Almost as depressing as the evident plagiarism in HillBillySkeleton’s post-truth politics post is its unremitting, one-eyed left wing bias. The Political Sword is the ideological mirror image of Andrew Bolt’s blog only much less entertaining. The most recent post there is a lengthy and even more one-eyed diatribe against Tony Abbott by “Ad Astra”. I seldom visit that blog and only did so as a result of Don Arthur’s exposure of HBS’s liberal unattributed borrowing practices. I should have known better.
How could anyone with an even marginally discriminating intellect fail to notice that Abbott’s relentless negativism and lack of regard for truth has an equally long pedigree in ALP propaganda? Labor’s opposition to the GST over a decade or so was hardly noteworthy for its positive approach or regard for truth, given that Paul Keating had lobbied hard for a GST only a few years previously. Moreover, as we now know, a GST is a perfectly sensible and innocuous tax and part of a balanced tax mix. One day we’ll all realise the same is true of a carbon tax or emissions trading scheme, although whether Julia Gillard’s prime ministership will survive its implementation remains an open question. Why is it any more outrageous for Abbott to fear-monger and misrepresent a carbon tax than it was for Beazley et al to do the same over GST?
Then there was Labor’s campaign against WorkChoices, the mother of all fear and smear campaigns and chock-full of untruths and gross exaggerations. Oh yes, and asylum seeker policy. As we now know, Labor is entirely prepared to embrace a minor variant of John Howard’s Pacific Solution when the cold hard political reality of the alternatives slams them in the face often enough. You can bet they would have done the same as Howard in 2001 had they been in government. Labor led the “tough on asylum seekers” charge throughout its period in government, but at that time its policies had bipartisan support. Might Labor’s desperate and cynical abandonment of a longstanding tacit bipartisanship on immigration policy be one of the reasons why Abbott can happily ignore their current squeals of outrage about his appalling negativity and “post-truth politics”?
The game of “my your party is more dishonest than your my party” may provide a warm inner glow of self-righteousness to the hard core lefty audience at The Political Sword, but it’s otherwise completely pointless.
Much more interesting would be an exploration of how (if at all) one might go about engineering more informative, honest political debate on all sides. One way might be to legislate to subject political advertising to the misleading and deceptive conduct provisions of the Australian Consumer Law (there are currently almost no truth constraints at all on political advertising). Another might be to educate kids more thoroughly in critical thinking and expose them to the existence of cognitive biases like confirmation bias which tend to convince us of the unquestionable correctness of our own opinions and close our minds to evidence suggesting otherwise.
However, even if we do all those things and more, spin and hyperbole will remain staples of the political process. That’s because we humans will remain contrary, stubborn, prejudiced and “tribal” creatures. Even worse for the prospects of informative civil discourse is the fact that most of us are almost entirely disinterested and disengaged from political debate, and therefore readily susceptible to capture by glib propaganda lines on the rare occasions when an issue impinges on our consciousness. The best any system can do is to moderate the extremes of such conduct. And the best we engaged centrist individuals can do is keep away from ideologically extreme blogs like The Bolta or The Political Sword, or maybe better still keep reminding ourselves that they’re just mildly entertaining caricatures.
