Politics and public policies
Calling out the wreckers
One painful lesson from the referendum campaign is that advocates for a reasoned and evidence-based approach to public policy can be bulldozed by a campaign based on lies, misrepresentations, bullshit, fake news and sophistry.
That doesn’t mean advocates for reform should sink to such levels themselves, but they should at least call out those who are responsible and expose their tactics.
In a speech to the party faithful Tanya Plibersek doesn’t hold back. She describes Peter Dutton as “a man whose life mission is to block progress, to stoke division, to kick the underdog when they’re down”, and as “a man who stands in front of all our opportunities and says no”. “Peter Dutton is not a man who can deliver, he can only sabotage.” He is “one who sees weakness in empathy, power in negativity, political advantage in division”. She goes on to describe his train of political wreckage in specific detail.
This can be seen as a rhetorical struggle between two parties, but it is far more. Her most serious statement about Dutton portrays him as “a man who seeks to reach the highest position in Australian government, by killing people’s faith in government”. Most parties, including those on the centre-right, seek office to improve people’s lives through considered public policy, given effect through established institutions. But the tactics adopted by Trump, Erdogan, Orbàn, and now Dutton go beyond that constrained model, for they have contempt for those institutions. It’s not a Labor-Coalition or a left-right contest: rather it’s a struggle to preserve the institutions and conventions of democracy.
In the same speech Plibersek has a swipe at the Greens for opportunistically siding with the Coalition, as they did with the Carbon Reduction Scheme in 2009, or as they have attempted to do with the government’s housing plans. Many on the left don’t understand that reform is a difficult and slow process, in which one has to take what one can get at the time. Nor do they realize that journalists and the public interpret the left’s opposition to a reform for being too moderate as an endorsement of the right’s opposition to the reform for being too radical.
Similarly Mike Seccombe, writing in the Saturday Paper, calls out the behaviour of Matthew Sheahan, the person behind the campaigning organization Advance: The man behind Advance’s far-right campaign.
Seccombe shows how Advance uses established patterns to thwart change. To paraphrase that tactic – “the weaponization of lies” – “flooding the zone with shit and making it impossible for people to tell truth from fiction”. They wait for the justifiably indignant and angry reaction, and then to accuse reformers of creating division. It worked a treat in the referendum, and the Coalition is likely to use it in the 2025 election.
That is, unless they are constrained by a politically unaffiliated body empowered to make judgements on political claims. Seccombe points out that Zali Steggall, an advocate of truth in political advertising, will soon introduce a bill that would give the Electoral Commission and ultimately the courts that role. He warns, however, that while the public seek truth in political advertising, there is a risk that the Coalition and Labor, sharing a binary model of politics, will do a dirty deal. Advance is already portraying truth-in-advertising laws as establishment of a “Ministry of Truth”.
The government has a draft misinformation bill, but as Christopher Arnott of Griffith University points out in a Conversation contribution, the Coalition has a dissenting report on the draft, opposing what many see as an already too-weak proposal: Regulating political misinformation isn’t easy, but it’s necessary to protect democracy.
The Australia Institute has a site where people can add their names to a petition calling for truth in advertising laws before the next election.
On a related matter, for those who happen to be in or near Canberra, the Australia Institute is also holding a book launch next week – The future of free speech by Benjamin Walters.
Calling out the government on whistleblower protection
In the coming week Afghan war crimes whistleblower David McBride will be on trial in Canberra. If found guilty of charges laid under the Crimes Act (a convenient catchall for the government) and the Defence Act, he could be facing a life sentence. His disclosures have been verified and backed up by the Brereton Inquiry, but even so he is facing prosecution.
Writing on the ABC website, investigative reporter Adele Ferguson describes the actions taken against McBride, and the government’s tardiness in doing anything to live up to its promise to improve whistleblower protection: As David McBride readies himself for trial, his fellow whistleblowers have a message for the government. She also covers the case of ATO whistleblower Richard Boyle, who has already been prosecuted.
Both McBride and Boyle tried to use internal mechanisms before going public, but in both cases they were ignored.
The issue is not only an injustice perpetrated on McBride and Boyle. It is also the way their treatment sends a strong message to other would-be whistleblowers, and to those in charge of internal processes, who can be reasonably assured that complainants can be ignored when they face the prospect of spending ruinous amounts on legal fees and jail sentences.
Beside the article linked above, Ferguson has a 7-minute interview on ABC Breakfast, where she makes the additional point that government documents are generally over-classified. Even if a document is clearly overclassified, those who disclose such documents can be prosecuted under present legislation. (In my time in government employment I saw publicly-available maintenance manuals for Land Rovers classified “Restricted” and a transcript of an article from the magazine Der Spiegel classified “Secret”.)
Ferguson points out that the law allows the attorney-general to stop prosecutions that are not in the public interest, but so far Mark Dreyfus has not exercised this power for McBride.
Michael West has an account of a KGB-style police raid on another whistleblower, Gabriel Bernarde, who exposed what he believed to be suspicious behaviour by an ASX-listed company. To quote Micheal West:
Funny how the police never gagged anybody from PwC for selling state secrets to foreign clients, or frisked the bank chiefs in bed for their systemic banking frauds! Funny how nobody at the Big End of Town ever seems to be raided at home by armed police officers. Ever.
Health policy – let’s not forget public health
There are media reports of Covid-19 resurging, but all that’s revealed in the weekly Covid-19 reporting by the Department of Health and Aged Care is a normal pattern of a series of waves of cases, each wave having a smaller impact. That’s how epidemics behave.
It may be abating, but we should not forget the lessons from Covid-19. Cases, deaths, and economic consequences were disproportionately distributed. The poor took the worst hit.
The Grattan Institute’s Peter Breadon writes that the poor consistently have worse health outcomes than those who are economically better-off, and that effective public policy can help rectify these inequalities: Failure to invest in prevention increases health inequality. Using geographical data he demonstrates that those living in poor areas not only have worse outcomes but are also disproportionately likely to have risk factors for chronic disease – obesity, psychological distress, lack of physical activity, and smoking. Public health measures can reduce these risks, but Breadon points out that Australia devotes the lowest proportion of health expenditure to preventative care of all high-income OECD countries.