Post-truth PM breeds rank culture of deceit and deflection
When he was quizzed last week about travel entitlements for politicians and their spouses, Anthony Albanese insisted it was a matter for the Independent Parliamentary Expenses Authority. “We haven’t changed the rules,” he said. “We haven’t added to any entitlements. The rules have been there since they were put in place by the former government.”
By the weekend, however, we learned that the government had changed the rules, as the Finance Minister is entitled to do by regulation. The Daily Telegraph reported that the government had quietly expanded the definition of “party political duties” weeks before calling the federal election.
There will, of course, be no amendment by the Prime Minister to his previous statement, let alone contrition or an apology. He will simply barge on, elbows out, as Australia’s first post-truth PM.
It is also a matter of record that Tony Burke met Save the Children officials in October 2024 to discuss the return of ISIS brides. We know he met them again on June 13, when he gave the repatriation plan a wink and a nod.
In August, the charity sent an email to Burke, cc Penny Wong, requesting help obtaining passports. Those passports were subsequently issued, if not on Burke’s explicit authority, then on the authority of officials in the department for which he is responsible.
Yet when Anthony Albanese was asked about the matter in parliament on October 9, he replied: “The assumptions suggest that they’re coming back to Australia with our support, which they are not.”
Albanese’s great disservice to Australian democracy has been the normalisation of mendaciousness as a legitimate form of political communication. Under his leadership, fabrication has changed from an aberration into an acceptable mode of civic debate.
Our democratic system has evolved to cope with bruising contests, and Australians have become adept at distinguishing fair dinkum arguments from spin.
But it is an open question whether it can withstand such a torrent of calculated falsehoods emanating from the office of the PM granting licence to his colleagues to do the same.
The false accusations against former Coalition ministers Linda Reynolds, Christian Porter and Alan Tudge were an early sign that Labor was operating under a different moral code.
Penny Wong and Katy Gallagher’s refusal to acknowledge the truth established in two courts of law – that Reynolds had not covered up the alleged rape of one of her staffers, and had handled the matter compassionately and professionally – shows that Labor now tolerates second-order dishonesty: the obfuscation of dissimulation. Or, to put it simply, a cover-up.
Labor’s descent into proactive dishonesty began under Albanese’s predecessor, Bill Shorten. The Mediscare campaign, which came close to unseating Malcolm Turnbull, demonstrated how digital communication was changing the parameters of civic debate.
Labor pioneered the use of micro-targeted social media to spread the entirely false claim that the Turnbull government would privatise Medicare. The ALP’s fear-based social media ads had gained millions of impressions in marginal seats long before Coalition HQ was aware of the scale of the campaign. By the time Shorten launched his official campaign by declaring the election a referendum on Medicare, the lie had become an established fact in crucial voting cohorts.
There’s little doubt that the moral decline of the political class has been facilitated by social media and accelerated by the arrival of smartphones. Mistruths become matters of fact through assertion and repetition. Liking and sharing can turn yesterday’s contentious claim on social media into today’s uncontested reality.
Algorithms prioritise emotion over empirical arguments. It may not be impossible to create a viral video about, say, falling productivity, but let’s just accept that it’s hard.
It might be argued that Labor’s altered moral boundaries reflect a wider drift in Western democracies towards post-truth politics. The US Democrats created Russiagate by repackaging conjecture as near certainty and treating intelligence leads as established facts. Keir Starmer and his Chancellor, Rachel Reeves, invented a budget black hole as an excuse to raise taxes that were used to increase welfare payments rather than debt reduction.
In part, the mainstreaming of mendacity could be an overhang from Covid, when politicians from former British PM Boris Johnson to former Victorian premier Dan Andrews got into the habit of lying to justify draconian restrictions on private life, then lied again to dodge the consequences of their own mistakes.
Yet the drift is not inevitable. Like every human, a politician can choose between honesty and deception. For some, truthfulness is a sacred command, for others a solemn duty. Many are mindful of the damage to their profession caused by the erosion of public trust.
It takes special maturity to understand that lies are never justified by good intentions or circumstances, to understand that honesty is a moral imperative in politics, as in life.
Albanese may have his own ethical red line beyond which he would resist the temptation to prevaricate. If so, it is not yet apparent where that threshold lies.
There is a certain irony that Labor should present itself as the defender of political integrity, campaigning in 2022 with a promise to shine a light into dark corners by establishing the National Anti-Corruption Commission.
Albanese’s attempt in his first term to set the government’s media watchdog on the trail of online misinformation was a classic example of moral displacement, the impulse to accuse others of the sins one most fears in oneself.
It was particularly rich for Albanese to blame the loss of the voice referendum on a misinformation fear campaign, since that was the very tactic Labor would employ the next time the country went to the polls.
In this year’s election, Labor seized the opportunity that was handed by Peter Dutton’s failure to explain his policies by writing the Coalition’s manifesto itself.
Thus, by election day, voters in marginal electorates were convinced the switch to nuclear power would cost $660bn, a figure plucked from the air by a renewable energy advocacy body.
They were persuaded that Dutton’s attempt to reacquaint Canberra public servants with the location of their office was really an attempt to rip babies from arms and frogmarch mothers back to the workplace.
Most audaciously of all, the electorate had been duped into believing Dutton would cancel their Medicare cards and force the chronically sick to pay by Visa.
Once again, the Liberals’ campaign headquarters was completely caught out by a barrage of precision-targeted lies flying under the radar that led to the carnage of election day.
The hubris induced by his substantially increased parliamentary majority appears to have convinced Albanese that anything goes. He responds to serious questions in parliament or press conferences with the scorn of Humpty Dumpty in Through the Looking Glass. A word means just what the PM chooses it to mean, neither more nor less.
Thus, lying has changed from a situational tactic to the modus operandi of the Albanese government – a habitual way of operating that defines how it behaves.
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For those who believe truth still matters, let’s start with some honest facts.