The long and Shorten of this campaign is that Bill is happy to lie to Australian public

OPPOSITION leader Bill Shorten’s blatant lies during this election campaign have gone well beyond just messing with the minds of ordinary voters to the corruption of the Australian political process.

OPPOSITION leader Bill Shorten’s blatant lies during this election campaign have gone well beyond just messing with the minds of ordinary voters to the corruption of the Australian political process.

No politician in recent history has deliberately run such a desperate and dishonest campaign. Those who followed the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption may well say they ­expected nothing less of the former trade union boss who deceived some of the lowest-paid workers in the country so as to benefit his union cronies, but in promoting outright lies about the non-existent privatisation of Medicare or phony increase in GST or the cost of education or false claims about similarities between his hollow border protection policy and the Coalition’s successful block to people smuggling, Shorten embraced a foul and disgusting course of action. Not only did he and his coterie of union thugs and party volunteers promulgate this ­abhorrently deceitful strategy, they wilfully targeted the aged and home-bound, the most vulnerable people in our ­society, with their scare ­campaign. There are low acts (more of those later) but this operation has exposed Shorten as being prepared to wallow in the deepest, dankest of sewers in his bid to scare people into voting for his team. That fewer than a handful of his own candidates were prepared to concede that it would make actually sense to look at the decrepit backroom technology struggling to support the vast Medicare infrastructure is also telling. Where are the brave and ­realistic Labor souls who should have been calling out their leader for his mendacity; or are they all gutlessly ­shuddering in the shadows and waiting for this nightmare to end? Of course, “their” ABC went along with this dishonesty until last Thursday when 7.30 host Leigh Sales asked Shorten to put his hand on his heart, look Australians in the eye and tell them the Coalition has a policy to privatise Medicare. He couldn’t do it. But in ­finally putting Shorten’s feet to the fire, Sales went where no other ABC reporter had gone. Labor’s campaign launch was then nearly a week old and the Big Lie had been running free, fanned by Shorten and other Labor figures and at the heart of Labor’s scare campaign. Tony Windsor, without a doubt, committed the single most disgraceful act of the campaign when he showed the utmost disloyalty to an old friend and supporter and ­suggested he was mentally ­impaired. His friend’s mental health problem had nothing to do with this campaign. It was a desperately unfortunate incident of post-traumatic stress disorder which occurred in the aftermath of the Vietnam conflict in which he had served with honour. Given Windsor’s predilection for betrayal of principles, who would have been surprised that he stooped to smear a man who had shown him nothing but support? Little wonder that the union thugs, GetUp and other ­unprincipled Leftist activists are thronging to the electorate to support Windsor. Shorten is a divisive force. He sees Australia as, first and foremost, an invaded land of conquered Aborigines who need a treaty, rather than a settled, united country in which all people are made welcome if they are treated equally. Then he sees Australians as haters, people who apparently have such a vile hatred of ­homosexuals that they cannot be trusted to vote to change the traditional time-tested definition institution of marriage without resorting to violent speech or, he hinted, worse. This is a vicious slur on Australians who for many reasons, some religious, wish the ceremony of marriage to remain the province of men and women, not men and men or women and women. As homosexual couples ­already enjoy all the benefits of the union without any perversion of the definition, and as homosexuals have been free to go out about their businesses without sanction — witness the Mardi Gras — his defamation of millions of ordinary people is a disgrace. Like the elitist leaders of the Remain camp in the UK during the Brexit campaign, Shorten misjudges the mood of the nation. He wants to water down the suite of border protection policies, he supports the greater surrender of sovereignty to international bodies, he ignores the real concerns in the electorate. While his remarks may win him applause on social media, they are simply anathema to thinking people. Next weekend, voters will face a moment of truth when they are handed their ballot papers. The challenge will be to their own sense of morality. Can they in all sincerity vote for a party led by a man, who, unchallenged by his own party, has told filthy lies in a bid to frighten the aged and the uninformed? Can they support a person who has no regard for the truth, a person who is prepared to utter falsehoods to win power? Most Australians are better than that. Their sense of fairness and justice has been ­offended by this campaign and by Saturday they will be voting this individual out of their lives forever — or they will truly be doubly disillusioned.