By ABC's Jonathan Green Thu Aug 15, 2013
Photo: How can this be what it is: the open and public contest to claim the right to represent us. (AAP: Alan Porritt)
Despite the growth of a wonkish niche in the serious media, fatuous trivia and distorted polemic still trumps discussion of the big issues like, say, Australia's fiscal quandary, writes Jonathan Green.
I'm not sure why we should have imagined it might be any different, a small triumph of hope over repeated experience perhaps.
But answer this: have you ever endured anything so demeaning, patronising, condescending, cynically manipulative, mendacious, superficial, fatuous, rat cunning, trivialised or just plain false as the process of politics, now thrown at you live, minute by minute, through the course of this campaign?
Day by grinding day the major figures trot out the same evasive half-truths and hearty hail-fellow-well-met palm-offs ... the sum of it hard to watch without a growing sense of complete letdown and dislocation. How can this be what it is: the open and public contest to claim the right to represent us. To form a government. To run our country.
Why in that context can we not be given the benefit of a candidate's honest view? Why do we not have the right, through a political media that ought also to be at least nominally acting in our collective interest, to push for hard answers and firm commitments on the issues that matter?
You thought the campaign of 2010 was a low point ... from here it looks like a benchmarking exercise; a slough of inconsequentiality that simply set the standard.
Let's look at the big issues of the week: Rudd allegedly cheats with notes in a debate that is memorable for presenting the anti-matter of insight. But it turns out Tony's not the suppository of all wisdom, while Rudd's son smokes a cigar, and dammit, you've got sex appeal, you minx. Oh, and homosexuality? It's just a phase you're going through.
Somewhere in there the Pre-Election Fiscal Outlook hinted broadly that the federal budget was anything but sexy - in fact, it is closer to suppository, if truth be told.
And make no mistake, this is serious: a budget bottom line that simply doesn't add up, an age of deficit, fuelled, as time goes miserably by, by further collapses in the revenue take as the economy softens and jobs go south.
To take the outlook seriously is to know that in this campaign we are being all but conned by two teams who refuse to treat the electorate with even a modicum of intellectual respect. That respect would entail either side telling us simple truths about either the economy or their intentions. Truths that would include an uncomfortable confession that revenue is below spending, followed by three options: increased tax, reduced spending, or a life lived increasingly in the red.
And here we are, preparing to invest authority over the national cheque account to one party or another too sheepish to level with us over its plans. One lot will tell you we're triple-A rated, the other that surpluses are in their DNA.
There ought to be a law... or at least a conversation that took the people of this country into the political confidence, that admitted there may need to be reframing of the tax system, a reframing that should involve a discussion of the GST, just as it should consider sales, tax, land tax, income tax and whatever pernicious duties may apply to the transfer of cigarette card collections between consenting adults. Everything should be on the table and we should all be included in the conversation.
Because, guess what, this is our country and those semi-verbal mime artists now competing for the privilege of running it should be doing so on our behalf having first made a full disclosure of their plans.
Sounds ridiculous, I know.
And yes, compared to 2010, there has been more analysis of these issues in the serious media, but you have to wonder how much that is simply evidence of the growth in opinion and context publishing since, a development that has filled a happy wonkish niche, but hardly diverted the mainstream from its day to day grind of fatuous trivia and distorted polemic. Things there are as bad or worse than they ever were.
The traditional media verities still apply, with the constant distraction of campaign trivia, misspeaking and accident substituting for any true interrogation of the state we're in ... or might want to be.
In its absence our next government - whichever it is - will be elected on the basis of vague platitudes and four or so weeks spent avoiding catastrophic error. Both major parties will do just what it takes and no more than might be required to nudge their numbers over the line in a show of finely polished political practice.
Lucky country.
Jonathan Green is the presenter of Sunday Extra on Radio National and a former editor of The Drum. View his full profile here.
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