Michael McGuire: Parties resort to fear campaigns in last week of election campaign, don’t fall for them

AS the crescendo builds to Saturday’s election and the desperation takes hold, all parties will fall back to the elemental — the fear campaign. Don’t let fear win, writes Michael McGuire.

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CAN you feel the fear building? As the crescendo builds to Saturday’s election and the desperation takes hold, all parties will fall back to the elemental — the fear campaign.

Fear beats all other emotions, but mainly hope. Its only real rival during an election campaign is hypocrisy, which may be more of a vice than an emotion.

It’s sad to see a venerated figure such as the former prime minister Bob Hawke reduced to fronting silly fear campaigns to help state election campaigns. The bloke is 88, can’t he be allowed a little dignity in his fading years?

He was dug out this week to front a Labor Facebook ad designed to stoke fear. “The Liberals have always been about cuts and privatisation of essential services,’’ the grey eminence intoned. “The last time the SA Liberals were in power, they privatised ETSA.’’

Former prime minister Bob Hawke appearing on an ad for Labor in the South Australian State Election.

Hawke neglected to mention, of course, that when he was PM he started the processes that led to the privatisation of the Commonwealth Bank, Qantas, then he sold off AUSSAT, which became Optus, which in turn paved the way for the sale of Telstra. So Hawke’s view is consistent only if you don’t count banking, telecommunications and aviation as “essential services”.

It’s easy enough to see where state Labor found the idea to make Hawke the grim reaper of privatisation. During the 2016 election campaign he fronted a similar campaign for federal Labor on the topic of the Liberal’s supposed plan to privatise Medicare.

There was no such plan but that wasn’t the point. Hawke was roped in to lend his charisma and to warn Australia from the depth of the 1980s that Medicare needed to be saved. The video was viewed more than 400,000 times on Facebook and the “Mediscare” campaign was seen as one of the prime reasons Bill Shorten ran Malcolm Turnbull so close in the race for the prime ministership.

The SA version of the Hawke ad has been viewed more than 90,000 times on Facebook and coincided with Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis unveiling his own pitiful stunt.

In a bid to revive the ghost of the ETSA sale, Koutsantonis posed with a cardboard cut-out of Liberal treasury spokesman Rob Lucas, who guided the privatisation process in the late 1990s. Electricity prices are a serious concern for many South Australians, but Koutsantonis is attempting to pull a swiftie by implying: “Don’t worry about what we have been doing wrong for the past 16 years, worry about what the Libs did 20 years ago.”

Treasurer Tom Koutsantonis outside SA Power Networks. Picture: AAP / David Mariuz

Perhaps, it’s a message that would have some credibility if the Labor Party hadn’t spent quite a bit of the last 16 years selling off the Motor Accident Commission, state lotteries, state forests, Lands Title Office, not to mention a variety of other land and buildings. This is despite a swag of “no privatisation” pledges since 2002.

But it’s not about consistency, or policy or credibility. While the public professes not to like negative campaigns, the professionals keep wheeling them out because they work.

In this campaign, Labor has run the privatisation line, the Libs paint a picture of a state headed for massive tax and electricity price rises, of a state where the young will flee and business will grind to a halt.

Both Labor and Liberal have attacked Nick Xenophon. Labor say he is a Liberal stooge who will combine with Steven Marshall to cut services. The Liberals say he is standing “arm in arm’’ with Labor. The Australian Hotels’ Association wants you to believe every pub in the state is at risk of closing if Xenophon is elected.

It’s all depressingly stupid.

To work, these fear campaigns need a modicum of truth, a sliver of reality. They need to tap into a fear that a voter holds, no matter how dormant it may be. Fear doesn’t have to be rational, it just needs to be real.

It was fear that Donald Trump played into with his election victory. Fear of Mexicans, fear of immigrants, fear of Hillary Clinton, fear that someone, somewhere in the world was doing better than America. Some of the same fears propelled the British public’s vote to leave the European Union. Expect more this week. More fear. More from Labor, more from the Liberals.

But don’t vote in fear, make a decision based on logic and reason. Don’t let fear win.