What Peter Dutton and the Coalition are offering Australian voters is a fiction
It’s headlines without substance, chimeras and half-truths that never stand up to scrutiny, but comprehensively misdirects the media’s gaze.
The nation has been in election mode since the beginning of the year, when Anthony Albanese used his January Press Club address to remind voters of what he had spent the better part of the last three years doing.
Peter Dutton fronted his own quasi-election opening campaign launch in Victoria – the state he hopes will help deliver a Labor defeat – complete with a new slogan “let’s get Australia back on track”.
If it sounds as though someone in Coalition headquarters ran “Make America Great Again” through ChatGPT with the instruction to make something similar for Australia, but different, congratulations –your neurons are firing in exactly the way someone receiving big money worked to manipulate.
But on the eve of the election being formally called, one has to ask – what track is a Dutton-led Australia heading towards?
An imaginary fantasy of the 1950s, when “strong” men made decisions and women did what they were told, and migrants were indistinguishable from their neighbours, as long as their name wasn’t printed on the letter box?
The Coalition has spent the time since the last election working on keeping itself together, with Dutton particularly focused on his own political survival as leader. It doesn’t leave much room for working for the Australian people.
If there is a way to divide, Dutton will find it and he’ll lead the Coalition, a party where unity has come to mean blind obedience, into the chasm with him.
While Opposition Leader, Dutton has promised to slash migration allegedly to ease the housing affordability crisis, but won’t give answers as to how any of that would work.
Nuclear barely mentioned
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Nuclear is barely mentioned any more, as the Coalition tries to avoid giving detail for a policy that was intended as no more than a distraction.
The public service is under attack, with the Coalition promising to cut spending without acknowledging it would benefit only the private sector.
Shadow treasurer Angus Taylor is on a “marginal seat tour” claiming that Australians are paying $3500 more in tax under Labor, without acknowledging that people also received pay rises – hence more tax – or that it was the Coalition that phased out the low and middle-income tax offset in the first place.
When it comes to the fundamentals of Australian society – how the Coalition would address housing affordability, inequality, climate, energy security, fractures in social cohesion, protection of the environment or the growing risks associated with the changing geo-political situation – its answers have been to either completely vacate the space, or worse, back in populist strongman tactics that would cede Australia’s sovereignty and sink us further into regressive regimes.
It’s fiction, dressed up as change, but only takes us all backwards.
Green fiction
Nationals senator Bridget McKenzie showed just how far the Coalition had slipped into its own world last week when, in an interview with the ABC, she accused Tanya Plibersek of having “a conflict of interest” in holding the environmental portfolio – because Plibersek’s main electoral rivals are the Greens.
“She is out-greening the Greens,” McKenzie – who was found to have breached ministerial standards during the Morrison government’s sports rorts scandal – said.
Plibersek’s electoral rivals created an “inherent” conflict of interest for the Environment Minister, she claimed.
“It’s in her own electoral interests,” McKenzie insisted.
Which again, is fiction.
Plibersek has approved 10 coal mines or expansions since winning government. That’s an additional 2449 million tonnes of lifetime emissions. Another 22 mines or expansions are under consideration.
Labor has a gas strategy that locks in fossil fuels to 2050 “and beyond”.
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FOI documents revealed this week that Plibersek has known for almost a year and a half that salmon farming should be comprehensively assessed under national environmental law for its impact on the endangered Maugean skate and Macquarie Harbour’s world heritage value, documents the department fought to keep secret.
Instead of following the science, the Prime Minister pledged $37 million in public funding to support the salmon industry and then went further, promising to introduce legislation that will allow the foreign-owned salmon industry to bypass Australia’s environmental laws, even as rotting chunks of dead and diseased salmon are washing up on Tasmanian beaches.
We now know that the proposed environmental legislation Labor wants to rush through the Parliament this week goes even further and will gut existing environmental protections, prohibiting civil society from fighting to protect nature.
Does the Australia Institute have a dog in this fight? Of course it does.
But we ALL do.
The proposed legislation would prohibit third-party civil society organisations like the Australia Institute and the Environmental Defenders Office from challenging environmentally damaging projects.
Who does that benefit, other than the vested interests who gain financially from these projects at the expense of the environment?
What Labor is proposing will make it harder to use existing environmental laws for their intended purpose.
It limits who can challenge projects on their environmental impact. The research and modelling that organisations like the Australia Institute provide would become inadmissible, leaving community groups fighting against multimillion-dollar consultants and corporations alone.
Which is, by any definition, undemocratic.
And yet the Coalition would have the average voter believing Labor has been “out-greening the Greens” on environmental policy.
It’s one of the worst aspects of the fiction the opposition has created in lieu of a policy platform.
Void of ideas, it has instead created a black hole of half-truths and populist statements, so dense light bends around them, but manages to smother critical appraisal of what the government is actually doing.
As one opposition figure said to me this week, the Coalition could manage to do what no one in Labor can – win it re-election.
There are so many real issues Australia is facing, without throwing fiction into the mix.
As is almost always the case, the truth is stranger than fiction. And in this case, more damaging.
Amy Remeikis is chief political analyst for The Australia Institute. Read more from her and the institute here
