It is hard to understand why the media are surprised at another undecided election result where we are once again headed towards minority government, since the polls predicted this knife-edge outcome for the last eight weeks. Either way, the media’s prevailing election campaign narrative, which congratulated Turnbull’s clever, safe, detail-light strategy has come crashing down since Saturday, replaced with an analysis of what went wrong for the Liberal National government.

One of the more thoughtful post-election narratives is exemplified by Ian Verrender who says wealth inequality has caused mass-disenchantment with ‘the establishment’. Verrender writes:

A revolution is sweeping across the developed world, as an increasingly disillusioned lower and middle class find themselves threatened and disenfranchised by the economic forces unleashed by the rise of technology and an increasingly global economy.

This analysis is correct; there is no doubt people earning lower and middle-incomes are slowly awakening to the raw deal they are getting from neoliberal economic policies which hurt them whilst making a shrinking elite-class richer and richer.

Such a revolution is used to explain the shock Brexit result in the UK, and the popularity of supposedly anti-establishment candidates such as Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders in the US. Here, Verrender argues, it has caused an increasing number of voters to abandon the two-party system in favour of minor parties and new-or-re-released ‘others’ such as Pauline Hanson’s One Nation and Xenophon’s NXT.

But while commentators like Verrender have identified the problem (wealth inequality), they still seem blind to the solution. This ‘inequality causing a pox-on-both-the-major-parties’ narrative is missing the elephant in the room. So, while journalists don’t understand, nor report the solution, their audience remains uninformed, and low and behold, the problem goes unsolved. Have the media forgotten that it’s not just their role to report what happened in the election, but to give voters the information they need to make the best decision before they go to vote?

Correct me if I’m wrong, but not once did I hear, see or read a mainstream journalist during the election explain that wealth inequality would not be solved, or even lessened by voting for an anti-establishment candidate. Nick Xenophon might be very good at attracting media attention through stunts and a hollow promise to ‘do politics differently’, and Pauline Hanson might be adept at attracting racists, but how far did any journalist get in unpicking soundbites to explain how a vote for these diverse ‘other’ candidates does nothing to improve a voter’s inequality of wealth?

For those who were looking, who weren’t distracted by the anti-establishment-rejection-of-major-parties symptom of wealth inequality, there was actually an election campaign going on over this very issue. In fact, the entire election campaign was a battle between Turnbull, representing the neo-liberal trickle-down narrative, where tax-cuts-for-capitalists are responsible for ‘jobs and growth’, versus Shorten, representing the inclusive growth narrative where the consumer-power of lower and middle-income families is the generator of jobs and growth. This consumer power arises from a more equal distribution of wealth, benefiting all. Labor’s narrative goes beyond the old ‘safety net’ concept of welfare for those left behind by a globalised economy, replacing it with an understanding that prosperity is driven by inclusion; by not leaving anyone behind.

If you want to simplify this conflict further, which no doubt journalists would prefer we do, we saw a merchant banker versus a union leader fighting it out over the best way to manage the economy. Don’t believe me? Do you remember when Turnbull said this during an ABC 730 interview with Leigh Sales?

Well everybody knows that their prosperity depends on the prosperity of their employer…they want to know that their business is doing well, that the company they’re working for is investing, is growing, is able to retain more of its earnings and put more of it back into the business. You see everything we’re doing is going to encourage more investment.

This is an example of the completely-de-bunked trickle-down narrative which assumes that any policy benefiting an employer will benefit employees.

In contrast, did you notice how Shorten, numerous times, in fact, every day of the election, said something like this statement he made on the day of the Brexit, when journalists repeatedly said share market volatility would help the Liberal campaign:

The argument about not changing the government goes down to the economic fundamentals and the economic plan… our decisions to invest in people through a good education system, a world-class education system, and a world-class health system … to invest in public transport, in infrastructure for roads, in tourism infrastructure, in the NBN, is the right way to go…It is all about building sustainable growth, and at the heart of sustainable growth is inclusive growth. When working class and middle class families… feel disengaged from the political process, then you see the sort of results you see in the United Kingdom.

Shorten’s entire policy platform and election campaign were, in fact, encapsulated in the inclusive growth narrative I wrote about before the election. I heard this storyline repeatedly in Labor candidate statements, and just as importantly, in Labor’s policy platform: funding for education, health, infrastructure, protection of wages such as penalty rates, reforms to negative gearing to reduce inequality in the housing market. These policies are the nitty-gritty real-world outcomes which help to reduce growing inequality, which in turn helps grow the economy and creates jobs for everyone’s benefit. How many voters were told by the media about this solution to growing wealth inequality and were told Labor is offering policies benefiting everyone’s collective prosperity?

While the media focused on soundbites, gotcha moments and gaffes, and reported the ‘jobs and growth’ slogan as if it were a plan, and while they gave endless publicity to the side-show-no-policy-detail-required to anyone running against the major parties, they missed the real ideological battle playing out right in front of them throughout the entire campaign.

The most interesting element of the election result, however, is that I don’t think the electorate made the same mistake the media did. Voters know personally how important education, access to healthcare, a fast NBN, public transport, environmental protection and renewable energy, penalty rates and childcare funding is to their everyday cost of living, and their ability to compete in an economy stacked in favour of the rich. That is why, even with a low primary vote, Labor has still managed, through voter preferences, to put themselves in a winning position.

Therefore, the real story this election is the backlash against the Liberal National’s neoliberal trickle-down agenda, which, even when propped up and maintained by the mainstream media, isn’t attractive to voters anymore because they can see the damage these policies cause to the economy and social fabric of their communities.

Even if the Liberal Nationals manage to form a minority government, with a wafer thin majority and possibly 20 crossbench senators to work with, every neoliberal policy brought to parliament will have to be sold, negotiated and justified to MPs and senators elected by voters who are concerned about growing wealth inequality. So voters have, in a way, got what they voted for; a government who will be forced to take their needs into account. What could be more exciting than that?

I look forward to the media catching up with the electorate to recognise that the major parties are offering two different world-views, and reporting their policies as such. I look forward to the media realising a hung-parliament and a diverse senate is a good outcome for Australians, rather than framing this situation as chaos and unworkable. An uninformed electorate has put Labor’s anti-wealth-inequality policies within striking distance of government. Imagine what an informed electorate is capable of.

