Opinion: Labor wins at telling the biggest lies

I’ve never met Peter Dutton, but I would guess he’s a pretty good bloke, writes Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

There was a time last week when I thought I’d be lining up behind Pope Francis in the queue outside the Pearly Gates.

When Saint Peter asked my name I’d say “O’Connor. There’s a chance I’m not on the list, but I’m with the Pope.”

I managed to survive whatever had laid me low, and several days and 1000 tissues later emerged from our guest room to rejoin the human race, but nothing quiet focuses the mind like sitting up in bed in the sure and ­certain knowledge that you are not going to get any sleep.

The election, I decided in the midnight hours, had come down to this.

Do you vote for a Labor party that has demonstrably failed to deliver what it promised and overseen a fall in living standards and productivity and refused to acknowledge that any of this is its fault?

Alternatively, do you vote for a Coalition that might very well do the same. Who do you mistrust the least?

If it was a contest to see who could tell the biggest lies, then Albo and his team are the clear winners. They are just better at it.

Hark back to 2016 when on the morning of election day, tens of thousands of phones in targeted electorates around the country started pinging. People checking their messages found an unsolicited text saying: “Mr Turnbull’s plans to privatise Medicare will take us down the road of no return. Time is running out to Save Medicare.”

It was a lie, pure and simple, and post-election Bill Shorten admitted the messages had been sent by the Labor Party. The Australian Federal Police investigated, but no charges were ever laid.

No surprise, then, to see the same old blatant untruth given a bit of a polish and rolled out again with claims the Coalition will trash Medicare.

So I’m lying in bed as sick as 10 dogs, thinking that according to Albo if he is re-elected and I can cough and splutter my way to the nearest GP, all I will have to do is wave my Medicare card and I’ll be whisked inside to see a ­doctor who will absolutely insist on bulk-billing me.

I know this won’t happen because the doctors – real doctors with stethoscopes around their necks, not pretend ones like Treasurer Dr Jim Chalmers – say it won’t.

The list of Labor promises runs from here to the front gate and back again with more added by the day. It’s impressive, but as the former premier of the Soviet Union Nikita Khrushchev once said: “Politicians are the same all over. They promise to build bridges when there are no rivers.”

The Labor campaign has been slick but predicable.

Mistruths and half-truths wrapped in $100 bills, with Peter Dutton cast as a cross between Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler.

I’ve never met Dutton, but I would guess he’s a pretty good bloke. This doesn’t make him a successful politician, but faced with the choice of having a beer with Albanese or Dutton, I know who I’d pick.

His campaign, however, has lacked the same degree of energy as Labor’s, but here’s the thing – does deciding who will steer the nation for the next three years all turn on a few weeks of frenetic travel from one end of the country to the other promising money to anyone who’ll listen?

Surely the actions and words or lack of them of the two men over the three years that have passed should count for something or are we all so brain-dead now that we can’t be ­bothered casting our minds back and making a judgment based on the ­evidence so easily available to us?

How much easier it is to allow yourself to be beguiled by television and social media advertisements and unfounded assurances of the golden times that lie ahead.

Albanese is acting as if it’s stitched up. Job done. We got away with it again. Here’s to another three years and then off to the hilltop mansion with its majestic ocean views.

Maybe he’s right and we’ll know soon enough, but it is at the very least disconcerting the way that he turns and twists in the breeze and struggles with the truth.

The nation is drifting, its people crying out for decisive leadership. Which man, then, has the strongest heart and the hardest head?

Originally published as Opinion: Labor wins at telling the biggest lies