As week two of the 2016 federal election campaign kicked off, there was no more important news than the findings by The Australia Institute (TAI) which clearly show the 2016-17 budget measures will not, in fact, create either growth or jobs.

In short, taxpayer-funded government hand-outs to business and the wealthy do not trickle down to those in greatest need, but are scooped up by – this will shock you – business and the wealthy.

Who are the wealthy?

Australians who enjoy an income of $80,000 or more per year want for absolutely nothing. We can choose between public and private education. Between public and private health care. We do not experience the systemic criminalisation of poverty. Nor the anxiety and transience of housing insecurity. When we turn on a tap, at home or at the park, clean potable water comes out. We can take at least one domestic holiday each year, and save for overseas holidays – the trip of a lifetime, biannual sojourns in the Pacific. Either way, other than our ugly sense of entitlement, we are just fine.

The electorate which reaps the greatest windfall from the jobs n growth budget is Wentworth, the extraordinarily wealthy enclave in the eastern suburbs of Sydney and seat of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Meanwhile, the Grattan Institute released findings that the slated company tax cuts would stimulate growth by  0.6% at best and it would take 25 years ‘for the economy to feel the full effect’. In other words: nothing. Margin of error stuff. The ‘growth’ half of the Liberal Party slogan ‘jobs and growth’ is demonstrably false.

In response, the Prime Minister did not engage with the figures. He did not provide a nuanced rebuttal. He did not display his fabled intellect, another lie, so vigorously promoted by his crony commentator mates. He did what weak and lazy conservative thinkers always do: asserted that a demonstrable lie is somehow natural, inevitable, common sense, an infallible truth.

Turnbull said: “It is well understood and well accepted that if you reduce the level of business taxes, company taxes, then you will get a better return on investment, you will see more investment and you will see more employment and that is the inevitable consequence of it.” (The Guardian, Friday 13 May, 2016).

Over at The Australia Institute, economist Richard Deniss found that the government hand-outs to business in the 2016-17 budget will create as many jobs over 30 years as the economy created last month on its own. That is, the economy created more jobs in a month, without a $50 billion hand-out from the saintedAustraliantaxpayer™ than the hand-out to business will create over the (very) long term.

Who is the saintedAustraliantaxpayer™?

Anyone who buys a good or service. It took a Disability Support Pension (DSP) recipient to remind the nation and the foreign-owned Murdoch press of this fundamental fiscal fact. This displeased said Murdoch press, which is neither Australian nor pays tax, but is down for persecuting a sexual assault survivor who is reportedly now on suicide watch.

(In fact we paid $882 million of our tax money to the foreign-owned Murdoch press. This windfall was sent via a morally bankrupt government and a depleted and frankly exhausted Australian Tax Office, which under the profligate and economically illiterate Treasurer Joe Hockey was forced to shed 4,400 jobs in 19 months.)

Disunity and Misleading Claims

As well as the completely unfounded claims (lies) the government broadcasts about its budget, the company tax cut (like the date of the budget itself) saw the Prime Minister and the Treasurer at odds, again, over whether Treasury had done the costings. Did the Prime Minister lie about whether Treasury had done the costings? Why not ask FactCheck, the ABC service to be axed by its brand new ex-Murdoch CEO in the middle of an election campaign?

What does it matter whether the Prime Minister forgot to tell the Treasurer that his re-election strategy relies on a grandiose announcement about a double dissolution over a bill nobody knows or cares about and that this would mean bringing the budget forward because Malcolm?

Who cares whether the Prime Minister lied about Treasury costings and the Treasurer therefore ordered Treasury to release the costings which is clear evidence that the Treasurer hates the Prime Minister and that the government is dysfunctional and in chaos but whatever because Malcolm.

Why not trust a banker, a barrister, a politician in bed with the real estate industry? Malcolm!

In the end we found out that the cost of this pre-election hand-out to Liberal Party donors business would be nearly $50 billion – for basically no return, except a prop on which to hang a slogan. That slogan of course is jobs and growth. The analysis above clearly shows that neither jobs nor growth are an inevitable iron-clad law of economics flowing from budget promises, as the Prime Minister would have us believe. Jobs and growth is nothing but a false and empty slogan of the most Abbottesque variety.

