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Voters punish those who tell the whole truth

By Graham Young - posted Tuesday, 27 May 2014


Like the last, this parliament looks as though it will be obsessed by who lied, and didn't, and just what constitutes a lie.

It's not an obsession that most electors hold.

As the old joke goes – "How do you know when a politician is lying?" "Their lips are moving". We expect our politicians to lie, and we don't generally accept it as being a meaningful distinction between politicians of different stripes, unless we are partisans.

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We distinguish on the basis of other factors. Do they care? Are they effective? Do they give me what I want?

John Howard understood this.

When charged with lying by Mark Latham on the basis of his words he pivoted to performance and contrasted lying with trust: "Who do you trust to keep the economy strong, and protect family living standards? Who do you trust to keep interest rates low?"

There is something ritual and unavoidable about the political lie. In a mad world, only the made are sane, and in a world of illusion where people want to believe a lie, only a mad, or foolhardy, person would tell the truth.

Not that most of what happens in politics is dishonest, but election campaigns, are particularly prone to the salesman's wishful thinking.

Sometimes the pitch just shades the truth, "paltering with us in a double sense" and burying the facts in the fine print. Or it directs attention away from the unpleasant consequences of a policy.

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Other times the pitch is coloured by the knowledge that there's no personal harm in being reckless, because the chances of winning the next election are non-existent, so delivery of a promise is a non-problem.

Treasurer Joe Hockey is the one having to fess up to breaking promises at the moment, but his opposition number Chris Bowen is only 3.49% of the two-party preferred vote away from having been in much the same position.

Whoever won the last election was going to have to pull things back, and in a tradition going back at least to Malcolm Fraser and the 1977 "Fistful of dollars" election, or Bob Hawke in 1983, find that the cupboard was bare.

So in a moral sense, as distinct from a political one, both opposition and government frequently deserve to share the dishonours. They've amped dishonesty up in a campaign of mutually assured destruction (MAD).

However, liars only succeed because their victims are willing to accept the lies, and here we should not let the electorate escape without blame.

In the 21 years since John Hewson took Fightback, the most transparently elaborated political platform to an election and lost, no politician has been game to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, because it really would be "so help me God".

Hewson could have won, but he was brought down by the "L.A.W. law" tax cuts that Paul Keating legislated before the election, and then cancelled after, and the slogan of "Jobs not GST".

Electors trained Australian politicians well. There are no votes in the unvarnished truth, and if you want to get elected in the real world, then you should be as economical as possible with the truth.

Or just economical. Keating's deception in 1993 led directly to John Howard's small target strategy in 1996.

The media is also implicated. As long ago as 1987 Tony Blair claimed that "The truth becomes almost impossible to communicate because total frankness, relayed in the shorthand of the mass media becomes simply a weapon in the hands of opponents."

That was 10 years before the first blogs, 17 years before Facebook and 19 years before Twitter.

Social media has multiplied the problem many times over, and because it is populated by partisans, truth claims are elevated in importance, because partisans actually believe in their side.

Concentrating on whether a promise is broken or not allows us to avoid considering the substance of the new policy.

Part of the "Juliar" dynamic was that it allowed opponents to argue against climate change policies without having to argue against climate change science.

We want to pay less for power, and we want to save the world. Opposing a policy because it is a breach of trust allows us to embrace two contradictory positions, at the same time as we take the high moral ground.

So it's actually convenient for all of us that promises are broken, and none of us is blameless. But we'd rather lie about that to ourselves as well, when we care at all.

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This article was first published by the Australian Financial Review.



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About the Author

Graham Young is chief editor and the publisher of On Line Opinion. He is executive director of the Australian Institute for Progress, an Australian think tank based in Brisbane, and the publisher of On Line Opinion.

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