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Voters punish those who tell the whole truth

By Graham Young - posted Tuesday, 27 May 2014


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".

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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.

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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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