can share energy or you can share power because, the moment you do, you dissipate it. So in essence the function of power for me is to generate momentum.
The next step is to understand that the more you share it, the less you have it. So there is a danger with that sense of democracy – in fact, I don’t believe that we do have democracy at all because one minute you say there’s democracy and the next minute you say a radio personality can swing it, which means we have influence.
MR BRUCE BAIRD: ‘Influence’ – he finally doesn’t have the say and also their power is also derived on which of the senior politicians that they can have. If they don’t have the PM, the Leader of the Opposition or the Treasurer, then their own standing falls. So I’ve seen some of the key people trying to ensure they get these people on.
MR JONAR NADER: Back to your question of vision, I liken vision to the notion that it comes from the word “to visualise”. If a leader is expected to not only see in one’s mind where it’s going but to also negotiate with everyone else who doesn’t see where that person is going, you end up slowing down. So for me, power is about propulsion so that you can overcome the obstacles. But it strikes me that in our type of democracy the person who is the most powerful is not the person at the top but the person who can create an obstacle, and usually that could be a small-wing group or a minority group. So you find it’s one little bureaucrat somewhere in council who can say, “No, you can’t build your catholic church or your building or you mosque,” and you go, “Why?” and they’ll slow you down. So for me propulsion is vital and therefore momentum.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: I like that expression because in some ways it’s a spiritual or religious way of looking at things. I actually think creation is imagination. God creates, God imagines – like God imagines human beings and from that comes the energy. I think that leadership in today’s world, from a religious point of view, is to mimic God, is to imagine what is possible and to create that forward momentum as a result.
MR JONAR NADER: That’s why I still maintain that you cannot therefore negotiate that, because the moment you negotiate – I mean, I remember years ago I had to put some lobby in our group to get a roundabout in our community to slow down certain traffic hazards. You wouldn’t believe the ambulance had to have a say, the truckies union had to have a say, the fire brigade – every single group out of the woodworks. It got to the point where, three years later, nothing happened and this is where hesitation leads to destruction.
MR PAUL COLLINS: I really need to come back to you. It seems to me you have a very elitist view of power, but let’s put that on hold for a moment.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: No, he isn’t because he said the ones that actually exercise the most power are the blockers. That’s not elitist.
MR PAUL COLLINS: No, that’s true. You two ought to talk to each other more happen.
MR JONAR NADER: I don’t know why we’re getting on so well.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Kate, you’re caught here with all these talkative men. Do you believe there really is distinction between authority and institutional power? I suppose connected with that is the whole problem of powerlessness, how people experience an impotence really.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: I think this is kind of related to these points and I’ll see if I can get the gender balance right here. You can talk about propulsion and energy but ultimately you need a followership. You can’t just drive forward. Presumably you’re trying to enact change or you’re trying to change a state of affairs – get the roundabout through or whatever it might be – and to do that you need a followership. You need people who are going to come along with you. To get that, I think you need a degree of participation; you need to have influence. Influence is about authority. It’s about people sharing the vision; it’s about people wanting to go with you on the journey; it’s about people with you wanting to enact change; and to do that you need to have a shared sense of connection with these people in power to get that sort of momentum happening. But I agree with you – if you have authority and you have influence, you can achieve quite a lot. But if you rely on command and control, which is how we’d like to define power or the way we do in the work that we’re doing at the Australian National University, if it’s command and control, then you’re not going to have those people willingly join in with you.
MR JONAR NADER: I don’t at all agree with that.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Why don’t you, because this gets to this elitist thing, you see.
MR JONAR NADER: You talk about power and control and I could almost feel a sense of negativity. If I were to interview you, as I have people, and if I say to successful people, “Do you have power?” they hesitate. “Are you successful, George?” We’re somewhat modest about success and power. If I were to say to you…
MR BRUCE BAIRD: It’s a very Australian thing, though. If you asked Americans, they’d have very different views. “I’m fantastic at what I do. I’m the world’s most elite athlete in this area.”
