Opinion: Truth is missing in action, in both political and corporate worlds

When our politicians are comfortable with deception, why should we expect Australian corporate giants like Telstra and Qantas to be any better, asks Mike O’Connor.

When does a mistruth become a lie or the deliberate omission of relevant facts a deception or is it the painfully obvious and unavoidable truth that they are all lies designed to deceive?

It was Jack Nicholson whose response to Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men became immortalised in moviedom when he barked, “You can’t handle the truth!”

Corporate Australia has apparently decided that like Tom Cruise’s character Lieutenant Kaffee, we just can’t handle the truth.

In recent days Qantas has been going to extraordinary lengths to shield us from the truth in the Federal Court where Justice Michael Lee is deciding what penalty to impose on it for illegally sacking 1800 workers.

The sackings, Qantas told the court, were a mistake and not intentional. We are asked to believe that good old “we still call Australia home” Qantas sacked 1800 people by mistake. Terribly sorry. Destroyed the livelihoods of 1800 men and women. Won’t happen again. All a bit of a misunderstanding.

Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson

Justice Lee, a man more than capable of handling the truth, was having trouble prising it from Qantas.

He suggested witnesses had been “sworn up to affidavits which did not reveal the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth”.

“I’m presented with a case which shows a decision-making process which is completely at odds with what in truth happened. That’s the most profoundly disturbing aspect of this,” he said.

Justice Lee questioned why Qantas CEO Vanessa Hudson did not give evidence, given her involvement as then chief financial officer in the sackings.

“Now why shouldn’t I draw inferences from that, that Qantas want to do all they can to protect themselves from scrutiny?” Justice Lee asked.

While Hudson was hidden under a metaphorical doona, another one of our largest and better known corporations, an “Aussie icon” if you will, had also decided that its customers couldn’t handle the truth.

Announcing Telstra’s half-yearly results earlier this year, the company boasted that “we have expanded our coverage to more than three million square kilometres, now reaching 99.7 per cent of Australia’s population. To put that in perspective, our mobile network covers more than double the area of Optus’ network and around three times the area of the Vodafone TPG network,” she said.

This came as news to all those people in the bush still relying on carrier pigeons for communication. Threatened with legal action by TPG, Telstra then admitted that its three million square kilometres claim was true – as long as people spent thousands of dollars on external antennas.

Even then, unless you managed to have a massive antenna strapped to your head, there was no coverage once you left your home. TPG and Optus, by comparison, measure their coverage on standard mobile phone use.

Telstra is under fire for its coverage claims.

Telstra’s claim was akin to marketing a property as having ocean views as long as you stood on the roof atop a step ladder with powerful binoculars.

Our politicians decided a long time ago that we couldn’t handle the truth.

Recently, the man credited with the strategy of Labor’s federal election victory, the party’s national secretary Paul Erickson, was questioned on Labor’s scare advertising campaign which claimed that the Coalition had plans to cut Medicare funding and urgent care clinics to pay for its nuclear policy in spite of Peter Dutton and numerous frontbenchers saying that they would absolutely not do so.

Mr Erickson said it had been the right move for the campaign, and he did not rule out using the scare tactic again when Australians next go to the polls. He was, he said, completely comfortable with the strategy.

But what if it misleads the electorate? This is the message being sent to the next generation contemplating a career in politics – truth is an inconvenience easily discarded and replaced with half-truths, omissions and blatant lies. Why would anyone with any sense of self-respect want to be a part of it?

When our political system appears comfortable with deception, it is hardly surprising that the corporate world find it easy to be equally comfortable with treating their customers and the public at large with arrogant contempt.

The truth? We can handle the truth and the truth is that our political and corporate bodies are being eaten away by moral decay.

Originally published as Opinion: Truth is missing in action, in both political and corporate worlds