Next came The Australia Institute findings that the company tax cut would represent a massive $10 billion wealth transfer over ten years from Australia to – wait for it – the USA. Not to a developing country. Not to an aid project. Not to investment in renewables or global peace or education for girls (the single most effective way to change the world).

In response, the Finance Minister did not engage with the figures. He did not provide a nuanced rebuttal. He did what weak and lazy conservative thinkers always do: asserted that a demonstrable truth is not true. The Australia Institute findings are ‘factually incorrect. Completely and utterly false’ blathered Cormann, as we stood by for his substantiating evidence. But no, his entire argument amounted to the blare of a quiz show horn. Bzzzzzt. Wrong.

Recall that the Prime Minister relied on not just false but disproven productivity claims for the Australian Building and Construction Commission (ABCC) in his letter advising the Governor-General to dissolve Parliament. The Attorney General QC produced a 13-page letter in support. The Governor General reproduced the false claims in his speech to the amassed MPs who the Australian taxpayer flew back to Canberra at an estimated cost of $20 million to reject a bill we knew would be rejected. (Did the Governor General mislead parliament? My case for the affirmative here).

Such expensive gestures afford huge electoral advantage to the incumbents. Of course, for those smashing economic managers of the Liberal Party, no expenditure of other people’s money to shore up political advantage is too great. Abuse of incumbent power is also no problem.

Meanwhile the Prime Minister, not known for decisive action or sound judgment, dithered and waffled about the budget and a double dissolution, as his fortunes sank in the polls (stand by for fear-mongering on terror and asylum seekers). Meanwhile, his Treasurer hastily scribbled some numbers on the back of a nearby envelope. Young people, Morrison muttered, pencil clamped between his teeth. Health and education no no scrap that. I know. Give business yet another hand-out and troll young people by making another business hand-out look like a constructive policy.

Done.

Democratic process: on policy and law

None of the budget thought bubbles measures have been tabled as bills or passed by both houses of parliament. The government is in no different a position to the opposition: whatever they say is a promise, not a law.

Supply was passed, unamended, the day after the budget was tabled. New policies, which require new appropriations, are still up for grabs. Electoral fodder, nothing more.

At any time, but more so at times like this, it is important to remember that legislation is the codification of policy; and policies are units of ideology. Laws are made by politicians, who belong to political parties, which in turn hold to specific ideologies. The law is not neutral, either in creation or application. There is no magic political-evaporation pond in which to soak our laws when they come into force. Law is inherently political, because politicians make laws.

This is how democracy works. An election is called. Candidates for two major and some minor parties traverse the country, communicating their policy platform to the voters. The policy platform is comprised of planks. In the old days this was a direct metaphor for the stage on which the politician stood, like soap box for public speakers.

One party or coalition secures a majority of seats in the House of Representatives and forms government. Its promises, founded on its ideology, do not suddenly magically turn into law (the great Gough Whitlam came close to performing this magic in 1972, rest his soul). Each policy or promise must be dumped or broken or drafted into a bill and passed by both Houses of Parliament. No new policy, no hand-outs to business, whether tax cuts or the dehumanisation of young unemployed people, are yet law. What is happening in this campaign is a simple abuse of the power of incumbency by the incumbents.

Decoding election messages: the Malcolm campaign

The media has a designated role in the democratic process. This designated role is not to compete between gotcha moments and creepy selfies for the nightly lead. In the English tradition, the tradition forcibly imposed on this continent and her islands, the media is the fourth estate. The first, second and third estates are the Church, the landed gentry (Lords), and the peasants (Commoners).

As an estate, a stakeholder in a democratic system of government, the media have an obligation to report in the public interest. This includes informing the electorate of opposition policies, so the public has a choice on election day. If the electorate are not informed of opposition party policies, we only hear about government, and thus lack informed choice at the ballot box. There are words for one-party states, and none of those words are democracy.