MR JONAR NADER: That’s right. But you talk about command and control in a sense as if it’s a negative thing, as if to say that’s bad. I put it to you that the most important things in life – not necessarily good or bad – the most significant things in our history have come about from people who did not negotiate, who were able to do what they wanted to do.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: When you say ‘influence’, it doesn’t necessarily mean you have to negotiate or you have to spend a lot of time bringing people with you. You can have legitimate authority, which is because you’re in a position of power, and people accept that position – they accept the norms, values and beliefs that you’re espousing in that position of power – people will actually let you, you know, go forward and command and control.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Can I just get in because we want to run our insert piece. But, before we do, I want to ask you this, Bruce, and can you answer it briefly – how do you do what Kate’s talking about? How do you get people on side with you? How do you get them to follow you, to vote for you?
MR BRUCE BAIRD: You’ve got to give them a sense of the vision because just to lay down the law is not enough. They have to have a sense of what’s in it for them; or alternatively what they don’t want to be in it for them – the nimby syndrome.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: Is what’s in it for them the same as a vision?
MR BRUCE BAIRD: Well, it can be. Hopefully you can lift people to beyond that into what’s in it for the community.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Just at this point, I want to look at some specific power relationships, starting with power and influence in the workplace. Let’s hear once again from social psychologist Penny Oakes.
MS PENNY OAKES: The carrot and stick approach, the coercive power approach will always be limited because it leaves the vast majority of people powerless. The increasing tendency for the CEOs of major companies to award themselves massive salaries, which I think by definition cuts them off from their subordinates, makes it impossible for them to be perceived as ‘one of us’ and therefore to exert influence-based power. They almost create a situation in which they have to rely on manipulative coercive power in order to get anything done. It doesn’t surprise me at all that people feel relatively dissatisfied at all with their powerlessness under those circumstances compared to their relative empowerment in closer relationships, which are based on values and not coercion.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Jonar, I’m dying to ask you, and I know that Penny Oakes can’t respond, but do you agree with her?
MR JONAR NADER: No. There is this notion of perceived power – for example, people think that the Queen is powerful or that a minister is powerful. What people don’t realise is that the department that runs the minister, not the minister that runs the department; and it’s not the CEO that runs the company, it’s some other force.
MR PAUL COLLINS: But that’s not true all the time. I know of some very powerful ministers that have bureaucrats quaking in their boots.
MR JONAR NADER: They are the powerful ones.
MR BRUCE BAIRD: I can remember a particular project, a project up to the Parramatta River, and I had all the bureaucrats and boards totally opposed and I called them all together and said, “We’re going to do it regardless.” Now you can travel on the Parramatta River and it’s the Minister who made it happen. So it doesn’t always work but I know what you mean. They’re particularly powerful nevertheless.
MR JONAR NADER: I don’t say the CEOs are powerful. In fact, in essence they have the power to destroy. They might have the power to enact the limits given to them by the board, but in themselves they don’t have power because they are employees – albeit they get $20 million, et cetera.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: I think they play a really important role and it depends on how you think about their role in the institution in terms of shaping what the norms, values and beliefs are that make one organisation distinctive from another. They are there to portray the vision to actually bring people on board to the objectives of a particular organisation or department. I think that is a very important role for them, and they exert a lot of power in terms of the way they can influence an organisation and what it’s going to be about, what defines it.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Jonar, you can get this in because I want to find out how they do it in the Church.
MR JONAR NADER: Interestingly, before the break we were speaking about getting people behind you – and, look, I’m not dictatorial. However, the moment you say, “We need to get people behind me,” you’re admitting you don’t have power because a powerful person doesn’t care who is behind them.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: You’re admitting a very subtle understanding of human behaviour and that you realise that no one individual can actually achieve things – it takes collective action.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Why I’m kind of half going at Jonar is because I actually agree with him. I think when I look at, say, the Roman Catholic Church after the Second Vatican Council, the reason why change has failed is because we tried to get everybody on side.
MR JONAR NADER: Consensus does not work.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Consensus didn’t work. It was an elite that needed to see the vision and run with it.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: Consensus is not the same as legitimate authority.
MR BRUCE BAIRD: It’s also a question of the leadership and whether people identify with that leader, even though they may lay down the law. If they’re seen as being one of them and no sense of hubris – a successful model in Australian politics is those who appear to be just like your ordinary Joe Blow – if you go State or federal, the more removed they are from the average guy in the street, the less chance they’re going to survive. I think that’s also important to mention.
