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Canberra Today 27°/29° | Tuesday, March 19, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Griffiths / Believing is black and white

AND so the Australian body politic has come to a point of complete cognitive dissonance.

John Griffiths.
John Griffiths.
In the wake of the 2015 Commonwealth Budget it seems the political class is completely unable to communicate meaningfully with the public, a state of affairs which bodes ill for democracy.

Bill Shorten’s weird performance with Neil Mitchell on Melbourne’s Radio 3AW recently could almost be worth a column of its own.

Thirteen times Mitchell asked if Labor had left a legacy of Government debt. (It is of course a matter of public record that it did.)

Thirteen times Shorten proceeded to answer questions other than the one he had been asked.

He was willing to come across as a complete goose to Mitchell’s relatively small audience because he was thinking about how the sound bite could play to much larger audiences.

Having a grown-up discussion and informing the audience available about one’s policy positions is now, it seems, a distant second to how the quotes will line up on social media.

The Government, on the other hand, has been simply breathtaking in its cartwheeling succession of backflips.

The same people, who for years lamented Labor’s Budget deficits, now appear to be utterly untroubled by ballooning debt.

This is particularly galling when one considers that just this time last year we were told, and expected to take seriously, that young people needed to deny access to welfare, and the elderly access to doctors, due to the absolute urgency of the need to balance the books.

Remember this line from Tony Abbott: “…for our children’s sake we have to address this issue of intergenerational theft which the former government was engaged in”?

It was extremely difficult to believe them last year that the “Budget emergency” really justified stinging cuts when they’d just done away with the carbon and mining taxes, but now it’s almost impossible to believe anything they say at all.

In George Orwell’s “newspeak” it would be called “blackwhite”: “Applied to an opponent, it means the habit of impudently claiming that black is white, in contradiction of the plain facts.

“Applied to a party member, it means a loyal willingness to say that black is white when party discipline demands this. But it means also the ability to believe that black is white, and more, to know that black is white, and to forget that one has ever believed the contrary.

“This demands a continuous alteration of the past, made possible by the system of thought which really embraces all the rest, and which is known in newspeak as ‘doublethink’.”

When sitting down and talking to politicians off the record it’s generally a pleasant surprise that they’re across the subject and invested in the detail.

Which makes it all the more jarring when they slip into doublethink when the cameras are rolling and start saying palpably untrue and manifestly foolish things, all because wisdom and truth are not bedfellows with their political agenda.

Perhaps thankfully the Abbott Government appears to have shelved most of its student politics agendas in favour of one driving imperative: re-election.

Barring some sort of external shock, such as a major global financial crisis or a war with China, one can confidently predict the economy will be singing along all the way to election day mid next year.

The question is going to be what it’s going to cost in the long run, and who we can believe to tell us about it.

Who can be trusted?

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Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

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