April 15, 2025 • 23 mins
This week our revered economics editor Ross Gittins wrote an essay for the Age and Sydney Morning Herald, in which he lamented the state of this election campaign in particular, and Australian politics in general. The essay was titled “They treat us like mugs”, and Ross did not miss with his critique of the timidity and cynicism of the two major parties’ campaigns. Gittins joins Jacqueline Maley in the studio, to talk through his searing critique.
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S1 (00:01):
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley, it's Tuesday, April 15th.
Today we're bringing you something very special because this week
our revered economics editor, Ross Gittins, wrote an essay for
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, in which he
lamented the state of this election campaign in particular and
Australian politics in general. The essay was titled They Treat
(00:25):
us like Mugs. And Ross did not miss with his
critique of the timidity and the cynicism of the two
major parties. Campaigns. As a special guest today, we have
Ross in the studio to talk us through his searing critique. Welcome, Ross.
S2 (00:38):
Thank you.
S1 (00:39):
It's really nice to have you. You're a first timer
on this podcast and we welcome you warmly. Ross, you
really do not mince words in this essay. You start
by saying of the current election campaign that it's been
neither interesting nor edifying and hasn't got to grips with
the big issues. That's a pretty big statement out of
the blocks. Can you elaborate on that?
S2 (00:58):
Yes. Well, I mean, what they've done is, is show
us all these trinkets. We've got this tax cut and
we've got this cut in petrol. Something else over here.
Something else over there. All this stuff that might help, uh,
might or might not help first home buyers. And it's
like walking through a shopping center and picking what you
(01:21):
want to buy. Well, that's not very edifying, even, uh,
trying to compare them. Most of the time you're comparing
apples and oranges and it's not all that easy. And
but it's also not very informative.
S1 (01:37):
And why do you say that? Because, I mean, there's
plenty of information out there about the variations of the
different policies, the housing policies. I mean, there's interviews, there's
podcasts like this one. There's reams and reams of newspaper
articles about how all these schemes might work. Why do
you say it's not informative?
S2 (01:52):
I guess because I doubt whether most people are dedicated
enough to read much of that stuff. I think one
of the things is that political campaigns mainly happen on television,
and both sides put an enormous amount of effort into
just making sure they get on to the evening television news,
(02:14):
and that's where they show that they're out and about.
You can have a look at them and they're doing
this and they're doing that, and they've got this policy
and they've got that policy, but there's nothing deep and
meaningful goes on in a TV bulletin. If you want
to look for the good stuff, you can find it.
(02:36):
You can even find mine. But the.
S1 (02:39):
Very.
S2 (02:39):
Best stuff. How many people do that? I'm not sure.
S1 (02:42):
Sure. I mean, there'd only be a smallish chunk, I suppose,
of the voting population. Who are that engaged? You do say?
I mean, this is a big call that you make
as well. You say in your 51 years as a journalist,
and this is the 20th election campaign that you've witnessed,
you say that they're getting worse.
S2 (02:57):
I don't doubt that. And they really started to get
worse after the 2019 election. That's the one where Bill
shorten thought he was going to win. Everyone thought he
was going to win, but he didn't. Why? Because he
had very carefully costed promises. He had a lot of
(03:18):
generous promises and his economic people had gone through and said, well,
if we increase that tax a little bit here, it won't.
It won't affect many people. And the people it affects
can afford it. And a little bit over there. And
by the time the election campaign had finished, the Labor
(03:40):
Party's opponents had turned that into an enormous scare campaign
where everyone thought taxes are going to go up under labor.
I'm not a mug. I wouldn't vote for them.
S3 (03:51):
He's the only one talking about a death tax.
S4 (03:53):
A death tax, death taxes, death tax.
S5 (03:55):
There is a plan for a death tax.
S3 (03:56):
A secret plan for a death tax.
S4 (03:58):
Death tax. Death tax. Death taxes.
S6 (04:00):
Labor. It's the bill Australia can't afford authorised by Ahern's
Liberal Party of Australia, Canberra.