MR PAUL COLLINS: I think George is modelling a kind of humble leadership in here because you haven’t had a chance to get in with these talkative ones. What does leadership in the Church mean? It seems to me that bishops are really in the spotlight – and by that I mean the shooter’s spotlight more than the television spotlight.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: Power is relevant, I think, when it has an effect on your life. If it doesn’t have an effect on your life – with profoundest respect, any power the Pope has or doesn’t have doesn’t affect me because I’m an Anglican, if I could put it that way. I think we need to realise that everybody exercises power.
MR PAUL COLLINS: How?
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: A baby exercises power by crying and trying to influence the parents in terms of the way it’s picked up, put to bed, washed and everything else.
MR JONAR NADER: There’s a question of power and empowerment, and I don’t think anyone can empower you, no more than I can say, “You’re no longer scared of spiders,” in the sense that I can’t decree power upon you. But I think the question is – are we empowered? And I don’t think as a democracy we are. We are not empowered.
MR BRUCE BAIRD: I think an interesting model was the Gandhi approach with this passive resistance to authority where people caught the vision, they had a charismatic leader and they followed just impassively – they were all empowered.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: I would like to come back to what I was trying to say – the most significant power in a person’s life is through their relationships. That is far more significant than an institutional power. I think the reason why the Church is often in the limelight negatively is because it is perceived to interfere in areas of personal relationship by the way in which the priest, the bishop or the lay person actually misuses their opportunity or their privilege in terms of individual lives.
In anybody’s life – their partner, their children, their parents, their friends – the power that is exercised within that circle is far more significant in the end to them than the power of the PM or the bishop. But the Church, in my view, exercises power appropriately when it’s modelled upon the servant model of Jesus. When it actually abandoned servanthood, then it is always – and without exception – using power badly.
MR PAUL COLLINS: We’ve talked a lot about power, but I want to bring up powerlessness.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: I didn’t get a chance to comment about that before.
MR PAUL COLLINS: You didn’t and you’ve written a lot about this. It really seems to me that there are a lot of those blockers – that is, nasty little people who get into organisations and block things happening – and I’ve met a few of them in my time. But there are also people out there and I’m now looking down the barrel of the camera out in the world there who are very angry and feel deeply powerless. What are we to make of all this, Kate? You’ve done all the work on this.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: There are two levels at which you can think about this issue. One is the personal power aspect, and I think there were some notions of that in the introductory piece. When people feel like they’re achieving their goals, we certainly know that that’s linked to well-being. Personal power is very important if people are going to be having healthy, happy lives, I guess.
But personal power is not just about the individual, you can also see it as being about – increasingly people are becoming more influenced by the organisations in which they work, maybe because work is becoming more central to the social networks and social connections that people are having. I think there’s a sense in which people need to be empowered in the organisations and the institutions within society. Perhaps people feel less empowered now than they did previously. And that sense of powerlessness that comes from that can actually lead to disengagement where people are not actively engaged in what’s going on around them.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: But that’s a use of power, isn’t it? Passivity is one of the greatest uses of power that you can actually…
KATE REYNOLDS: If it is a deliberate choice, but quite often powerlessness is forced upon them because they do not have any sort of ways to interact.
BISHOP GEORGE BROWNING: But don’t you think at the end of the day in some respects powerlessness is a misnomer, because you could say that the terrible acts of terrorism that are happening in the world today have come out of a situation in which people have felt powerless or they’ve felt so much pain that they then have reacted in this way and are exercising enormous power.
MS KATE REYNOLDS: And they have to resort to the kinds of powers that are perceived by many to be illegitimate because there is no other vehicle for them.
MR BRUCE BAIRD: You certainly find in the community today a lot of agro people who are very concerned about the councillors not doing something or the State or Federal Government. You meet them at community meetings where they can get very intense because they feel no-one is listening to them, we go on regardless, et cetera. So it’s not uncommon.
MR JONAR NADER: You have a group of people who feel no-one’s listening to them. When I’m teaching in a classroom, if it’s hot or cold and I say, “Should we lose the window?” Half the class says yes and half the class says no, and I always get into trouble. Now I just do what I think I should do and I open it or close it, and no-one says anything. So when you consult, you end up with faction groups and that’s what slows you down.
You know how we say power corrupts – this notion? I don’t believe that power corrupts either. I think certainly corruption is powerful, and that’s why people seem to steer away from power. But in itself it is better to have power than not.
MR PAUL COLLINS: Jonar, you get the last word. That’s our program for today. Thanks again to our panel. I’ll be back again next Sunday. I hope you’ll join me then. Goodbye for now.
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