Tory Shepherd: Political dirty deeds come mighty steep

Political fibs during election campaigns are nothing new, but we reached a previously untapped level of shamelessness during the 2019 campaign, which was absolutely riddled with falsehoods and blatant lies, writes Tory Shepherd.

Democracy is at stake here and there is no doubt people are voting based on wrong information. Picture: William West/AFP

Welcome to post-truth politics.

While pundits start to pull apart the results, Labor stares ever deeper into its own navel, and Prime Minister Scott Morrison believes his win was a matter of supernatural intervention, one thing is clear: the hallmark of the election campaign was the extraordinary amount of bunkum being sprayed around. There was flummery and gibberish and jiggery-pokery. Balderdash and ballyhoo.

Lies, damned lies, and misleading statistics.

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One could even go as far as saying the whole exercise was slathered in ackamarackus, defined by the Oxford Dictionary as “pretentious nonsense, something intended to deceive; humbug”.

Both major parties knew full well before this election the damage a concocted scare campaign could do. Scare campaigns rustle up fear through misinformation. And they work.

Labor, under former prime minister Julia Gillard, was pummelled by the “carbon tax” that was not a tax. At its peak, then-Nationals Leader Barnaby Joyce said that not only would a lamb roast cost $100 but the whole animal would cost more than a house.

Labor then created “Mediscare” — a campaign on the false premise that the Coalition was going to privatise Medicare.

Senior Liberals are still smarting about how successful that particular bit of hogwash was.

Clive Palmer’s UAP lies were shameless. Picture: Nikki Davis-Jones

Political fibs are nothing new — but there is a new level of shamelessness. And of course there’s the internet — so people can spread muck far and wide, or target it to a specific group.

The 2019 campaign was absolutely riddled with falsehoods.

One of the most audacious was the idea that Labor was going to introduce death taxes, taking a 40 per cent chunk out of people’s inheritance. That oozed through social media despite being a complete fiction.

The most pervasive was the “retiree tax”.

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Renaming the Labor Party’s plan to wind back cash refunds for imputation credits a “tax” was evil genius.

There were big swings against Labor in electorates with more people aged over 60.

We may never know just how many people wrongly believed they would be affected.

Some thought all franking credits would be removed. Many didn’t realise pensioners were not affected.

Plenty of people probably didn’t understand what was happening at all — but felt fearful anyway.

Critics of the policy said it would hit people on low taxable incomes — but neglected to add very rich people can have low taxable incomes.

The Coalition’s death tax scare campaign seriously hurt Labor, despite being based on no real evidence. Picture: AAP/Joel Carrett

Clive Palmer was one of the worst culprits, though his egregious lies were often overshadowed by the sheer ridiculousness of what he was saying and the sheer scale of his advertising spending. GetUp! falsely accused Treasurer Josh Frydenberg of being involved in the Malcolm Turnbull coup. In a strange exchange, far-Right extremist Neil Erikson told people he had met conservative West Australian MP Andrew Hastie.

Mr Hastie denied the meeting happened. Then Mr Erikson said he had made up the story to drive votes towards now-ousted racist senator Fraser Anning.

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There was bull said about carbon emissions, claims people would have to hand over their utes.

One Nation was busted suggesting the Port Arthur massacre was some sort of set-up, and leader Pauline Hanson tried to suggest damning footage of her colleagues variously trying to flog off Australia’s gun laws or leering and grabbing at women was some sort of Islamist plot.

Opposition Leader Bill Shorten said — more than once — “everything is going up except your wages”.

Wages are growing — albeit at a sloth’s pace. RMIT’s Factcheck called out Labor for thundering about Coalition “cuts” on health and education, when in fact spending will increase (just not as much as Labor had planned).

The Labor Party’s ‘Mediscare’ campaign from the previous election took things up a notch. Picture: AAP/James Ross

You can’t mislead parliament but you can certainly mislead the Australian people.

With no punishment at all — Australia has no rules on truth in federal political advertising.

The Australian Electoral Commission did its best, urging people to analyse whether information was reliable. But they’re toothless on truth.

Federal parliament has been ruminating on some sort of legislation to stop the peddling of lies for decades.

Every time there’s some momentum, though, someone throws up their hands and says it’s all too hard. It would be tough to enforce, tricky to work out what is untrue, and social media is still a frontier town as far as honesty is concerned.

That’s not good enough.

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Democracy is at stake here and there is no doubt people are voting based on wrong information. Fear always trumps hope when it comes to campaigns, so politicians will not give up their scare campaigns without a fight. Not when there are votes to be won.

We’ll never completely stop politicians playing fast and loose with the truth. But it’s time we did something to tackle the rising tide of bull.