One of the most interesting post-election whinges we’ve seen from the Liberals is Perth MP, Andrew Hastie’s confession that he found it hard to stay on message with Turnbull’s ‘jobs and growth’ campaign, so ended up, in his words, basically running his own show. He explains that he realised he couldn’t keep up the party-line when he found himself struggling to explain to a constituent how the Liberal’s plans would benefit the man’s children. I heard Liberal Rowan Ramsey, whose electorate of Grey in Adelaide’s far-northern manufacturing and farming belt, say something similar on ABC radio this morning, explaining that the ‘innovative’ and ‘agile’ lines parroted by Turnbull had little connection with the voters he was trying to persuade to support him rather than Xenophon’s NXT candidate – who may still win his seat.

What struck me is that these Liberal candidates are using this criticism as a suggestion that Turnbull’s campaign wasn’t effective for their electorates, when actually, what they are saying is that the Liberal policy platform, indeed, the Liberal’s entire ideological worldview, is really hard to sell to voters. There’s a reason for that. And can I suggest to Hastie and Ramsey and any other Liberal candidate who felt the $50 billion tax-cut to big business was a difficult ‘sell’, and cutting education and healthcare funding was a difficult ‘sell’, perhaps should think about changing political parties before they go ‘off message’, which is basically akin to false advertising.

This hard-sell is the reason Turnbull’s campaign was a lot of flaff, colour and cheese, but very light on actual policy detail, or strong arguments in favour of a policy platform. Deep down, the Liberals know that there is no argument that can convince people that trickle-down economics is an effective wealth generator for ordinary Australians, that is, the 99% of Australians who aren’t super wealthy. There’s no simple catch-phrase or slogan that can hide the fact that a corporate tax cut makes the rich richer, and sends a lot of profit off-shore, with barely any discernible impact on GDP growth. The vast majority of Australian journalists would no doubt blame Turnbull’s ‘messaging’, or ‘campaigning’ on this disconnect between what voters want, and what Turnbull is offering. But the truth is, no matter how well advertised a can of soft drink is, no matter how much money is spent on savvy strategists, opinion polling and glitzy campaign launches, or how many journalists campaign for this world-view, if people taste the drink and it tastes like cat-piss, they’re not going to buy it. Or, more importantly, they’re not going to buy it a second time.

A man like Turnbull, who lives in a harbourside mansion worth god-knows-how-many-tens-of-millions, who made his money in unproductive merchant banking, who uses Panama tax-havens to ensure his own astronomical wealth continues to grow at a pace grossly outstripping low, average and middle income wealth growth, will, I suggest, find it difficult to come up with a really convincing reason why an ordinary Australian should support a trickle-down economic agenda, which has, for the last 20 years at least, failed to have a positive impact on their livelihood. Turnbull is out-of-touch with electoral tastes because he is out-of-touch with the real needs and wants of the electorate.

Let’s get something straight. This is not class war. This is class awakening. Ordinary Australians, even Liberal candidates, are realising that leaders like Turnbull and his Liberal colleagues, don’t have the best interests of ordinary Australians at heart when they stake their political careers on policies that hurt ordinary Australians. It was bound to happen eventually.

So what can Hastie and Ramsay and any other Liberal candidate do who finds it difficult to sell the Liberal’s cuts to education, to healthcare, a slow NBN, cuts to arts funding, a $50 billion gift to mostly-offshore-multinationals, a pathetic-wasteful-not-effective Direct Action climate policy, lower-wages-through-threats-to-penalty-rates, a freezing of the childcare rebate and any other number of policies which have the net-result of increasing wealth inequality at the expense of the wealth of the 1%? The answer is not in messaging, or in finding a more authentic ‘real tradie’, or changing leaders to see if someone else can sell the snake-oil to the ordinary folk more effectively. The answer is having a good long hard look at a world-view which doesn’t serve the interests of the Australian electorate, who have the democratic hiring and firing power to choose who runs the country. If the electorate doesn’t like what you’ve got to offer, maybe it’s time to change that offering. If Liberal candidates want to campaign on a platform that’s easier to ‘sell’ to voters, such as offering better education, better healthcare, infrastructure and an array of social and economic policies which reduce wealth inequality and low-and-behold, create the growth and jobs which the Liberal’s trickle-down policies do not, maybe they should campaign for the Labor Party.

So little Johnny, who is your favourite parent? Mummy or Daddy? Aunty Heather! I want Aunty Heather!

Yes, this is a simplistic metaphor, but you get my point. The electorate’s, and coincidentally media’s growing love for any candidate who doesn’t come from a major party is akin to children picking their cool Aunty Heather over their parents in a contest of who is the better caregiver. Sure, the whole idea of picking one parent over the other is unrealistic, but an election is basically a contest between who is going to care best for the country; a Labor government or a Liberal government, and in this election, it appears, in South Australia, at least 1 in 4 voters chose neither.

My favourite cognitive linguist, George Lakoff, who studies political metaphors, is responsible for the idea that left wing governments represent mothers – based on nurturing values, whereas right wing governments represent fathers – based on authoritarian values. Using this metaphor, I am heartily sick of hearing people say ‘a pox on both their houses’, ‘I don’t like either party’, ‘the establishment is broken’, ‘our cool aunty or fun-loving uncle Xenophon / Greens / Hanson / Lambie etc will look after us better than our boring old parents’!

The thing is, as fun as it is to spend a few hours a week with cool aunty or fun-loving uncle, they’re not your parents. They don’t have to pay the mortgage, organise your school lunch box or follow-through on promises to buy you a pony, which then has to be looked after for its entire life. They can buy you an ice-cream once every three years and apparently that’s all it takes to make some voters happy. The messiness of actually having to parent, to form government, to take legislation to parliament, to develop policies in the national interest, to balance a budget, to deal with the constant media narrative of ‘major-parties just aren’t credible’ is a completely different kettle of fish than appearing on the TV for the odd sound-bite and never actually having to give away anything about ideals or vision of policy positions BEFORE THE ELECTION. The media helps facilitate such Teflon-campaigning.