S2 (04:05):
And that hugely changed Anthony Albanese's attitude to elections. And
so when the Labor Party came back for another go
in 2022, they did this small target thing where they
promised very little and they had the list of promises
(04:26):
of things they wouldn't do was longer than the list
of things they would do. They wouldn't introduce a new tax,
they wouldn't increase any existing tax and they wouldn't touch
the stage three tax cuts. They were already legislated. They'd
let them go through. They wouldn't interfere with them. Now,
(04:46):
that was the one promise that Albanese broke. But basically
he was saying, I've tied my hands together. I've tied
my hands behind my back so that I can't do
anything much. If you elect me but elect me.
S1 (05:01):
And I mean, I suppose he had the the massive
advantage of a very unpopular incumbent prime minister and a
government that had been in power for nearly a decade.
So perhaps a lot of people thought it was time
for a change. You just touched on, you know, television
and how election campaigns are really run on television, or
the traditional model for, I don't know, maybe the last
50 years it's been it's all about getting on the
(05:22):
nightly news. But in the essay you say that that's
changed now because our media consumption habits are so fractured.
Young people, you know, I guess anyone under the age
of about 35 is not really necessarily reading newspapers. They're
not necessarily watching free to air TV at the time
that it's on. So everyone's attention is fractured and splintered.
(05:42):
But and you talk about how that's basically narrowed political
campaign messages into scare campaign advertising that can go on TV,
but can also be, you know, all over your social
media feed.
S2 (05:54):
Yes. So the main way election campaigns are conducted these
days is through advertising, whether they're advertising on free to
air or they're advertising on other mediums. These days, a
lot of advertising on social media, which is actually very
if you're not actually a watcher of all these things,
it's a bit hard to know what what's happening.
S7 (06:16):
Living costs are up, bills are up, inflation is consistently
higher than any major advanced economy. And we've had the
biggest fall in disposable income in the developed world. We
can't afford three more years of labour authorized by a
Liberal Canberra.
S2 (06:30):
If the best you can do is get most of
your opinions from advertising, then you are likely to have
a very jaundiced view of what's happening.
S8 (06:45):
The money for Peter Dutton's $600 Hundred billion dollar nuclear
plan has to come from somewhere under your tax goes
up under Dutton, your HECS debt, childcare, medicines, TAFE fees
go up, he cuts you pay.
S6 (06:58):
Authorised Erickson, ALP Canberra.
S2 (07:01):
Even if there weren't people using those ads for scare campaigns.
When I tell you about my policies, I tell you
about the good bits. I don't tell you about the
bad bits, especially not in an ad. So you don't
end up being very much informed unless you go out
of your way to make sure you are. I mean,
(07:21):
you can go on the party sites and you can
read reams of their speeches and their policies and this,
that and the other, but I'm not sure many people
do know.
S1 (07:30):
I think what you're saying is true. I mean, you know,
I'm thinking about the most disengaged or the least interested voters.
They might be looking at Facebook, Instagram, they might be
listening to a podcast or doing something like that. And
political ads will pop up for them.
S9 (07:44):
An election is approaching soon. Replace your independent teal MP
with one that works, reduces costs and will not disappear
when you need them. Most.
S10 (07:52):
Authorized by Julian Symons Australians for prosperity.
S2 (07:54):
That is the way a lot of people do their homework.
They think. I'm not really interested in politics, but I
know I've got to vote and the election campaign is on.
So in a week or two I've got to decide
who I'm voting for. And so I'd better start doing
some homework. I know I'll watch the ads. Yeah. While
I was watching something else, I saw these ads. They're
(08:16):
they're what I remember and know about the campaign.
S1 (08:19):
Yeah. It's the information you retain when you're making your vote.
You also discussed Ross, the professionalization of politics. You sort
of say that previously the men and they were pretty
much all men who entered politics often had, quote, real jobs.
That's my scare quotes, not yours. And careers. And, you know,
out in the real world, in business, in the law, um,
(08:41):
as a train driver, you know, perhaps in a, in an.
S2 (08:44):
Or as a policeman.
