Twin blights on our politics is a symptom of Americanisation
Clive Palmer’s buying power and hate-filled GetUp reveal the poison now running through Australian politics.
Palmer constitutes an unprecedented abuse of existing laws — with an advertising spend probably upwards of $50 million by election day simultaneous with denying candidate accountability — while GetUp, the most powerful allegedly independent campaign force, has shattered its pretence as a democratic lobby for moral causes by trading in hate and dishonesty.
Palmer and GetUp seem to be complete opposites. Palmer runs a dictatorial top-down outfit that floats on big money, pumps out xenophobic populist-right propaganda that thrives by denigrating the system. GetUp presents as mother’s milk democracy, a grassroots moral movement that exists to purge Australia of the tyranny of conservatism extremism.
Yet they are remarkably similar in one respect. They represent the ugly face of the Americanisation of Australian politics. Have a close look. If their 2019 performance is our future, then our democracy, like our society, is becoming more toxic, hysterical, negative and polarised.
This represents the iron law of society — your politics will follow your culture. The past six years have seen the growing debasement of our culture and that puts our politics on an escalator to rancour and disrepute. An astonishing feature of Australia today are the interests attacking our traditions, institutions and demonising anybody in their ideological path while pretending they are acting in the name of a better democracy.
If Palmer wins representation for himself and his party there should, in parliament’s review of the election, be a push for spending caps to be introduced by law. It is highly likely the 85 per cent of people who don’t like Palmer and won’t vote for him, and who are driven nuts by his ads, will support such limits.
Yes, such laws have unintended consequences (witness the US) and would need to pass the High Court, but that is no reason not to try to refine the design.
GetUp is an organisation that seeks to destroy. It does not run candidates itself. Its operating method is to damage and destroy its opponents, whom it blackens through a combination of personal character assassination and political critique. It boasts about its influence at the 2016 election and its ability to terminate at this election Coalition MPs of what it calls the “hard right”. Its agenda now is ambitious in the extreme. It seeks, in effect, the partial political beheading of the Liberal Party. It targets Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton, followed by a line of others — Kevin Andrews, Greg Hunt, Josh Frydenberg, Christian Porter and Nicolle Flint.
Its method is an Australian version of the US brand of political action committees that are getting stronger at each election and are basic to the disrepute of US politics. PACs are formed by like-minded people, raise money and run campaigns to elect or defeat candidates, some being constructive but many viciously negative.
GetUp is a highly sophisticated operation, feared by the Liberals, trading on the idea of a “flourishing and fair” Australia. But it has been caught in its own hubris this election and risks being exposed as an extremist organisation of the Left fighting its declared extremists on the Right.
This was not supposed to happen. GetUp is a study in the extremism of progressive politics and its self-righteous belief any tactic is justified to crush its enemies. GetUp has peddled falsehoods about Andrews and Frydenberg and its universally condemned lifesaver advertisement against Abbott reveals GetUp as engaged in toxic tactics of the hard Left.
John Wanna, professor of public administration at the ANU, tells Inquirer: “They present themselves as being of the people but they are a restrictive, non-democratic organisation. It’s not an elected democratic model. They present themselves as being very nice but they operate like the PACs in America — their main purpose is to damage the other side. I think the danger for GetUp and the paradox may be that the more momentum it generates the more it might damage itself if it is seen to be subverting democracy. Its influence in that case may wane. But the way it is operating is an example of the Americanisation of Australian politics.”
Asked about the withdrawn lifesaver advertisement, Abbott said: “There’s no doubt GetUp seek to mock their opponents. They have no sense of respect for service if their opponent doesn’t share their views.
“They operate as a left-wing political mafia determined to rub out their opponents with campaigns based on prejudice.”
In his grassroots report about the GetUp campaign to destroy Abbott, Mike Seccombe in The Saturday Paper describes how its group leaders effectively worked a large crowd of volunteers with the sole aim of defeating Abbott: they tell people who to vote against, not who to vote for. Of course, the effect is to support the independent, Zali Steggall. The point, however, is that waging a campaign to destroy somebody is far easier than waging a campaign to get somebody elected. This is the distinctive point about GetUp. Unlike Scott Morrison or Bill Shorten or Pauline Hanson or even Palmer, who are trying to get themselves elected, GetUp exists solely to get people unelected.
The mentality this generates is destructive in the community but also seems to be self-corrupting. In the scripts it was using to turn voters against Andrews, GetUp accused Andrews of supporting gay conversion therapy. “This was a false and defamatory claim,” Andrews tells Inquirer. “I have never spoken about this issue in my life.”
Two branches in Andrews’s electorate put motions along these lines to the Liberal state souncil. Andrews was unaware of this until a newspaper report was published. He worked with Liberal state president Michael Kroger to have the motions withdrawn. When he discovered the GetUp script being used against him in its “conversation guides”, Andrews wrote to GetUp warning it was false and asking for the material to be withdrawn.
The point is obvious: when you create a demonised culture around a politician like Andrews on the grounds that he is an intolerable conservative, you can readily believe almost anything. A supporter of gay conversion therapy? Of course, why not?
The GetUp campaign against Frydenberg is purely opportunistic. The idea the Treasurer is part of the “hard right” is ludicrous. The justification, evidently, is that GetUp members wanted to target Frydenberg and claiming such a scalp would be an extraordinary triumph.
