At Least Turnbull Has Beaten “Confirmation Bias” and “The Halo Effect”!

Some of you will remember me talking about confirmation bias in the past. Basically, it’s where you notice the evidence that backs up your previously held position and fail to see anything that contradicts it. For example, when Australia performed badly at the Montreal Olympics where they failed to win a single gold medal, politicians decided that we needed to spend money setting up the AIS. Compare that to the reaction to the recent NAPLAN results. (Regardless of your attitude to education generally, you need to be aware that much of the concern was the results were “flatlining” and we weren’t showing as much improvement as we wanted.) Did the politicians suggest that we needed a centre for teaching excellence? Nah, it just showed that spending on education is a waste of money and that we just need better teachers, so let’s make ’em all sit some test so that anyone who can’t do maths doesn’t get to be a secondary Literature teacher.

And, I suspect that your reaction to my example will be in line with your own attitudes to education. I’m sure that someone will tell me that education hasn’t been as good since we stopped teaching Latin and singing “God Save The King” while simultaneously reciting our times tables, before learning about how babies were made behind the shelter sheds during playtime. I mean, the learning not the making, of course. Generally speaking babies weren’t made behind the shelter sheds, but if they were, they would have been Australian made babies, not those imported babies that concern Ms. Hanson so much.

Speaking of Pauline, did you happen to notice that after the ATO in Box Hill installed some “squat toilets” for the benefit of those wishing to use them, she was in the media complaining. I was terribly disappointed that nobody used the headline: “HANSON: USE OUR TOILETS OR PISS OFF”!

However, the point of this is not about education or Senator Hanson, it’s about Malcolm Turnbull who has allegedly been impersonating a Prime Minister. Personally, I don’t see much evidence for this, and I very much doubt that it could be proven beyond a reasonable doubt. Although sources close to Mr Turnbull have assured sources close to me that every now and then Mr Turnbull slows down the whole decision making process by suddenly ceasing to stare out the window and insist that people catch him up with what’s been happening in the meeting for the past hour or so.

When Malcolm Turnbull was given the role of standing up in Parliament and telling everyone that he wasn’t Tony Abbott, I suspected that it was going to be hard for him to lose so much support so quickly. At the time, it was much more evident that he wasn’t Tony Abbott and I suspected that confirmation bias would benefit him for a long, long time. “At least he’s better than Abbott,” was a phrase I expected to hear whenever he did something, or failed to do something. (The latter being more consistent with Turnbull’s modus operandi as a politician.) Unfortunately for Mr Turnbull, merely deciding not to hold interviews in swimming attire is not enough to convince people that he was a significant improvement on his predecessor.

I expected that the little changes that he made to direction of the government would have people saying, “There! I told you that he’d be better!” and completely ignoring all the evidence that didn’t suit the proposition. For example, when he changed the government policy on…

Mm, nothing immediately springs to mind. I’ll get back to you on that.

I also expected that – after the shipwreck that we refer to “Abbott’s time in government” – Turnbull would continue to benefit from the “halo effect” which to quote from Wikipedia (if it’s good enough for the Greatest Minister in The World to do it, why can’t I?)

“The halo effect is a cognitive bias in which an observer’s overall impression of a person, company, brand, or product influences the observer’s feelings and thoughts about that entity’s character or properties.”

So that’s why we expect sportspeople to be “role models”. And that’s why we judge the positions and actions of politicians differently depending on whether we support their party or not. For example, when Scott Morrison said that he was just following Tony “Titanic” Abbott’s orders on the Malaysian solution, I’m sure many who admire our Treasurer would see that as admirable loyalty, while criticising the Nazis for using the same defence at Nuremberg.

For a while, Turnbull did seem to benefit from the halo effect. According to some sections of the media, whatever decision Malcolm made was viewed from the prism that, if a clever man like Mr Turnbull had done it, then it must be a clever move. When he suggested that the states could impose income tax one day then say that it wasn’t going to happen the next, he’d “brilliantly” put the states on notice and made it clear that they needed to “live within their means”. And when he announced the double dissolution which everyone had been expecting for several weeks, he apparently caught Labor by surprise with his daring move. Of course by making it about the ABCC, it put Labor in an impossible position and ensured a comprehensive victory.

But that’s all done now. In less than a year, Turnbull has achieved the impossible. Both the Right and the Left agree that Turnbull is a dud – no other PM has managed a consensus like that between the likes of Andrew Bolt and the late Bob Ellis.

Not only that, but he’s managed to show that neither confirmation bias nor the halo effect are enough, when you don’t actually have any sort of a coherent plan.

Yes, yes I know they have plans for jobs and growth and innovation. They plan to be in favour of them, if they happen.