S1 (08:46):
That's right. In an honest profession. And then in middle
age or even later, they switched to becoming members of Parliament.
And now politics is a very different affair. It's a
whole of life, career and a whole of life profession
for a lot of people in Parliament. How has that
changed the nature of politics and particularly the nature of campaigns?
S2 (09:04):
Well, what it's done is changed. The people who end
up in Parliament and people who end up at the
top are they are people who really started on a
political career. Soon after they finished schooling university, they went
to work for a union, or they went to work
(09:24):
for a minister, a shadow minister, and they worked their
way up the system. Now, what that does is it
teaches them a lot about how the political game is played,
how to play politics, because that when you're in the
minister's office, that's what you're helping the minister do. In theory,
(09:46):
you might. You might be helping the Minister for health
work out what we should be doing about Medicare. But
a lot of the time, whatever you think about Medicare
and do about Medicare is very heavily oriented to what
do we need for the next election? What have we
got to fix? And so I think that's changed it
(10:08):
a lot. And I think when you have a long
career of 20 years, say, before you get to be
a minister, if you started out with the idea that
I'd like to be a politician because there are things
that need fixing that I feel very strongly about, you
get a lot of that beaten out of you.
S1 (10:26):
Mhm.
S2 (10:27):
More so than in the old system where somebody in
their 50s decides the rest of my time I'm going
to go to I made my pile, I got, I
got the kids off my hands. I'm going to go
into politics. I'm going to try and do something worthwhile.
In the last part of my career, that's the way
it worked in the old days. It doesn't work anything
(10:48):
like that. And so it's now much more professional, and
it's about advancing my career. I've I've been working up
for 30 years, and what I care about is getting
the top job.
S1 (11:05):
And you link that directly to the incrementalism of campaigns
or the sort of small target nature of the policies
that are announced in campaign. They're piecemeal, you know, they're
all little treats for the voters, but there's no overwhelming narrative.
S2 (11:20):
People have politicians have always wanted to win elections. Yeah.
I mean, in the past they've been juggling between I
want to win the election. I can't do anything unless
I win the election, but I don't actually want to
be there and do something. Now it's much easier to say, oh,
I'll make sure I stay in power and I'll think
about what I can do.
S1 (11:42):
Once I've gained power. Yeah. Um, what was it that
George Orwell wrote in 1984? The party seeks power for
power's sake. You talk about campaigns being much more scientific now.
Less based on intuition, less based on, I suppose, an
ear for what the voters might want or need. Yes.
And you say that parties spend so much money now
on focus groups and private polling to really hone their
(12:05):
message and to appeal to different constituencies? But why would
that be a bad thing if if parties are trying
to serve the electorate?
S2 (12:14):
Well, because if my objective was to learn how I
could sell an unpopular policy by emphasising this bit rather
than that bit, that wouldn't be too bad. But what
they end up learning is on what not to say.
If you listen to politicians, people can say the silliest
(12:38):
things to them and they don't say, I'm sorry, that's
not right. They not they don't say that. They don't.
They don't want to tell any voter anything that the
voter doesn't want to hear. And they know what the
voter wants to hear, because that's what all their polling
and their focus groups have told them. What you can
say that people will agree with.
S1 (12:59):
Yeah. And I mean, I'm just wondering how that's changed
from the past. I suppose now that the vote is
so splintered, we have a lot of people who are
voting for third parties, nearly a third of the electorate.
The major parties need much broader coalitions of voters than
they used to. So they do have to promise a
lot of things to small interest groups or smaller groups
of people, like moms or working dads or tradies.
S2 (13:20):
Yes. They try. They try to have they try to
have something for everybody. And and they do. How worthwhile
those things are. For example, they've got any number of
policies that are they've announced just this week about what
they're going to do to help first home buyers. They
sound great until somebody who knows a bit about it says. Actually,
(13:43):
they're just as likely to make it worse rather than better.
Sounds good, but doesn't actually do good.
S1 (13:50):
This is a little sidebar, but because we have got
the economics editor in the studio, I want to ask you, Ross,
what you made of those big spending promises on housing
that both Labour and Liberal announced that their party launches
last Sunday.
