GetUp is getting away with despicable lies and propaganda in this election campaign

GetUp is getting away with despicable lies and propaganda in this election campaign.

GetUp’s national director Paul Oosting, right, and a video still from the Tony Abbott campaign ad pulled by the activist group today.

GetUp is getting away with despicable lies and propaganda in this election campaign because they are not considered part of the political party process. What a joke and a travesty of our attempts to have a rules-governed democratic election process.

Having successfully fought a legal challenge to be declared an “associated entity”, which would force this richly-funded campaign machine to obey the same rules as political parties, GetUp is stretching the rules beyond even its own elastic limits.

But, even in “apologising” for despicable slurs GetUp uses the oldest, dirtiest political tricks to embed the lies and expand the slurs.

GetUp uses the age-old smear tactic of publishing a lie, daring someone to deny it publicly, and urging journalists to ask questions based on the lie. It clearly believes the bigger the lie and the more often it is repeated the better.

GetUp is not alone in this unrestricted sphere of electioneering but falls within the same category of a swathe of activist groups campaigning as “grass roots movements” — often foreign-funded with the convenient opaque mask of being a “charity”.

Today even GetUp had to admit its undergraduate disparaging of Tony Abbott had gone too far but not because it was a lie, not because it was hateful, not because it was baseless character assassination but because it offended a third party that not even GetUp can dare to impugn — lifesavers.

Yet, even in the withdrawal GetUp demonstrated the base tricks of getting benefit from publicising the lie even further and then getting publicity for its replacement ad.

GetUp used an Abbott lookalike in a political ad dressed as a lifesaver — which he has been for decades as well as a volunteer firefighter — refusing to save a drowning person. Abbott’s civil service as a life saver and firefighter is long-term and genuine.

As PM he received foreign news attention for attending a bushfire as volunteer.

But it wasn’t the personal slur that GetUp regretted, it realised that as a virtue-signalling politically correct outfit it was slurring all lifesavers only days after two had given their lives trying to save people.

The apology was to “Australia’s lifesavers” for the “insensitivity” of the ad, not to Abbott, and then went on to publicise its new replacement ad.

So, this so-called democratic defender of the political process used the dirtiest trick in the book — put out an outrageous ad and then get media coverage for the ad you’re not running and the ad you intended to run.

This was not the first instance of GetUp running false and defamatory slurs and then just walking away from it with no penalty.

Last week GetUp falsely accused a Melbourne Liberal MP of supporting “gay conversion therapy” without evidence, without checking and without care. Journalists questioning the “talking points” were urged to ask the MP. Getting others to do your dirty work is as old as spreading salacious gossip in a bar and waiting for someone to be asked publicly about the smear.

Scott Morrison was also asked about gay conversion therapy which he rejected and said it was a state health matter which it was.

Coincidentally Labor’s Mark Dreyfus announced Labor’s “policy” of federally opposing gay conversion therapy and said the Prime Minister’s response was a “cop out”. GetUp, under threat of legal action, has removed the reference but the smear is out there.

Morrison was a victim of anti-Adani protesters and union activists suggesting his hand raised in prayer on Easter Sunday was a Nazi salute and working for the mine would be like working for the Nazis. No slur bad enough and no lie big enough for some running under cover of our democratic protections.