Before I get jumped on as being unfair, I am happy to acknowledge that Australia’s cool aunties and fun-loving uncles have been good to us over the last three years. The cross benchers in both the lower and upper houses, including Greens, McGowan, Wilkie, Lazarus, Xenophon, Lambie etc, did manage to pretty much scuttle the Abbott and Turnbull budgets three years in a row, protecting us from the worst of their neoliberal agenda. I have a great love for Tony Windsor and Rob Oakeshott who helped Gillard’s productive minority government achieve many great policy outcomes. But the thing is, if that’s these people’s roll – if they’re here to mediate the odd policy, to block the very worst, to negotiate some pork-barrelling for causes they care about – that doesn’t make them pure and it certainly doesn’t mean they’re undeserving of scrutiny during the campaign. In fact, it could be argued, it’s even more important to know where they stand if they have the power to determine what happens in parliament. It also doesn’t mean the majors, who are doing the hard-yard policy work of government or opposition – are somehow automatically ‘not-credible’, just because this work is harder, messier and therefore easier to criticise. The work of a parent is different from the work of an aunty or uncle. I think it’s time the media stops the childish, simplistic narrative of ‘majors bad, minors/indies good’, to better educate the electorate exactly what they’re voting for, no matter who they are.

The absolutely worst thing that can happen to the reputation of cool aunties and fun-loving uncles (or in some cases, racist aunties and the gun-loving uncles) is that they’re given the responsibilities of a parent. For example, if Xenophon’s lower-house MP, Rebekha Sharkie, is responsible for making-or-breaking key policy outcomes, such as protections to Medicare, climate change policy, school funding, corporate tax cuts, penalty-rates, trade deals, the continuation of paid-parental leave, industry-protection, funding to childcare rebates and any manner of real world situations which actually impact on the every-day lives of the Australian people, no amount of stunt-making and Teflon coverage by the media is going to protect NXT from the scrutiny they should have had before the election.

I met many Xenophon voters and volunteers throughout the course of the campaign in South Australia and without fail, the majority of them justified their support of Xenophon with a statement such as ‘he’s keeping the bastards honest’, ‘the majors are corrupt’ and so on and so forth. But when you dig a little deeper, there is very little policy behind this supporter base, very little detail about what exactly the Xenophon candidates stand for, and no unity in their positions. Most of them have little to no idea how Xenophon himself voted in the previous two terms because, frankly, they don’t seem to care.

Taking a position is dangerous. Aunties don’t have to force their nieces to brush their teeth. Remember what happened to the Democrats when they sided with the Liberals to bring in a GST? What sort of backlash could Xenophon expect by being a policy king-maker, when his reputation is for ‘doing politics differently’, which in his case, mostly means ‘flying under the radar of scrutiny and getting away with doing whatever he feels like at that moment’. We already know his voters are disillusioned with the traditional business of politics because that’s why they voted for his party. What happens when that disillusionment is directed at the real-world decisions his party will now be forced to take a position on? What happens when voters realise Pauline Hanson isn’t going to be able to arrange a racist-Royal-Commission into Islam or that her climate-change-denial doesn’t stop Australia taking action against climate change? It’s all fun and games until aunty and uncle have to disappoint the kids.

The next three years are going to be fascinating to watch. There has never been a more exciting time to be scrutinising independents and minor parties! As I’ve said many times since Saturday afternoon: PASS THE POPCORN.

Dear Australia,

Isn’t democracy fun? I know I’m a rarity in my love for politics but even if you hate politics, I still think elections can be fun. Think of your vote like a shopping trip, but instead of buying new shoes you’re going out to buy your future. What could be more fun than shopping for your future? And you don’t even need your credit card.

Australians usually do a pretty good job of their election shopping. Australia is an awesome place to live. But every so often, like three years ago, we make a really bad choice and choose horrible futures, such as the recent past we’ve had to endure under the Abbott/Turnbull government. We have a chance on Saturday to correct this mistake and I’m just hoping you’re awake Australia, ready to make the smart choice.

Please don’t fall for the great catch-cry of the uninformed who say there is no choice between the two major parties. There is a reason these people are uninformed; because they don’t have the capacity to inform themselves. If we’ve learned nothing else from our UK cousins making the Brexit and now the Regrexit decision, who were madly googling ‘what is the EU’ after they’d already voted to leave, it is that it’s really important to be at least a little bit informed before you make your choice. Here is one plank you can use to bridge the information gap.

You could vote for a Liberal government. You could go to Bunnings, buy a hammer and smash yourself in the face with it. You could pretend that even though you hated everything about Abbott and every idea he ever had, that Turnbull will change everything as soon as he gets the magic word, and then everything will be alright again. Even though deep in your heart you know Turnbull would have changed everything already if he really wanted to and the only reason he hasn’t is because he actually agreed with all of Abbott’s policies when he sat in Abbott’s cabinet, and the only thing they disagreed about was which one of them should be Prime Minister.

I know it’s disappointing that the end of the whole Abbott debacle brought no relief to the horrors of Abbott, and that Turnbull has been so piss-weak, letting Cory Bernardi run the government while he flaffs and waffles and spins and shakes his glasses at you to mansplain why he’s smarter than you are and you should just shut up and stop asking questions about views he previously claimed to have which have disappeared as quickly as a raw onion in Abbott’s lizard-like-grip. Life is disappointing sometimes. Do you know what I find disappointing? People voting for Turnbull, pretending he’s not exactly the same as Abbott and pretending Turnbull’s wish to scrap penalty rates isn’t evidence he would bring back WorkChoices in the blink of the eye if you give him even a sniff of a mandate to destroy wages and conditions.

You could vote Liberal and get a cheque for your footy club facilities whilst ignoring the contradiction of apparent debt-and-deficit disaster and the shower of pork-barrel-bribes during an election.

You could vote Liberal and pretend that you don’t mind the rort of a Direct Action Policy paying polluters tax-payer funds whilst failing to reach emissions targets because you actually don’t mind climate change destroying your future, nor do you mind Australia coming last in the race to build renewable energy industry which could have created a well-paid job for you or your offspring had it not ceased to exist under a Liberal government.

You could vote Liberal and tell yourself the three-word-slogan ‘Jobs and Growth’ is all the evidence you need of an economic plan, and that a $50 billion tax-cut-gift-to-the-rich-just-like-Turnbull-who-use-offshore-tax-havens-and-mostly-don’t-even-live-in-Australia will eventually trickle down to you and make you gloriously rich when deep down you know this will never happen and that it is fantasy to think it will and that really all this tax cut will do is make the mostly offshore rich richer and you’ll end up paying the difference in loss of essential services and increase in your taxes, possibly through an increase in the GST down the track even though Liberals said they wouldn’t do that, since Howard did exactly the same thing when he said he wouldn’t bring in the GST and then did anyway.