S2 (14:03):
I think that all of them are quite bad and misleading.
They sound like they are helping you afford an unaffordable house,
but that is actually a contradiction, because if I can
help everybody afford the unaffordable, guess what? The unaffordable goes up.
(14:25):
That doesn't solve the problem.
S1 (14:26):
I mean, the coalition has said that its scheme to
make mortgage interest payments tax deductible for certain buyers. And
they've you know, they've obviously they're going to impose means
testing on on that measure. But they point out that
it's only for first homes. So it will actually provide
an incentive for developers and builders to have a pipeline
(14:47):
of money, I suppose, to build those first homes to
build more houses.
S2 (14:51):
I don't agree with that. I don't think that's right
at all. What that's saying is if we can increase
the demand, the supply will rise to meet it. That's
what that's what the first page of an economics textbook
tells you. But it's not what's happening. If that was happening,
if we have a lot of demand, we get a
(15:12):
lot of supply. If that was happening, the price of
houses wouldn't have kept rising for the past 2 or
3 decades. It's because supply does not respond quickly and
easily to increase demand that we've got the problem that
we've got. So the answer is not I'm going to
(15:34):
increase the demand for more supply and that'll fix it.
The answer is actually to increase the supply. And and
that's why the one policy of those that were bandied
around this week, the one I like most, is the
government's policy of spending $10 billion through the states to
(15:59):
do a lot of their own building and then sell
those off to first home buyers and to do it
on a non-profit basis. This is actually a huge amount
of government intervention that says we won't try and get
leave it to the private sector to build these things.
We're going to organise it all ourselves. We're going to
(16:19):
organise the land, the whole bit, because it's happening through
the state governments who have so much say over where
you can build and where you can't build and how
you can build this is this will work. The one
qualification is that we've neglected the building industry. And one
of the things that's been neglected is to have apprenticeships
(16:44):
so that we train up lots of building workers, electricians
and plumbers and all the rest of them. We don't
have a lot of those. So you can have huge demand.
And they say, well, yeah, I'd love to, but I
can't get the workers. And that's what they're saying right now.
And if the one weakness in the Labour Party's scheme
(17:04):
is that until they can produce enough workers, they can't
build a lot of houses. So part of the problem
is the bad functioning of our housing industry.
S1 (17:16):
Yeah, I do. I do think they have an apprenticeship
program for that worker pipeline problem, but it's probably not
going to be, let's face it, anything that's fixed before
at least a decade away. These promises on housing and
everything else cost costs money. That money has to come
from the federal budget somewhere. But we don't hear a
lot about that side. Um, or at least we haven't
so far. You say in your essay that the laws
(17:37):
of economics have been suspended and that, you know, both
parties don't really address how they're going to pay for
their promises.
S2 (17:44):
Yes. They tell you about all the extra spending they
can do. They tell you about the taxes that they're
going to cut various proposals to cut taxes permanently, temporarily.
This tax, that tax. Well that's fine, but how does
that add up? What is that? What? Where does that
leave the the budget deficit? You would have thought that
(18:06):
it's going to leave the budget deficit much worse, unless
they've figured out ways to pay for it. If they
figured out ways to pay for all of this stuff
they haven't told us yet, maybe they will tell us
before the election's over. I hope that's the case, but
I have a fear that the government and the opposition
(18:27):
are really hoping to get through it without having to
answer any of those kind of awkward questions. But the
other thing is, this is one of the my main
criticisms of election campaigns. No one is ever again game
to say I'm actually going to increase a few taxes,
(18:48):
because they know that the other side will just tell
lies about it and scare people.
S1 (18:54):
Yeah. And I mean, I think we've already seen a
little bit of that with Labour saying very much that
the coalition's going to cut without any hard evidence. It's
just a sort of an allegation that they're making at
this point. You do. Right at the sort of conclusion
of your essay that the voters are really on to
this malaise of the major parties, and the democratic system
has found a way to address it, which is that
(19:17):
people are increasingly directing their votes to third party candidates.
