The lies just keep coming

THE Victorian election result and the continuing decay of Labor governments federally and in every state the ALP still holds highlights the failure of Labor's claim to be the party of good management and the problems of its shift toward the Green-Left.

Former Treasurer and Prime Minister Paul Keating may have draped himself in a Zegna suit to project an air of Gordon Gekko business savvy but his Labor successors, state and federal, have demonstrated that running a business, a department or an economy requires more than a spivvy set of duds and a pre-programmed publicist from the Hawker Britton stable. Gauging by their sentiment, voters across the country now know that Labor cannot differentiate between spin and substance. If a minister - state or federal - makes an announcement, Labor has attempted to con punters into believing that something has really happened but, as the polls show, the voters are tired of being lied to. They are over spin. Writing in The Australian yesterday, Noel Pearson noted that "one of the problems with the popularisation of the word spin is that it has trivialised what is the deliberate and systematic misrepresentation of the truth and the promulgation of misleading interpretations of facts designed to deceive the listening and viewing public. Spin ends up trivialising a scourge in our democracy, because it sanctions a subtle process of suggestive misleading by elected representatives." In NSW, the ABC's morning radio presenter Deborah Cameron's Green-Left program features a regular segment called the Spin Doctors which contributes to the normalisation of Labor's deceitful distortions. A master of the art of spin is Federal Health Minister Nicola Roxon who promised before the 2007 federal election that Labor's $645 million roll-out of GP super-clinics would provide "after-hours care" with links to relevant health care call centres and would be "encouraged to bulk bill". Obviously a winner with focus groups, 36 super-clinics were to be delivered in 2008 Labor's first term, and, with focus groups still supporting the promise, a further 28 during the current term. In reality, only seven of the clinics are actually operating, and, in reality, only one - in Devonport, Tasmania - is providing an in-house after-hours service, according to an audit conducted by The Australian newspaper. The others either had no available after-hours doctors or provided the contact number for a GP who serviced the local region on their answering machine. Only two of the seven clinics audited - Ballan in Victoria and Strathpine in Queensland - provided universal bulk billing, with most only providing it to under-16s and concession-card holders, the newspaper found. Yet Roxon has the hide to defend her failure to deliver as evidence of the Government's determination to "get it right". Seven out of a promised 36 and then two years late does not sound like a successful program or a well-managed one and the failure to meet the key objectives of providing after-hours care and bulk billing cannot be wished away, though Roxon has now begun downplaying these items as just mere factors to be taken into account in the assessment of the super clinics. It doesn't take too much to understand that is service delivery failure with a capital "F". Which gives the lie to Labor senator Doug Cameron's excuses for the loss of the Victorian Labor government last weekend. On Sky's Agenda program on Thursday, Cameron made the claim that one of the major issues was the delivery of services before bizarrely blaming the privatisation of transport services in Victoria as the problem. Transport, he said, "has never recovered from privatisation. It's a big problem and I think that people see that as a key issue." Privatisation? As if the Victorian public wanted a return to the bad old days of poorly run government railways with all of the attendant problems caused by the brothers in the trade union movement. Coming from NSW, where commuters have to face overcrowded trains daily, where buses don't run to time and where the ticketing is as problematic as it is in Victoria, Cameron seems as divorced from reality as Roxon and provides a real clue as to the reason Labor is losing across the nation. As one of his senior NSW Labor colleagues told me when reviewing the Victorian election, "Labor didn't connect with the suburbs" and the reason it didn't is because Labor (at every level) no longer knows what it stands for. Try standing at a suburban railway station waiting for a non-existent train and talking to the commuters about the need to revisit the US alliance, work harder (in the dark) for a carbon-free future and spend more time rethinking our Middle East policy, or even, engage the average person on the pressing need to debate gay marriage and euthanasia and there's a reasonable chance of provoking an outburst of commuter rage. Remember, though, that the political climate can only get worse from next July when the Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate and begin pushing their social agenda, a social agenda that the gibbering Independent Rob Oakeshott has already enthusiastically embraced. The more optimistic of Labor's more serious thinkers are hoping that the effect of the Greens might be hampered by their own in-fighting, predicting a split between the former communists Lee Rhiannon and Adam Bandt, and those who came up through the dwindling ranks of the environmentalist movement. But that may not be enough to erode the Greens' influence on Prime Minister Julia Gillard who rushed into signing a written agreement with Greens leader Bob Brown in return for his support in her mongrel coalition. The Greens lost an upper house seat in Victoria and failed to win any lower house places. Even the inner-urban latte lappers might be seeing through the Greens' simplistic propaganda, which leaves Gillard looking as if she went ugly early. This view was supported by Keating in an interview with the ABC's Lateline last Wednesday when he said "the climate-change fiasco gave the Greens a real opportunity". He went on to say that "the Labor Party should never concede space to the Greens. Minor parties always, through the proportional system, climb into the Senate and get into a bargaining position", and he advocated moving Labor back into "the mainstream, and we will, then the relative position of the Greens will change. But I wouldn't be giving them any space unnecessarily. The two-party system matters to this country and fracturing it won't be a good thing." The task for Gillard and her government over Christmas will be to show that she is capable of managing something, anything, and that she can stand up to the Greens. Otherwise, Labor's new year is looking very bleak, indeed.