It’s not often I agree with Ross Gittins, the uber-Boomer ‘economics’ editor of the Age, but for once he’s right: this is one of the worst election campaigns in living memory. Of course, Gittins loses me again right away, when he sails to the la-la-land conclusion that a Labor-Greens government is the best outcome – and takes over 3000 words to say exactly what I just did in two sentences. Gittins is of that class of pundit who forever mistake prolixity for profundity. Orwell, he is not.
Still, the point remains. Over at the Australian, Paul Kelly is making much the same: in what is one of the most consequential elections in decades, one that will decide whether Australia continues its current disastrous trajectory, both major parties are sleepwalking to disaster. Worse, both are treating voters like mugs, waving ever bigger and shinier baubles in our faces, instead of talking serious policy.
Back at the Age, Gittins asks:
How are you going with the election? Are you getting a lot out of the debate, seeing the big issues canvassed and making up your mind who’ll win your vote?
The biggest issue being canvassed to date is: who’s throwing you the most sweets?
What’s that? You don’t think much of the election campaign? It’s been neither interesting nor edifying, and hasn’t got to grips with the big issues?
Well, I agree. I think both sides are treating us like mugs. Maybe like the mugs many of us have allowed ourselves to become.
In my 51 years as a journalist, this is the 20th federal election campaign I’ve observed at close quarters, and I’m convinced they’re getting worse […]
In short, election campaigns have become dishonest, aimed at tricking us into voting for one side rather than the other, using trinkets to distract us from the bigger issues that neither side has thought much about nor has any great desire to tackle.
The opposition leader who dared talk about bold policy agendas, from opposing the Voice referendum to embracing nuclear energy, has crawled back into a small-target shell. Why, remains a mystery. It’s precisely when Peter Dutton spoke up against the left consensus that, while the media screeched, voters listened.
Now, it seems, Dutton is just running scared of being called ‘Trumpian’ by the media. Which they’re going to do anyway, so why not make it worthwhile? This is the fallacy that’s crippled the supposedly centre-right conservative party for over a decade: nursing the delusion that, if they just keep quiet enough on the stuff that really matters, the media will be nice to them.
It’s a fool’s game, but it seems to be their natural instinct.
That, and promising to spend even more than Labor.
It is a deadly troika. The fusion of an election, inflation and a housing crisis has taken Australian public policy to a dismal low. The public, to a large extent, is being offered phoney and glib answers to its cost-of-living grief.
The campaign bidding war between Anthony Albanese and Peter Dutton has scaled a new peak: witness Dutton’s offering of a tax deduction for mortgage interest (a first in Australia), Albanese’s plan to deliver for first-home buyers with only a 5 per cent deposit and Dutton’s one-year tax relief offset of up to $1200, in addition to his fuel excise cut […]
The risk is that flawed public policy – high spending, high tax, weak productivity and inadequate defence – will be authorised at the election and shape the next term.
All this at a time when, as the Australian’s Paul Kelly says, “the world is being transformed in economic, trade and strategic terms”. Instead of trying to ride that wave, Australia’s two-headed muppet political system is busily agreeing with each other that we don’t want none of that here. Just spend more money we don’t have and buy ourselves another turn on the government benches.
“The election is lost in a fog of delusion,” as Kelly says. Our Tweedledum and Tweedledumber leaders might not be interested in world events, but world events are very interested in us.
And so we’re looking all too likely to get the very worst outcome imaginable: a minority Labor government run by the Greens. Which is where Boomer lefty Gittins reverts to form, pining for the good old days of the disastrous Julia Gillard government.
Only a terminally delusional codger could actually think Gillard’s carbon tax was a great achievement.
If the election campaign is the worst we can remember, the mainstream media are even worse.
