Remember public policy debates? Where once were national conversations we now find a wall of sound comprised of debate deadening sound bites.
There is nothing to discuss about the merits or otherwise of pork barrelling in 2009 because we’re actually ‘building an education revolution’. Similarly, opposition to debt is choosing to ‘do nothing’ in the face of a ‘rolling global financial crisis’.
Throwing other people’s taxes at the dead and incarcerated is actually ‘decisive action to stay ahead of the curve’. Questioning the Emissions Trading Scheme is to be a ‘Neanderthal’, a ‘sceptic’ and ‘denialist’ – the modern day equivalent of refusing to accept that the earth is round.
The Liberal party at times appears to think that good policy and its record in office alone will break through this wall of sound and see it re-elected to government.
If this really is the Libs’ strategy, then they have learnt nothing from New South Wales or the recent history of the Conservative Party in Britain.
In both instances it was only when the cumulative effect of years of spin above sound public administration came home to roost that people took any notice of the opposition.
Sadly, by then the wheels had so well and truly fallen off that it was virtually impossible for people not to notice the mounting body of evidence that their leaders had failed them.
In the case of NSW, the boom decade was squandered under the Carr and Iemma Labor governments. The rivers of revenue from the GST and a booming economy were used to buy off political problems and delay taking hard decisions.
At the very time Victoria was reaping the dividends of the Kennett revolution, Premier Carr was saying all the right things whilst using extra cash to make time stand still, avoid reform and appease public sector unions with big pay rises.
The spin kept the failing administration alive right up until 2007 when Premier Iemma assured us there really was no need to worry. Sure ‘there’s more to do, but we’re heading in the right direction’.
Eventually the wall of sound gave way to the reality of desperately overcrowded trains, clogged roads, crumbling schools, high taxes and poor administration. The NSW Government was officially ‘on the nose’. Reality bites – eventually.
It was a similar story in the United Kingdom, home of the original New Labour spin machine. Inventers, incidentally, of the meaningless, undefinable term ‘balancing the budget over the economic cycle’ which the Rudd Government has adopted as its own.
Whilst Prime Minister Blair and Chancellor Brown backed their ‘cyclically balanced’ budgets with a ‘golden rule’, Rudd and Swan are pinning theirs on ‘temporary deficits’. Recent events have shown all will end in an old fashioned black hole.
Over a decade of assiduously applying the golden rule has left the UK teetering on the edge of having its credit rating downgraded.
Importantly for the Liberals, it’s only now, as recession bites and people wonder how they ended up with government finances in a similar state to when the dust settled on WWII (sans the six year war) that the Conservatives are looking like a chance.
At a recent event I was discussing this predicament with former Prime Minister John Howard. ‘The public know’, he stated, ‘the good state we left the country in’.
Be that as it may, it’s extremely unlikely they will elect a new Liberal Government on the back of what it did last time it was in office.
The Liberal Party owes it to the 47% of Australians who voted for them in 2007 to get its message across before it’s impossible to ignore. Federally, they must learn from the experience of their NSW and Tory colleagues to find a way to counter the wall of sound before reality bites.
If the Liberal Party’s message is not cutting through it must find out why. Assuming it’s not the wrong message, it must be too complicated, nuanced, inconsistent or poorly articulated to mean anything to people.
The solution the Liberals arrive at must acknowledge that in the absence of substantive evidence to the contrary, most Australians will instinctively give those they elect the benefit of the doubt.
Consequently, many voters take comfort in the fact that the government will ‘balance the budget over the economic cycle’, even though they might not have asked themselves what, if anything, it really means.
The Labor party understand this.
They also understand that most people have only a passing interest in politics, particularly between elections.
News junkies and political tragics may tire of hearing the same, unsubstantiated sound bites replace genuine, old fashioned public debate and national conversations.
But the fact is the Labor party are getting their message through and many key swinging voters are pleased there is an education revolution underway and the government is using temporary deficits to protect the country from a rolling financial crisis.
Reality, it seems, it yet to bite. Therein lays the challenge for the Liberal Party.
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