My colleague, Greg Jericho, is dead right. Bill Shorten’s inequality pitch sure has “rustled the jimmies” of Australia’s conservatives. It should. When the facts are in, and the facts are bad, they can be very frightening.
The facts in this instance are twofold.
First, yes, inequality in Australia is as bad as it’s been in 75 years. The promise of Australian egalitarianism has withered under the blanket of stagnant wage growth, smothered by this government’s unprecedented structural favouritism to the rich. When the ACTU agreed to wage restraint back in the days of the Prices and Incomes Accord, it was in return for universal healthcare, a mass expansion of education and training, superannuation and award wages.
But successive governments have hacked at Medicare, privatised training, allowed the wealthy to arbitrage superannuation and idled by as 40% of the workforce has found themselves casualised… all while real wages have not gone up.
Instead, Malcolm Turnbull has thrown not only wads of cash, but cheaper and even free labour, at the profit-making corporations who need help the least.
Which brings us to the second scary fact for Turnbull and his fellows. The electorate has noticed.
This may be an experience unfamiliar to the prosperous gentlemen who dominate the benches of the Coalition, but when one’s labour productivity has gone up 6% over four years yet one’s real wage has fallen 0.6%, or one’s penalty rates have been cut, or one’s kid is suddenly working for $4 an hour at the local bakery, certain truths do begin to dawn. Especially when forking out to meet a growing gap between a Medicare rebate and a health bill.
So obvious has economic division in this country become that when Shorten speaks about it, it’s to a democratic majority. He’s been leading two-party preferred since September, precisely because of an electoral yearning that someone acknowledge reality. It has allowed him ditch the cautious, centrist me-tooism that dulled the most interesting parts of the Labor party for over two decades.
In a turnaround unimaginable in the grey days of Ruddism, the leader of the first union-based party ever to form government is once again talking about workers and fairness without sounding like some patchouli-scented campus beardie trying to flog their mum a copy of Red Flag.
So in the time-honoured tradition of the electoral bait-and-switch that passes for conservative policymaking, you have Scott Morrison – hilariously, also the treasurer – insisting that inequality is improving and that observable fact is “a lie”. Then Liberal backbencher Andrew Laming, “widely credited as someone who says on national television what his fellow right-wingers only whisper in their lounge rooms” in commentator Malcolm Farr’s words, pitched in with: “Inequality is staring over a fence and noticing another guy has got a jet ski and you don’t have one.” The statement was helpful, but mostly to the project of socialism.
One concludes that the tactic here must be to repeat what passes for success in the competitive pastime of conservative climate denial. Take the empirical facts derived over decades from data interrogated by experts, and then argue that the world just feels hotter because everyone’s got used to air conditioning, or isn’t happening because there’s still snow.
The saturation of media channels with nonsense “rebuttals” may help affirm sentiments in people who are already right-leaning, like Andrew “You just want my jet ski” Laming. However, in the centre where elections are fought and won, the Liberals would do well to appreciate that those who voted for Tony Abbott’s claim that “climate change is crap” were either going to vote for him anyway, or realise he was wrong once they saw the coral dying.
Because it doesn’t actually matter how slick your messaging, how polished your packaging or how outrageous your claims, dear Scott Morrison, reality has a habit of thumping discourse every time.
This may be difficult for those in America to believe right now but there really, truly are limitations to the electoral acceptance of guff. Pesky science has found that gullibility correlates to vulnerability; those who don’t feel in control of their circumstances assign “structure, pattern and meaning” where there is none.
“The more false the pattern,” quoth the research, “the more vulnerable you have to be to believe it.” Which explains why the vulnerable workers at the Carrier furnace and air conditioning plant in Indianapolis, Indiana, threatened with outsourcing to Mexico, cheered Trump’s December insistence he personally would protect all their jobs.
This week the ABC reported that 300 jobs have been sent to Mexico since, and hundreds more are set to follow.
Trump himself has moved on to spouting garbage at Boy Scouts. “He blew smoke up our ass,” one worker, disabused of her illusions, growled, “If he was going to do what he said he was going to do, we’d still have jobs.”
Admitting the facts in front of you is, of course, the first step to regaining control, which should offer a way forward to the exploited workers of Indiana as much as it should encourage Shorten to stick to the inequality line.
Because what matters far more to Western conservatives of this modern age, far more than policy details or political facts, is who is winning.
And when they’re telling obvious lies, they’re not. You are.