History shows Labor can’t be trusted to keep us out of the red
Labor has run its whole election campaign on a series of lies, and it would be stupid of voters to trust a party which has a history of economic deceit and has learnt nothing from its epic failures.
Labor has run its whole election campaign on a series of lies — again. No one should really be surprised. There is no law governing truth in political advertising.
NSW Business Chamber boss Stephen Cartwright asked last week why politicians weren’t held to the same standards as everyone else. They aren’t, and Labor ensured they can’t be. Not once but twice.
One of the most decent opposition leaders never to win government was Kim Beazley, now governor of Western Australia.
Back in 1983 Mr Beazley was the special minister of state in the first Hawke government.
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He introduced a new section to the Commonwealth Electoral Act (Section 160) dealing with truth in advertising in election material.
For the first time in Australian history it was illegal to print, publish or distribute “any electoral advertisement containing a statement (1) that is untrue; and (2) that is, or is likely to be, misleading or deceptive”, but it was too good to be true. The section was repealed the following year because it was “unworkable”.
When the matter was raised in 1994, under the Keating Labor government, it was knocked on the head again.
Mr Cartwright says the business community is told by our government that if their ads for, say, socks are false or misleading, in any way, the businesses face prosecution by the ACCC. “The legal requirement to protect our citizens is clear and absolute — as it should be,” he said.
But when it comes to the future of our nation, and the integrity of our democracy, no such law exists.
This lack of protection applies to third-party campaigners as well.
Mr Cartwright uses the recent campaign, run by the Education Union claiming the Coalition government has cut $14 billion from school funding.
If that union was a business selling those same socks, he said, they would be facing prosecution by the ACCC for false and misleading advertising because it simply isn’t true. You do have to ask which one is more important to our citizens.
The truth counts — but Labor doesn’t think so.
Which is why former Labor Treasurer Wayne Swan was able to promise four surpluses even as he squandered the budget surpluses that Coalition treasurer Peter Costello managed to build.
Just a reminder to those too young or too “woke” or too busy worrying about the latest scary climate modelling, former Labor PM Kevin Rudd said he would be a “fiscal conservative” as he and Mr Swan turned Mr Costello’s $20 billion surplus into a $27 billion deficit in a year. The last time Labor brought down a surplus was when the Berlin Wall was still standing.
Shards from that horrific symbol of Communist oppression are now held in museums around the world as mementos of an evil empire.
Now Labor is drifting Leftward at a far greater rate than Australia is moving away from Antarctica.
The Marxist-inspired ACTU boss Sally McManus encourages her dwindling flock of union members from the private sector to break laws they disagree with.
The last time there was a semi-responsible Labor government in office, then-prime minister Bob Hawke declared the outrageously criminal BLF a rogue union and outlawed it.
Ms McManus and Mr Shorten now embrace the equally notorious CFMMEU which has been using its multimillion-dollar war chest to target law-abiding MPs in concert with the Green-Left GetUp.
Six years ago the then army chief David Morrison, one of the weaker heads, achieved a momentary degree of celebrity when in addressing the UN’s International Women’s Day conference he used the unoriginal phrase “the standard you walk past is the standard you accept”. Labor now wants you to accept untruths and, what’s more, sneers, if you want a straight answer.
Last Monday, opposition leader Bill Shorten said it was “such a dumb question” to ask how much Labor’s environmental policies would cost.
It’s not dumb to want to know how much of your money Labor will take to spend on policies which would have zero effect on anything and would achieve, as the chief scientist Alan Finkel acknowledged, “virtually nothing”.
But it would be dumb to trust a party which has a history of economic deceit and has learnt nothing from its epic failures.
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