Are you an unemployed young person? Vote Liberal and earn $4 an hour doing who-knows-what and don’t you dare complain nor Murdoch’s flying monkeys will come after you.

You could vote Liberal to keep the boats stopped even though the net impact this policy has had on your life is to make you feel a little warmer in your nastiness towards people who don’t look like you, where you enjoy picturing five year old children living indefinitely in squalid conditions to the point where they’re so distraught they want to kill themselves.

You could vote Liberal and rip up Labor’s Gonski funding model, denying perhaps your children, or your friends children, or your grandchildren, or the children you haven’t had yet, and the economy as a whole the chance to be as smart and productive as it has the potential to be.

You could vote Liberal and be charged more to go to the doctor, more to buy medicine, more to have a pathology test, and be happy to rip billions out of presumably what you hope to be high quality care in hospitals when you need it most. These are the types of choices that make the starkest difference between a great country and a mean-spirited-user-pays-and-if-you’re-not-born-rich-that’s-your-problem-just-f*ck-off-and-die country.
You could vote Liberal and get a National Broadband Network which leaves us languishing behind our trading partners in internet speed, and keeps you three episodes behind on Games of Thrones thanks to how long the bloody thing takes to download. You could vote Liberal to unleash the bigots on gay couples in a $160 million dollar plebiscite which Turnbull’s team is busily finding loopholes to completely ignore. You could vote Liberal and keep being outbid at auctions by tax-payer-subsidised investors who will knock down your dream home and sub-divide for profit, so they can buy their unborn children three homes each.

Or you could vote Labor and get the opposite of all of the above.

The choice is yours Australia.

Vote wisely.

Yours Sincerely
Victoria Rollison

In the ocean of Brexit analysis, here is my drop. I am going to oversimplify and stereotype and generalise all at once by saying the very obvious thing: Britain doing what Nigel Farage and Rupert Murdoch and Boris Johnson wanted isn’t just about an anti-immigration xenophobia agenda, although it is related to that. No, the Brexit is a symptom of the mass anxiety felt by the people who were once considered the working class, and are now not sure what they are except anxious and scared all the time.

These are the people who feel left behind by globalisation, over-priced, not able to compete, not sure what their futures hold, wishing they could go back to the safe-old-days when they had jobs in manufacturing and coal mines and could work in the same company for 40 years and retire on a comfortable pension. This is what Brexit is about. Such anxiety and fear is very easy to stoke because it’s there, living inside people, all the time. Casualized jobs. No job security. Offshoring of manufacturing. A hollowing out of social services which used to catch people from falling. And a government who constantly tells them their anxiety is all their fault. If they can’t make-good in a capitalist, free market, globalised world, they’re told, the problem is with them. Not the government who refuses to implement policies which ensure the wealth created by globalization is shared fairly and equally amongst everyone who contributes. No, the problem is with those losing out, whose wages haven’t grown at the same rate as the profits, who feel a deep-seated resentment towards ‘the system’ which has left them behind. It’s no wonder they’re resentful.

This anxiety and fear is also very easy to transfer onto easy targets. To some, the villain is symbolised by free trade agreements, fears of world government and unelected EU officials. To others, and I would suggest many, this anxiety is encapsulated by immigration; the faces of the newly-arrived families in their towns are representative of their loss of confidence, of the death of the good old days, the end of the stable, comfortable Britain they grew up in. No matter whether life was better back then or not (and for most, it wasn’t), when resentful, anxious and fearful people see their communities becoming increasingly multi-cultural, it’s incredibly easy to blame those who don’t look like them for every problem they perceive as being caused by a globalised world. So they want these people gone. They think with them gone their anxiety will subside. They’re wrong. The real villains aren’t the immigrants next door. The real villain is an economic system which advantages the rich at the expense of the poor.

Frustratingly, bitterness and resentment make people vulnerable to fear campaigns. What Murdoch, Farage and Johnson didn’t mention was that the Brexit is predicted to make the UK’s economic situation worse by reducing the value of the Pound, thereby decreasing savings, cutting the value of pensions and possibly causing a deep recession and massive job losses. I’m sad for the UK today because I think they’ve made a bad decision. I’m sad for those who voted not to leave, and for those who wanted out. I don’t think anyone wins from this situation and everyone will likely live to regret it.

But this is not the UK’s problem alone. The same resentment, fear and anxiety account in large part for Trump’s popularity. Trump is also promising to tear up free-trade deals, to put up tariffs and to not just metaphorically, but literally build a wall to keep immigration and globalisation out.

The same phenomenon accounts for working-class, manufacturing towns like Whyalla in South Australia madly swinging their vote behind the pox-on-both-the-major-parties local Xenophon candidate. They feel the system has let them down; they don’t trust either Labor or Liberal to fix it, and somehow they think an outsider, anyone else, something else, will.

But how do you ‘fix’ globalisation? You can’t unscramble an egg. You can’t go back in time, and by the way back in time our living standards were worse, but of course everyone remembers the best bits of the past. If people feel left behind by a changing world, the only answer is to support policies which reduce inequality, to ensure globalisation’s spoils aren’t massively disproportionally shared only with the rich.

Bill Shorten this afternoon said the Brexit result proves that Australia needs inclusive growth in order to avoid the type of disenfranchisement experienced in the UK. Inclusive growth means policies such as Labor’s investment in education, healthcare, a social safety net and infrastructure spending to make Australia competitive with the world economy. Did I mention there’s an election next week? Let’s make a smarter choice than the UK.

Dear ABC

I would like to make a complaint about numerous journalists over the past two days using the phrase ‘Mediscare campaign’. As a supporter of Australia’s universal healthcare system, who has watched the Liberal government first under Abbott and now under Turnbull chip away and chip away at Medicare in their ideological quest to turn it into a user-pays healthcare system, and who has been aghast at secret plans to privatise a little bit here and there and no doubt a slippery slope to turning the whole thing into a profit-centre, I do not appreciate your journalists’ inference that Labor’s campaign to ensure voters are aware of the Liberal government’s Medicare policies is nothing more than a ‘scare campaign’.