There's a demand for them, and the supply has popped up,
you might say.
S2 (19:23):
Well, yes. In that case it has. Yes. The first
preference vote for neither of the two major parties at
the last election was the highest it's ever been, almost
about a third. So 1 in 3 people didn't vote
for either Labor or Liberal. I won't be surprised if
(19:43):
that's a bit higher this time. Mhm. That I think
is really the answer. What worries me is that the
two sides have been boxing it out for so long
that they've actually fought each other to a standstill, where
neither side is game to say anything. But I've got
(20:05):
a few lovely trinkets and that's my policy that I'm
going to do for you.
S1 (20:10):
Yeah.
S2 (20:10):
I mean, we have a lot of serious problems, and
that involved controversial changes, some changes that are nasty, some change.
All changes That can be misrepresented by your opponent as
being much worse than they really are. And I think
the two parties have fought themselves to a standstill, where
(20:34):
neither side is game to do anything, much for fear
of what the other side will say. But I also
think that the tendency for people to say, I'm disillusioned
with both of them, I'm going to vote for somebody else,
a good independent or the Greens or the teals. I
(20:54):
think that could break this standstill that the two big
parties have got themselves to. Because and especially if if
neither side gets a majority, one of them will have
to do deals with the independents and the minor parties.
And when they do, those parties will say, well, we'll
(21:17):
give you our support provided you do a few few
important things. You can see this with Julia Gillard's Labor
government in 2010, but you can see it all around
the place in various states. Minority governments are quite common
at the state level, and when they come in, they
really do things. When the people in the middle have
(21:43):
power to extract commitments from either of the big parties,
they do.
S1 (21:48):
Yeah. So the idea that the third party intervention or
the third needing to negotiate with the third parties, basically
takes both of the major parties out of their comfort
zones and pushes them forward into some new and possibly
exciting area of policy. I love that idea or your
analysis there that both the major parties are almost in.
It's almost like a toxic co-dependency or something, and there's
(22:09):
mutually assured destruction if either of them tries to do
anything with outside certain parameters.
S2 (22:15):
Yes.
S1 (22:16):
Yeah.
S2 (22:16):
Well, that's the way it seems to have been.
S1 (22:19):
Yeah. Ross, that has been such a fascinating chat. I
recommend to listeners to go and read Ross's essay on
The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald websites, if you
haven't already. It's a really cracking read and, um, very perspicacious,
I think. Thanks so much for being with us, Ross.
S2 (22:37):
My pleasure. Jacki.
S1 (22:41):
Today's episode was produced by Julia Katzel with technical assistance
from Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and
Tom McKendrick is our head of audio. To listen to
our episodes as soon as they drop, follow Inside Politics
on Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts.
To stay up to date with all the election coverage
and exclusives, visit The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald websites.
(23:04):
And to support our journalism, subscribe to us by visiting
The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe. I'm Jacqueline Maley. Thank you
for listening.
From the newsrooms of the Sydney Morning Herald and The Age.
This is inside politics. I'm Jacqueline Maley, it's Tuesday, April 15th.
Today we're bringing you something very special because this week
our revered economics editor, Ross Gittins, wrote an essay for
The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald, in which he
lamented the state of this election campaign in particular and
Australian politics in general. The essay was titled They Treat
(00:25):
us like Mugs. And Ross did not miss with his
critique of the timidity and the cynicism of the two
major parties. Campaigns. As a special guest today, we have
Ross in the studio to talk us through his searing critique. Welcome, Ross.
S2 (00:38):
Thank you.
S1 (00:39):
It's really nice to have you. You're a first timer
on this podcast and we welcome you warmly. Ross, you
really do not mince words in this essay. You start
by saying of the current election campaign that it's been
neither interesting nor edifying and hasn't got to grips with
the big issues. That's a pretty big statement out of
the blocks. Can you elaborate on that?
S2 (00:58):
Yes. Well, I mean, what they've done is, is show
us all these trinkets. We've got this tax cut and
we've got this cut in petrol. Something else over here.