The traditional media method of discharging this duty is to proclaim a commitment to the journalist code of ethics and to balanced reporting. Of course balance is not for vested conservative interests. The Murdoch empire remains a shrieking cabal of nasty privileged sexist racist cronies who broadcast their shameless partisan garbage to the detriment of all but the vested interests of their sadistically selfish boss.

But the supposedly more responsible media are not balanced either. This is partly a function of bullying by conservative governments and big business, via funding cuts (ABC and SBS) or a big bank withdrawing its ad buy (Fairfax).

But it is also a function of the most powerful structural advantage in any democracy: incumbency. The media subscribes to a structural hierarchy of privileged voices. The most powerful voices in society are assumed to be the most important voices.

Never mind that democracy claims to be government by the people for the people; or that the Rule of Law announces that we are all equal before the law; or that the most endorsed document in the history of humanity, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, says all humans are born free and equal in dignity and rights.

No. Put all that to one side and, like capitalism itself, afford the highest platforms and most prominent positions to the most advantaged. Those from whom we have already heard, whose voices we hear all the damn time; who rarely offer a new insight or creative approach (and never an impartial one); whose social power eclipses all others; and who are largely responsible for the social, geopolitical, and environmental mess in which we find ourselves and in which we have placed our overburdened and burning planet.

Value is scarcity, or so my economics professors told me. Yet here we are with a surplus of vested white men and the occasional woman whose views are largely dull and redundant anyway, but also, according to economic orthodoxy, being in surplus and all, of extremely low worth. It is these voices that the traditional media foregrounds as though they are of the greatest value. We have an over-supply of smug white men. We hear from them endlessly. The bigger problem is how to shut them up. These voices lack substance, honesty, morality, inspiration, creativity, insight… anything, really.

Except incumbent power.

Under this model, every mainstream media campaign report leads with the incumbent. It should be noted that the current incumbents are ministers in a deeply conservative and inept government, sexist and racist and homophobic to a man and woman. These values are thus hyper-visibilised and normalised, irrespective of whether Australians see such ugly positions to accurately represent our values.

Government representatives of the people: a sample

We might hear from AG George Brandis QC, ‘confirming’ that prevention of an imminent terror attack is a fact (when it is not only an unproven claim but sub judice, as the good QC knows, or ought to know).  Brandis is presumably on terror-mongering duty to rehabilitate his dismal reputation as a luddite who failed to notice that numerous letters from Man Haron Monis to his office amounted to overwhelming evidence of Monis’ violent tendencies – which ended in the Sydney siege.

Or we get Scott Morrison saying the Opposition has blown a hole in ‘the budget’ (the Opposition does not control the budget. That would be the job of the Treasurer) and saying ‘this decision, the decision that we have taken today, we had already accounted for’. Okay, Scott. You accounted last month for a decision you made today, but Labor did not. Back in your time machine, mate.

The temporal dissonance is bad enough, but the failure to ever back their own policies with anything other than ‘this is inevitable’ conservatism, or ‘my unprovable claim is a fact’ terror-mongering, or ‘Labor Labor Labor’ from a rabble who have been in government for 2.5 years?

Who else is out and about flinging misleading claims like defecating monkeys?

Why hello Peter ‘plod’ Dutton. Hello you of the recently purchased $2 million+ Palm Beach pad, trolling Tanya Plibersek on her household income. It is an unwritten bipartisan rule of politics to never draw attention to the exorbitant amount we pay politicians for their phony, petty posturing. But household income? Oh, that’s okay. In this instance. You know why? Because Plibersek is a woman.

Ask yourself: have you heard anyone, despite its ostentation, refer to the enormous wealth of Lucy Turnbull nee Hughes? Do you know whether Malcolm or Lucy, and we are talking an extremely high wealth base on any measure here, comes from the wealthier family circumstances? Not a whisper? Yet here is Dutton making veiled references to Plibersek’s husband. Anyone who has followed the fortunes of Mr P knows what else Dutton is implying, a disgusting smear unworthy of further consideration.