We all know what scare campaigns are. They are fact-less, politically opportune, cynical attempts to use fear to win votes. By calling the ‘let’s save Medicare’ campaign a ‘Mediscare campaign’, not only are you overstepping the line between reporting the news and editorialising in favour of the Liberal government, you are also undermining your very important job of providing voters with a true assessment of the facts this election.

The Labor Party has every right to tell voters what a Liberal government plans to do to Medicare and has every right to point out that the Liberal Party has always been an enemy of Medicare. Last election, the Liberals campaigned on a promise of ‘no cuts to health’, a lie blatantly exposed in the 2014 budget when the GP co-payment was sprung on us. Since you won’t do your jobs and tell voters the facts, and instead you write-off Labor’s campaign to protect Medicare as nothing more than a scare campaign, I am making this official complaint about your conduct.

I also note that you never came up with some pithy little slogan or catch phrase to undermine the Liberal Opposition’s un-factual scare campaign about the mining tax, or the Carbon Price. Nor have you mentioned the current Liberal scare campaign which accuses Labor of ‘putting people smugglers back in business’. You seem to spend all your energy trying to trick politicians into gotcha-moments and would like to think of yourselves as players in the political system, rather than doing your jobs and just reporting what is really going on.

There is little credibility left in your organisation. Each time one of you says ‘Mediscare’, you get closer and closer to the zero mark.

I look forward to a response.

Regards
Victoria Rollison

As I stood next to Labor South Australian Senate candidate, Michael Allison, handing out how-to-vote cards at a local pre-polling booth, we had a chat about what inspired him to run for government. As we were chatting, I noticed the Nick Xenophon Team volunteer was wearing a traffic-light-sized badge claiming a vote for his party is a vote for a real person. Xenophon’s claim that his candidates are ‘real’, and the major party candidates are not, is a typical ‘pox on both their houses’ tactic which allows minor parties and independents to claim they’re better than the majors without having to actually reveal their own ideas and values. The media lap this stuff up. But as I chatted to Michael, and found out more about his values, it was clear his values are Labor through and through.

Simply, Michael was inspired to run for the Senate to ensure his success in life is accessible to future generations of Australians. Growing up with his mum in public housing in regional South Australia, Michael says the policies which he hopes to fight for in a Labor government are the same ones which ensured he got where he is. A good public education, access to healthcare and vocational training at TAFE are what Michael believes led him to success in life. He seems exasperated that still the Turnbull Liberal government cuts from education and health, when these cuts will destroy the chance for more young-Michaels to reach their full potential.

I’ve met people who have come from similar backgrounds to Michael, who have gone on to success in their lives, who have very different ideas about the source of their success. To put in bluntly, there’s another perspective which goes something like this: I am successful because I worked hard. Even though I wasn’t rich, it was my motivation, drive and intelligence which got me where I am, and the only reason other people from poor backgrounds don’t get to where I have got is because they haven’t worked as hard as I have. To me, this attitude denies the role the community played in that person’s life. Sure, it takes commitment to get a good education, and well done to anyone who takes advantage of the opportunities a good education presented to them. But at the end of the day, motivation, drive and intelligence is wasted if it’s not nurtured with a good education, in a safe community, with access to vital services like healthcare. Michael gets this. He is grateful to the government policies which gave him the right foundation for him to succeed in life, and now he is motivated to ensure everyone else gets the same.

After training as an electrician, Michael joined a union. His passion for community values were soon transferred into his working life, where he supported his union in defending pay and conditions for his fellow workers. A Labor government, Michael explained, is as valuable to every Australian as a union is to its members; just as a union has their workers’ backs, a Labor government has the backs of every Australian whether they be workers, business owners, students, children, retirees, everyone.

Although some people might say Michael is a fairly typical Australian bloke, working in a trade, father of young children, living on a large block a long commute from the city, watching footy on weekends and passionate about his community, Michael doesn’t think there is such a thing as a typical Australian. The only typical thing about Australians, he told me, is that we’re all different. Young or old, born here or somewhere else, rich or poor, gay or straight, worker or business owner, retiree, student, male or female, Michael says the Labor party represents all people, equally. That’s when I realised why Nick Xenophon’s accusation of Labor candidates being ‘not real’ was even more unfair. The outcomes Michael wants to achieve in a Labor government are real outcomes for real people just like him. No stunts. No slogans. No protest votes. Michael is passionate about outcomes for real people, for real change, for real progress. What could be more authentic than that?

Today a collection of business lobby groups have started an advertising campaign calling on voters to make an election issue of their election wish list: a company tax cut, ‘flexible’ industrial relations policies and less ‘red-tape’.

Before I’m accused of being ‘anti-business’, let me just state right here that I’m not anti-business. Businesses are great. They are run by innovative, entrepreneurial, risk-taking people who we should respect and admire. People invest their own money in businesses which then hire people, giving those people a chance to contribute to the success of the business, and to earn a living doing so. For the most part, employers treat their employees respectfully and give them fair and just entitlements and compensation for the work they do. But the thing is, as great as individual businesses are, they can’t be left in charge of Australia. Or, to put this more clearly, they can’t use their political arm, the Liberal Party, to control our society, or our economy, or anything really. This is why:

Individual businesses want their employees to be highly skilled, well-educated and productive, but they don’t want to pay tax to ensure everyone else’s businesses have access to highly skilled, well-educated and productive employees.

Individual businesses want their employees to be healthy so they can turn up to work every day. But they don’t want to pay tax to ensure a universal health system helps their employees be healthy enough to turn up to work.

Individual businesses want infrastructure available to help them make money, such as quality roads, well maintained sewerage and electrical systems and police and fire crews available if they ever need them, but they don’t want to pay tax to ensure this infrastructure is available.

Individual business don’t want environmental protection regulation, or worker’s safety protection, or laws about how they should keep food from going off and poisoning people, or anything they throw in the red-tape basket and constantly try to get rid of. But they also don’t want the consequences of not following these laws and regulations, such as when the environment is no longer a safe and habitable place for them to make money, or when they are sued because one of their workers is hurt or killed through unsafe work practices, or if someone is poisoned by their food.