Something else over there. All this stuff that might help, uh,
might or might not help first home buyers. And it's
like walking through a shopping center and picking what you
(01:21):
want to buy. Well, that's not very edifying, even, uh,
trying to compare them. Most of the time you're comparing
apples and oranges and it's not all that easy. And
but it's also not very informative.
S1 (01:37):
And why do you say that? Because, I mean, there's
plenty of information out there about the variations of the
different policies, the housing policies. I mean, there's interviews, there's
podcasts like this one. There's reams and reams of newspaper
articles about how all these schemes might work. Why do
you say it's not informative?
S2 (01:52):
I guess because I doubt whether most people are dedicated
enough to read much of that stuff. I think one
of the things is that political campaigns mainly happen on television,
and both sides put an enormous amount of effort into
just making sure they get on to the evening television news,
(02:14):
and that's where they show that they're out and about.
You can have a look at them and they're doing
this and they're doing that, and they've got this policy
and they've got that policy, but there's nothing deep and
meaningful goes on in a TV bulletin. If you want
to look for the good stuff, you can find it.
(02:36):
You can even find mine. But the.
S1 (02:39):
Very.
S2 (02:39):
Best stuff. How many people do that? I'm not sure.
S1 (02:42):
Sure. I mean, there'd only be a smallish chunk, I suppose,
of the voting population. Who are that engaged? You do say?
I mean, this is a big call that you make
as well. You say in your 51 years as a journalist,
and this is the 20th election campaign that you've witnessed,
you say that they're getting worse.
S2 (02:57):
I don't doubt that. And they really started to get
worse after the 2019 election. That's the one where Bill
shorten thought he was going to win. Everyone thought he
was going to win, but he didn't. Why? Because he
had very carefully costed promises. He had a lot of
(03:18):
generous promises and his economic people had gone through and said, well,
if we increase that tax a little bit here, it won't.
It won't affect many people. And the people it affects
can afford it. And a little bit over there. And
by the time the election campaign had finished, the Labor
(03:40):
Party's opponents had turned that into an enormous scare campaign
where everyone thought taxes are going to go up under labor.
I'm not a mug. I wouldn't vote for them.
S3 (03:51):
He's the only one talking about a death tax.
S4 (03:53):
A death tax, death taxes, death tax.
S5 (03:55):
There is a plan for a death tax.
S3 (03:56):
A secret plan for a death tax.
S4 (03:58):
Death tax. Death tax. Death taxes.
S6 (04:00):
Labor. It's the bill Australia can't afford authorised by Ahern's
Liberal Party of Australia, Canberra.
S2 (04:05):
And that hugely changed Anthony Albanese's attitude to elections. And
so when the Labor Party came back for another go
in 2022, they did this small target thing where they
promised very little and they had the list of promises
(04:26):
of things they wouldn't do was longer than the list
of things they would do. They wouldn't introduce a new tax,
they wouldn't increase any existing tax and they wouldn't touch
the stage three tax cuts. They were already legislated. They'd
let them go through. They wouldn't interfere with them. Now,
(04:46):
that was the one promise that Albanese broke. But basically
he was saying, I've tied my hands together. I've tied
my hands behind my back so that I can't do
anything much. If you elect me but elect me.
S1 (05:01):
And I mean, I suppose he had the the massive
advantage of a very unpopular incumbent prime minister and a
government that had been in power for nearly a decade.
So perhaps a lot of people thought it was time
for a change. You just touched on, you know, television
and how election campaigns are really run on television, or
the traditional model for, I don't know, maybe the last
50 years it's been it's all about getting on the
(05:22):
nightly news. But in the essay you say that that's
changed now because our media consumption habits are so fractured.
Young people, you know, I guess anyone under the age
of about 35 is not really necessarily reading newspapers. They're
not necessarily watching free to air TV at the time
that it's on. So everyone's attention is fractured and splintered.
(05:42):
But and you talk about how that's basically narrowed political
campaign messages into scare campaign advertising that can go on TV,
but can also be, you know, all over your social
media feed.