The “conversation guide” against Frydenberg says he “was part of the coup that removed Malcolm Turnbull as prime minister”. This is a lie, as anybody familiar with the leadership crisis knows. Is GetUp incompetent or unscrupulous, or both?
The script continued that Frydenberg “failed to get any real action on climate change” and was “part of the chaos in Canberra”.
This was a puerile justification for its effort to destroy him. GetUp seems ready to fabricate any excuse for its priorities. Frydenberg is under real pressure with multiple challenges in Kooyong, notably from Julian Burnside on behalf of the Greens.
But there was a comic aspect to this situation when GetUp national director Paul Oosting was put through the wringer by the ABC’s Jon Faine. It was a brilliant insight into GetUp’s real character and will become one of the moments of the campaign. Oosting refused to admit his organisation’s dishonesty: “I don’t think it’s misleading, Jon. I think that as I’ve outlined to you — I think there was a leadership coup in the Liberal Party … Josh Frydenberg was clearly the key beneficiary of that … I don’t think he became deputy prime minister by accident, did he?”
Oosting had to be corrected twice by Faine. Frydenberg is deputy prime minister? Wrong. Michael McCormack is the Deputy Prime Minister. Then he said Frydenberg is the finance minister. Wrong. Mathias Cormann has that job.
But Oosting refused to concede his script was inaccurate or unfair. He defended it by talking about climate change, an irrelevant point. Faine went to the essence. GetUp says it stands for a “different kind of politics”, so would Oosting in the cause of more integrity in politics concede his mistake? No way.
We learnt a lot. We learnt from Oosting’s own mouth that GetUp is as dodgy and deceptive as any of the major parties. On second thoughts, it’s worse — neither Morrison nor Shorten would have been stupid enough to defend such dishonesty. The next time anyone from GetUp tries to spin the line they want a better or more moral politics, you can either laugh or shut the door.
What is obvious is the cavalier irresponsibility with which GetUp makes its claims. It supposedly has seven priority targets in this campaign and it engaged in dishonesty about two of them. The evidence from Andrews and Frydenberg is that GetUp trades in deception.
The denigration of Abbott was even worse and even more revealing. In the ad Abbott is depicted as a lifesaver who refuses to save a drowning person by repeating lines supposed to reveal climate change denialism, and then laughs at the apparent drowning.
Shorten said the ad was “grossly disrespectful” to lifesavers. He said it was wrong to denigrate Abbott for his volunteer work as a lifesaver and the ad was “well out of line”. John Howard said it was “outrageous to suggest a man who has given years of his life to volunteer organisations would allow somebody to drown while he sat there and sneered at it”. Former Labor minister Stephen Conroy said GetUp “deserve all the condemnation they get”.
The ad was pulled by GetUp only after complaints by the 150,000-strong Royal Life Saving Society. GetUp said it had the greatest respect for the lifesaving movement. There was no sign of regret about the way Abbott was depicted. If ever there was a forked-tongue apology this was it. Only a fool would think it genuine. Abbott, for the record, has a long history as a volunteer firefighter and lifesaver where, in fact, he has actually saved people.
What does this ad reveal about GetUp and its culture? The ad had to be created, produced and authorised. It was not an accident. This was intended. The implication is that Abbott was prepared to see people die because of his attitude on climate change. It is the best example so far of how the self-righteous moralism of GetUp leads to the debasement of our politics because of a willingness to demonise an individual without any sense of restraint or decency. This is a warped culture on display — accept Labor or Liberal at any time but don’t accept this.
This is nothing but fermentation of hatred on the assumption that because it is Abbott it is justified. This is what many progressives assert with a passion that borders on hysteria. And once you cross this threshold for one person, you will cross it whenever it is convenient for anybody else that suits your purpose. This is what GetUp represents. Will any of this hurt GetUp? Its activists will be unaffected. Perhaps a few of its volunteers from middle Australia might think twice. No responsible board of directors would tolerate this performance, and if the directors take no action, that will confirm the nature of this group and the hypocrisy of its claims.
This goes to the point made by Wanna: “If you join GetUp you join as a supporter but you are not a member. This is a non-democratic model many not-for-profits use where the executive directors have the power and can operate as a cohesive group.” So far it has been successful.
The supporters are happy volunteers, convinced they are doing democracy a service. What happens if GetUp, despite its tactics, succeeds in beheading an echelon of senior Liberals? Fundamental to the operation of PACs in the US is that they must be “independent” of parties or candidates, yet they exist to support or oppose parties or candidates. Sound familiar?
As for Clive Palmer, he has nothing constructive to offer our political system. Palmer’s ads say he aims to form a government. He does not campaign, offer policies, subject himself to the media or the public. He just buys ads and his real purpose is to win Senate places and attempt to gain the balance of power on the Senate crossbench.
Such a prospect has only one consequence — more dysfunction and chaos in parliament. There is no precedent in Australia’s history for what Palmer is doing. Consider the public vindication if Palmer spends $50m and gets nothing — if the lot is wasted. That would be a sweet moment, or would it?
The downside is that One Nation would get more Senate seats. Every sign post-election is that Australia needs action to salvage the mechanics and culture of its democracy. But didn’t we know that?
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Election 2019 will decide who governs but the campaign reveals the poison now running through Australian democracy — the evidence being the effort by Clive Palmer to buy power and the business model of peddling hatred by GetUp.