Individual businesses need their customers to earn enough money to be customers. They need people who work on weekends to earn penalty rates so they can afford to consume stuff. They want everyone to earn enough money to have choices in the market place, to be able to buy insurance, to buy a new car, to get the latest iPhone, to have a sandwich from the local shop for lunch, to go to the movies and go out to dinner afterwards. They want a prosperous society, but many don’t want to maintain the wages of their own employees to ensure this prosperity is widespread. Many campaign against award wages, penalty rates and even the minimum wage. Many resent the entitlements that provide consumers with the time off to actually enjoy their lives, go on holidays (where they spend money), have time off to have children (children arrive with a lot of consumer spending), to renovate their homes (Bunnings does well). They expect their workers to work on casual wages, with no paid holidays or they expect salaried workers to work overtime without extra-compensation, which eats into the worker’s life and their enjoyment of their life and ultimately, their ability to consume from businesses.

I understand that individual businesses just want to make as much profit as they can, whether it be for themselves, or their shareholders, and this makes them very one-eyed and driven, some would say, blinkered, in their quest for this single-minded goal. But this individual drive to make as much profit as possible, whilst they complain about paying tax, while mostly actively work to reduce or avoid tax, when they fight against award wages, penalty rates, minimum wage and workers entitlements, when they campaign against business regulation, when they claim education and healthcare is an expense which is hurting the economy rather than helping, and when they claim a tax-cut for businesses is good for everyone, when really they know it’s only good for business owners and shareholders, they’re letting their own selfish vested-interests ruin everybody else’s prosperity, AND, and this is the crux of the matter, their own prosperity in the process. Put simply, their selfishness is bad for themselves along with everyone else.

That is why they should never be in charge of the country, and a smart country would never ever elect their representatives, the Liberal Party.

It’s not surprising that Peter Hartcher is out of touch. In his Fairfax-protected-species-ivory-tower, where he refuses to engage with readers via social media in case he might actually learn something, once again he’s failed to realise we’ve all moved on from the bullshit ‘class war’ analogies he’s peppered his SMH column with today.

If Hartcher was paying a little more attention these last few years, rather than spending the entire term of the previous Gillard government publishing Rudd-leaks and rather than using his powerful position as political editor to commentate politics like a sporting-match, he might have realised Labor’s political narrative has shifted. This change isn’t due to the ‘media-cycle’, ‘spin’, or ‘political games’ or ‘election winning strategies’. This shift is in response to what is going on in the world, out here in reality, a reality Hartcher doesn’t seem able to understand.

As far back as 2014, the Guardian, characteristically, were way ahead of the rest of the media in reporting unequivocal statements by the IMF: inequality is bad for economic growth. Yet, two years later, Hartcher is still playing the two-horse-race game of Liberals-for-economic-growth and Labor-against-economic-growth because he just doesn’t get it. The irony of him asking Shorten for more nuance would be amusing if it weren’t so frustratingly hypocritical.

In Hartcher’s column today, his argument is that Labor has ramped up ‘anti-business-rhetoric’, which suits Shorten’s trade union background, as opposed to Turnbull’s big-business identity. Hartcher makes the point that Labor’s policies aren’t actually anti-business, but that this is what Shorten is ‘saying’ and therefore Shorten needs to stop ‘saying’ it. Note there are no quotes in the article from Shorten in response to this criticism, nor from anyone else in the united Labor opposition who are 100% on-board with Shorten’s narrative this election. Funny that.

Instead, we get, you guessed it, neoliberal ideological warrior Tony Sheppard, author of the Abbott-budget-written-by-big-business Commission of Audit saying:

‘governments need to encourage business growth because that leads to investment, jobs and the tax revenues that pay for health and education and everything else’.

Then we also get former Labor president Warren Mundine who has also in News Limited this week admitting Labor isn’t the party he used to run, which by the way Mundine, is a really good thing because you don’t understand economic growth any better than your mate Hartcher or Sheppard, saying:

‘Consider the anti-business rhetoric in this election. Past Labor leaders understood government can only create the conditions for jobs and enterprise to thrive. It’s business that generates economic growth through investment and innovation. Federal Labor don’t seem to get this’.

I will address all three of these dinosaurs’ mistakes in one statement and I’ll write it in bold in case that helps with their comprehension:

Economic growth does not pay for health and education and everything else. Health and education and everything else drives economic growth. Businesses do not generate economic growth in order to build the conditions for jobs and enterprise to thrive. Proper social investment builds the conditions for jobs and enterprise to thrive. You have everything topsy-turvy-round-the-wrong-way-you’re-so-confused-I’m-surprised-your-pants-aren’t-on-your-head-get-with-the-program-you’re-actually-hurting-the-economy-with-your-outdated-ill-conceived-attempts-at-telling-us-how-the-world-works-just-go-away. I will spell it out clearly: the conditions for economic growth are strong investment in education, health, infrastructure, a solid social-safety-net no-body-left-behind consumer-led-growth wealth-distributed-more-equally world. Businesses do not hire more people because they get tax cuts. Businesses hire more people and grow the pie when there is strong consumer base, with good health, education, strong wages and therefore available disposable income. Economic growth requires a strong society as its very foundation.

Once you understand these very simple-even-a-5-year-old-can-understand facts, your argument that Labor is anti-business because they point out this fact, actually makes Labor extremely pro-business and makes Turnbull’s tax cut at the expense of proper investment in all the things which actually help the economy a really bad thing for business. Since business is the only thing these dinosaurs care about, perhaps it’s time they did what was right for business and advocate policies which will actually help economic growth. If you haven’t noticed the damage the Liberal government has done to the economy in the last three years, well, perhaps you’re just not paying attention.

It’s because of the likes of Hartcher, Sheppard and Mundine’s misunderstanding of the world that we are in the economic mess we are now. Rising inequality hurts all of us. The IMF understands. Credible economists understand. Labor understands. But we still have too many dinosaurs who refuse to get it. I just wish these dinosaurs would hurry up to extinction so a good government can work on fixing the economy for all our benefit.

You can always tell when someone is losing an argument because they start shouting over their opponent, getting shriller and often more sensationalised, immature and, well, obvious in their losing position. These quotes from Morrison’s press conference today display such behaviour:

‘War on business’. ‘Using taxes as their bullets’. ‘Declare war on growth in our economy’. ‘Toxic taxes’. ‘…chosen weapons in his war against business and his war on growth’.

Of course I don’t know what’s happening behind the scenes of the Turnbull election campaign. But I can guess. Judging by the ramping up of the class-war rhetoric displayed in this clunky over-reach example, I predict there is a mixture of panic and on-the-run strategizing going on because the old tricks are failing.

