When it comes to politicians, some are good shots and some are cheap shots. These days, the successful politicians – you wouldn’t call them leaders – have relied heavily on cheap shots. The cheapest being to spread fear.
The simple truth is that humans have evolved to continually check their environment for threats. Those who weren’t so obsessively cautious died from some misadventure before they’d managed to have kids.
One way of defining civilisation is that it’s the quest to remove all threats to life and limb. This is the largest role performed by government and the main thing our taxes pay for.
The welfare state – including universal health care and social security payments – is about removing the threat of people dying because they’re too old or sick or disabled to work, or just can’t find a job. The welfare state is a giant risk-sharing system, a massive insurance scheme.
But though our lives have become infinitely less risky – one reason we live much longer than our great grandparents - we go on scanning our environment for threats. Which is good news for the news media - and the reason most of the news they choose to tell us is about bad things – and for less-scrupulous politicians.
Politicians have long known how easy it is to play on our fears to their own advantage. In our more racist past, the “Yellow Peril” was a frequent issue in election campaigns. Scott Morrison’s AUKUS nuclear subs deal led pollster Peter Lewis to wonder whether Morrison would consider “tapping the Coalition’s longstanding brand advantage on national security for a fear campaign about China’s rising influence”.
As the independent economist Saul Eslake rarely loses an opportunity to remind us, in recent years it has suited politicians to greatly exaggerate the risk we face from terrorists. Both sides have been happy to play to our fears that all those people arriving in leaky boats would take our jobs and clog our highways.
But issues of economic management are far from immune to the fear treatment.
Since politics has become so professionalised – a career path you start on after university, rather than a contribution you make after succeeding in some other field – politicians are people who worry more about what they have to do or say to attain and retain power than about why they need power to fix all the things they believe need fixing.
The more we’ve come to distrust our politicians – all politicians – the more they’ve realised the only thing they can say that we’ll believe is how bad their opponents are. Ask a minister how the government’s policy would work and the answer you get is disparagement of the opposition’s policy.
Invariably, any plan to tackle pressing economic problems, or just make the economy work better, has pros and cons, winners and losers. Bingo. A pollie with a plan is a pollie fighting a scare campaign.
One man with a massive plan was economist-turned-pollie Dr John Hewson. He lost the unlosable election in 1993. Another man with a plan was Bill Shorten. He had to fight scare campaigns on every front.
This was partly the Liberals’ retaliation for the success of Labor’s under-the-radar social media Mediscare in the 2016 election. Guess what? The coming federal election will be the battle of the scare campaigns, with as few substantive policies as possible.
Gresham’s Law says bad money drives out good. A new law says scare campaigns drive out policy reform. Or maybe B-grade pollies drive out A-grade. When it comes to standards of political behaviour, it’s always a race to the bottom.
One price we pay for this is that it encourages pollies to take no thought for the morrow. “I’ll just get re-elected and cope with whatever problems arise, if any do.” It raises muddling through to bipartisan policy.
Another price is that we go through the ritual of electing governments with little knowledge of what they secretly hope to do – or may have to get on with if circumstances force their hand. Why risk outlining your intentions when it’s safer to make up stories about your opponents’ evil intent.
But not to worry. An ever-helpful media will spend most of the election campaign pressing them to bind their hands by “ruling out” this and ruling out that. Thanks, guys, that’ll really help.
Since the rise of Tony Abbott, the Coalition has benefited greatly from scare campaigns about the cost of acting to reduce carbon emissions.
But pressure from G7 leaders, international financial markets, sensible Liberal voters threatening to elect independents, and now even the Business Council, may force Morrison to campaign on the claim that moving from fossil fuel to renewable energy could do wonders for the economy.
It’s true – but who’ll believe him?