And then there is the Prime Minister. The shtrong (pause, deepen pitch, take breath) Prime Minister. A man who told Freemantle workers that massive government contracts are innovative, talented, the future of Australia, twenty-first century.

Let’s take a closer look. The  announcement is a government contract for patrol boats. Are we at war? Is someone invading our remote island?

A: Australian patrol boats are used to turn back desperate people fleeing persecution, many fleeing persecution of our making, in Iraq and Afghanistan and Syria. So the Turnbull vision of innovation for the future of Australia is to further persecute desperate human beings. Nice.

The announcement was for a government contract. Not a start-up, not the invention of refrigeration, or commercial application of wi-fi, or economies of scale on solar cells. It is a government contract to build patrol boats. This, says Turnbull, is Australia at its best. This is our future. Lovely.

Turnbull is talking about a taxpayer-funded order for military hardware in peacetime. The claims he makes for this ordinary procurement decision are so grandiose, so doused in rhetoric, that there must be a greater ideological purpose. What could this statesmanlike purpose be? When on analysis the rhetoric comes up isolationist, socialist, and racist? Can that be right?

Yep. Turns out the only point is the re-election of the Malcolm government, which stands for literally nothing but itself and its donor mates. Nothing new there, then.

Turnbull followed his racist isolationist speechifying with a visit to Darwin, where the Northern Territory government has leased the port to a Chinese government entity for the next 99 years. This is obviously the greatest threat to national sovereignty since the British took by force the sovereignty of over 300 nations in 1770.

Here on soil stolen by the British and handed to the Commonwealth of Australia which leased it to the Chinese, Turnbull waxed lyrical on shtrong border protection. Think about that.

Is he being wilfully ignorant? Stupid? Has he not heard of soft power, despite the cheer squad who laud his ‘intellect’? Or does he just love money and hate brown people seeking asylum? It is very hard to tell.

Just kidding. It is very easy to tell. Despite being demonstrably terrible at his job, Turnbull likes having it; and when a vested, powerful, wealthy white guy likes what he sees, woe betide anyone who stands between him and his object of desire. No isolationalist nationalist xenophobic rhetoric is too low to go.

Six More Weeks: A Survival Guide

Happily, the way to understand media coverage of all this woeful garbage is not difficult. It is not intellectually demanding, or more complex than that, as people out of their depth in public are trained to say.

First, every day is opposite day in the Liberal Party. The reason is that their policies are designed to benefit their own, their base and their donors; but must be sold as if the policy will produce some general social good – in order to win the election. While the Grattan and Australia Institutes have done fantastic work, and our system requires evidence to debunk the myths and lies being flung about, there is no need for the average punter to decode or analyse or crunch numbers. Just ask two simple questions:

• Is the Minister insisting his claim is true without any substantive evidence? It is false.
• Does the decision in fact benefit business and the wealthy? Then that is its point.

The dedicated punter can perform further checks. Turn the claim around, and see if its exact opposite seems to resonate, to more closely correspond to the facts in the world.

• Turnbull is a good economic manager: take a look at the deficit
• Turnbull can be trusted: Turnbull has reversed his positions on GST, state tax collection, marriage equality, the Republic, climate change (etc)
• Turnbull is a good leader: Turnbull failed the Republic campaign and failed on climate as Opposition leader. See also NBN. And Godwin Greche (etc)
• Turnbull is an intellect: Turnbull repeats the same six words at every outing
• Turnbull is progressive: see marriage equality and climate change, above. See also Safe Schools, cashless welfare, Gonski, university fee deregulation, eating disorder helpline, upfront pathology costs (etc)
• Turnbull is better than Abbott: Turnbull bangs on about terror and border protection at every opportunity
• Turnbull is articulate: Turnbull ums and ahhhs like Abbott. Turnbull uses conservative tropes every time he speaks. Turnbull patronises senior journalists to prevail over otherwise much stronger counter-arguments to his claims.

And so on. And on. For six more gruelling weeks.

 

 

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