I think the Liberals are scrambling for something tougher, harder, with more cut through because the old-reliable lines aren’t working. Perhaps I give them too much credit, and perhaps their class-war language is just a coincidence. However, I’m guessing Turnbull’s Liberals have been spooked by Labor’s positive campaign, and the positive impact this campaign is having on Labor’s popularity in the polls, and they’re scrambling to stem the tide. I think the Liberals have worked out they’re losing the argument.

Just to recap, the two ex-stalwart lines which aren’t working are:

• A focus on national security through bashing boat people. The Liberals jumped the shark by trying to tie the arrival of asylum seekers to Australia’s economic problems – epitomised by the community’s aghast reaction at Dutton saying boat people will simultaneously steal jobs and languish on the dole. This strategy no longer works because the ‘asylum seeker’ frame has been extended to ‘immigrants’ and we are a country of immigrants, many of whom are incredibly proud of arriving in this country with little English and nothing more than determination to succeed, and don’t appreciate Dutton stamping on their achievements by implying they leaned their way to prosperity. The dog whistle is broken.
• A reliance on the idea that a Liberal government manages the economy better than a Labor government so even if you don’t like Liberal’s social policies, you’ll still back Liberals because the economy comes first. Shorten is slowly yet surely breaking this narrative through his newfound determination to remind everyone that you can’t have economic growth without a strong community underpinning economic demand. I wrote about this last week, but in a nutshell, without government investment in education, health, wage defence, environmental protection, a proper social safety net, infrastructure such as the NBN and public transport and so on, the economy doesn’t have a foundation on which to grow. It seems like Australia is waking up to this idea, helped on by the failure of trickle-down economics to provide any benefit to anyone except the top 1% and the understanding that a tax-cut for companies at the expense of social investment is hindering, not helping the economy. Amen to that!

In having discovered neither of their two key-election-winning-pillars working, like superheroes who’ve lost their super-powers, the Liberals are in desperate search for a new strategy. Because they’ve been left with nothing. At the very same time, neoliberalism has been declared dead, or at least slowly bleeding to death. So you can see why the Liberals have reached panic-station point and are wishing they’d never called a double-dissolution election in the first place. Diddums.

In the leaders’ debate on Sunday night, Turnbull’s most used word was ‘Labor’. The thing the Prime Minister wanted to talk most about was the Labor opposition. This decisively proves Labor is setting the agenda this election and the Liberal’s panic decisively proves they have worked this out.

The Liberal’s response to this panic has shown they don’t have the innovative, agile culture Turnbull likes to claim they do and so rather than come up with anything new, they’ve fallen back onto their oldest strategy: demonising Labor and screaming CLASS WAR! CLASS WAR! CLASS WAR!

There’s a major flaw in this plan which no doubt, due to the panic and the lack of other ideas, hasn’t been considered: the cries of class war play right into Labor’s hands. Shorten can calmly, and even smugly if he likes, say ‘yes, you’re right. There is a class war. Your company tax breaks have proved which side you’re on. And everyone else is now fighting back. This election is our chance to put an end to unsustainable inequality, and instead grow the economy for everyone’s benefit. Who’s with me?’ Bam.

A house with bad foundations is a bad house. I don’t care how nice the hedge is out the front, I don’t care if it has air-conditioning, polished floorboards or, for that matter, an industrial-sized $6,000 toaster. If the foundations haven’t been built solidly, everything on top of those foundations is bad and liable to fall down at any minute. I don’t want to live in a house with bad foundations.

This example shows the nonsensical myth that underpins political commentary, and in turn, voter perception, and is spouted around the place like Gospel with no-one questioning its very premise. This myth was once again trotted out by John Hewson this week when he compared the Liberal’s ‘jobs and growth’ slogan with Labor’s ‘we’ll put people first’. Hewson wrote ‘Perceptions about the two major political parties are well entrenched in the electorate psyche. The Liberal/National Coalition is consistently seen in the polls as “better economic managers”, while the ALP is consistently seen as “better to manage education and health”.’

This statement is based on a myth. It’s a myth which Labor needs to get much better at countering. The myth is that there is a choice: either you can have a government who cares about the economy, or a government who cares about people. Labor needs to emphatically argue that you can’t have one without the other.

There is, in fact, no choice. Either you spend on health and education and other social initiatives which benefit people, and in turn reap the rewards in an economic sense. Or you slash and burn spending on health and education and other social initiatives which benefit people, and see the economy come crashing down into a smouldering heap. THERE IS NO CHOICE!

Let’s look at it another way. The economy is just a collection of people. It’s not a big machine in the sky which we need to bow down to and sacrifice lambs on and feed with gold bullions and hope that it likes us to it doesn’t punish us and kill off our money. The economy is us.

I will take this one step further and say there is no such thing as a community AND an economy, sitting side by side as two siloes of concern in our lives. That’s like saying ‘I have a job’ and ‘I have a family’ and these two lives don’t interact at all and live in separate realities and have no relation to each other. The economy, and the society, and the community, is just a collection of people interacting, and is all one THING. If you don’t look after all of it, all of it will suffer. If you cut off the arm and let the body bleed out until it can no longer survive, the whole thing is dead. If the people in this thing, in this economy, society, community, marketplace, money-making world, whatever you want to call it, if in this world people haven’t had their health, education, infrastructure, wages, technology, environment looked after, the economy is going to suffer.

I’m not sure how I can make it any more simple, except to say that there really is no choice. Education is not an aside, a nice thing to have. Healthcare is not a cost which we have to bear, with its consequences having no impact on the ability of people to maintain economic growth.

So every time you hear someone say, ‘I vote Liberal because they’ll look after the economy’, think of my house example and remember, this voter might be interested in hanging pretty curtains in the bedrooms but if at the same time they’re skimping on the materials for strong foundations, the whole house is going to fall over. Please don’t vote for an unliveable house. THERE IS NO CHOICE!

The last three years of Liberal National government have been absolutely nightmarish. Their ideological wrecking-ball has crashed through every imaginable progressive policy area. They have been ferocious in their quest for small government and a neoliberal economy that benefits only the wealth and privilege of the tiny few at the top end of town.

You would think progressives would see this election as finally a chance to end the daily horror. You would think the risk of this government getting a second term, and an awareness of the even-scarier havoc this government could create with a majority in the senate might compel progressives into a united army, dedicated and driven in their mission to rid us of this threat. You would think.

Devastatingly, and we-need-a-stronger-new-word-for-frustratingly, this is not happening.

This tweet by Greens supporter Catherine Deveny is what’s actually happening:

Catherine’s tweet mirrors the campaign of the Greens Party and Richard Di Natale, who, on the first day of the election, proclaimed that his priority this campaign is taking Labor-held inner-city Sydney and Melbourne seats such as Anthony Albanese’s seat of Grayndler, Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney and David Feeney’s seat of Batman.

This week, the Greens joined Liberals in criticising Feeney when it was revealed he had a second property which hadn’t been declared, criticism which spectacularly back-fired when Di Natale was found to have done the very same thing. Add to this that Di Natale’s family paid au pairs a pittance for caring for his two children as live in house-keepers, it was not a good look for a man claiming to be pure after spending a week attacking Labor over penalty rates. All in all, it’s been a messy mud-slinging week of tit-for-tat between the Greens and Labor, helping again to take the spotlight off the real challenge for progressives this election; beating the Turnbull government.

Now, of course I’m not saying Greens don’t have the right to run against inner-city Labor candidates and to partake in dirt-slinging campaigns attacking Labor, because they have a right to do whatever they want in a democratic election.

But if they can do whatever they want, so can I do whatever I want, and point out that this campaign by the Greens is helping the Liberals win a second term. This campaign by the Greens is helping Liberals win a second term. I said it twice on purpose.

While the Greens focus on defeating Labor by putting their limited time, money, volunteers, media opportunities, campaign strategies, dirt-slinging and apparently-star-candidates (which is questionable in the case of Casey who admits to loving the idea of an Abbott government, at least he’s honest) into defeating Labor MPs, and while the likes of Deveny and thousands of other Greens supporters spend all their time and energy ranting and yelling about how bad Labor is and how evil Labor is and how nobody should ever vote Labor ever and how if you do, you’re a heartless-asylum-seeker-hater who deserves to be spat at on the street, the Liberals are absolutely loving every minute of it.

The Liberals are loving that Labor has to spend time, money and volunteers in safe Labor seats when Labor’s time, money and volunteers would be more effectively spent campaigning in marginal seats held by Liberals. The Liberals are loving the calls from the Devenys for people not to vote Labor, because the opposite of not voting Labor in our preferential electoral system is voting Liberal instead. Unless you put the Liberals last – or at least below Labor – you are effectively voting for them.

And do you know what the Liberals love even more? They love when the Greens are so desperate to beat Labor, that they do preference deals with Liberals. Preference deals which help the Liberals get more votes, thereby increasing Liberal’s chances of winning more seats than Labor and winning a second term of government. What’s not to love!

This willingness by the Greens to do deals with Liberals to help them defeat Labor comes on top of the Greens kindly helping the Liberals change senate voting laws, potentially increasing the chances of a Liberal senate majority, and reducing the vote for independents and minor parties who were instrumental in blocking not one, but three horror-Liberal-budgets, saving the country from some of the worst of the Liberal agenda.

To Greens who have already started yelling at their screens ‘THERE IS NO PREFERENCE DEAL’, which I have had yelled at me on Twitter approximately 12,000 times since the apparent preference deal was written about by Chris Wallace in the (firewalled) Saturday Paper last weekend, please read the article. For those who can’t access it, here is a summary: Victorian Liberal Party President Michael Kroger is likely to direct preferences (quote from article): ‘to the Greens in five Melbourne and Sydney seats’ in a strategy ‘to divide and rule the progressive side of politics’ (my emphasis). In return, the deal (quote from article) ‘would see the Greens issue “open tickets” that don’t direct preferences in a number of vulnerable marginal Liberal seats. While not a “swap”, the preference deal would subtly, but in extremely tight contests potentially decisively, affect the result by shifting the two-party-preferred vote a few vital percentage points’. Note, ‘affect the result’ means affecting the result in both the marginal seat AND THE WHOLE ELECTION, which is predicted to be tight.

Has this deal been confirmed? No. Are the Greens denying it? Yes. But they would wouldn’t they. How will the public ever know if such a deal was made? The Liberal how-to-vote card in five Melbourne and Sydney inner-city seats will direct preferences to Greens ahead of Labor. And there will be some Greens open-ticket how-to-vote cards floating around the place, which the Greens will no doubt claim just miraculously, coincidentally, I-don’t-know-how-that-happened-because-it-certainly-wasn’t-our-intention-to-help-the-Liberals-slippery-little-suckers-weasle-words and there MOST DEFINITELY IS NOT A DEAL! So we will see. And until we see, I will remain very very nervous about such a deal, because, even though of course preference deals happen all the time and they’re just a reality of political life, this particularly dirty deal, as Wallace has pointed out, could be the difference between a defeat and a second term for the Liberal government.

Everything is at risk: Gonski school funding, climate change policy, accessible higher education, workers’ rights, Medicare, housing affordability, national infrastructure such as public transport and the National Broadband Network, and I could go on on and on.

I can’t imagine how privileged your life would have to be, sitting in an inner-city Café, drinking a luke-warm Latte, to not have a care in the world except maintaining your comfortable spot on your high horse, screaming at anyone unlucky enough to come into your path that the Labor asylum seeker policy is THE ONLY THING THAT MATTERS THIS ELECTION. And even if no other policy mattered to you, if you really were so privileged that you didn’t care about any other progressive policies because you hadn’t been hurt by, nor cared if your community was hurt by Liberal policies, and all you really did care about was immigration policy, how on earth can any sane, compassionate person possibly equate this one-and-only-care with the risk of continuing the Liberal’s asylum seeker policy, which results in zero chance of resettlement for refugees, thousands and thousands fewer refugees given a chance to live in Australia and complete and utter disregard for the safety, health and wellbeing of the poor, desperate people living in indefinite detention. And not only risk this outcome, but betters the chances of it through a preference deal? Really? You’d help the Liberals keep their asylum seeker policy if it meant stealing a few seats off Labor? Really?

If the Greens continue with their ‘beat Labor at all costs’ campaign and do make a deal-with-the-devil to win inner-city Labor seats, and Labor do manage to win the election regardless, this progressive win will be despite the Greens. Because the Greens aren’t just not helping. They’re determined to be a hindrance to Labor and therefore are effectively giving a leg-up to the Liberals. How they live with this reality, and vote for it, is beyond me.