S2 (05:54):
Yes. So the main way election campaigns are conducted these
days is through advertising, whether they're advertising on free to
air or they're advertising on other mediums. These days, a
lot of advertising on social media, which is actually very
if you're not actually a watcher of all these things,
it's a bit hard to know what what's happening.
S7 (06:16):
Living costs are up, bills are up, inflation is consistently
higher than any major advanced economy. And we've had the
biggest fall in disposable income in the developed world. We
can't afford three more years of labour authorized by a
Liberal Canberra.
S2 (06:30):
If the best you can do is get most of
your opinions from advertising, then you are likely to have
a very jaundiced view of what's happening.
S8 (06:45):
The money for Peter Dutton's $600 Hundred billion dollar nuclear
plan has to come from somewhere under your tax goes
up under Dutton, your HECS debt, childcare, medicines, TAFE fees
go up, he cuts you pay.
S6 (06:58):
Authorised Erickson, ALP Canberra.
S2 (07:01):
Even if there weren't people using those ads for scare campaigns.
When I tell you about my policies, I tell you
about the good bits. I don't tell you about the
bad bits, especially not in an ad. So you don't
end up being very much informed unless you go out
of your way to make sure you are. I mean,
(07:21):
you can go on the party sites and you can
read reams of their speeches and their policies and this,
that and the other, but I'm not sure many people
do know.
S1 (07:30):
I think what you're saying is true. I mean, you know,
I'm thinking about the most disengaged or the least interested voters.
They might be looking at Facebook, Instagram, they might be
listening to a podcast or doing something like that. And
political ads will pop up for them.
S9 (07:44):
An election is approaching soon. Replace your independent teal MP
with one that works, reduces costs and will not disappear
when you need them. Most.
S10 (07:52):
Authorized by Julian Symons Australians for prosperity.
S2 (07:54):
That is the way a lot of people do their homework.
They think. I'm not really interested in politics, but I
know I've got to vote and the election campaign is on.
So in a week or two I've got to decide
who I'm voting for. And so I'd better start doing
some homework. I know I'll watch the ads. Yeah. While
I was watching something else, I saw these ads. They're
(08:16):
they're what I remember and know about the campaign.
S1 (08:19):
Yeah. It's the information you retain when you're making your vote.
You also discussed Ross, the professionalization of politics. You sort
of say that previously the men and they were pretty
much all men who entered politics often had, quote, real jobs.
That's my scare quotes, not yours. And careers. And, you know,
out in the real world, in business, in the law, um,
(08:41):
as a train driver, you know, perhaps in a, in an.
S2 (08:44):
Or as a policeman.
S1 (08:46):
That's right. In an honest profession. And then in middle
age or even later, they switched to becoming members of Parliament.
And now politics is a very different affair. It's a
whole of life, career and a whole of life profession
for a lot of people in Parliament. How has that
changed the nature of politics and particularly the nature of campaigns?
S2 (09:04):
Well, what it's done is changed. The people who end
up in Parliament and people who end up at the
top are they are people who really started on a
political career. Soon after they finished schooling university, they went
to work for a union, or they went to work
(09:24):
for a minister, a shadow minister, and they worked their
way up the system. Now, what that does is it
teaches them a lot about how the political game is played,
how to play politics, because that when you're in the
minister's office, that's what you're helping the minister do. In theory,
(09:46):
you might. You might be helping the Minister for health
work out what we should be doing about Medicare. But
a lot of the time, whatever you think about Medicare
and do about Medicare is very heavily oriented to what
do we need for the next election? What have we
got to fix? And so I think that's changed it
(10:08):
a lot. And I think when you have a long
career of 20 years, say, before you get to be
a minister, if you started out with the idea that
I'd like to be a politician because there are things
that need fixing that I feel very strongly about, you
get a lot of that beaten out of you.
S1 (10:26):
Mhm.
S2 (10:27):
More so than in the old system where somebody in
their 50s decides the rest of my time I'm going
to go to I made my pile, I got, I
got the kids off my hands. I'm going to go
into politics. I'm going to try and do something worthwhile.
In the last part of my career, that's the way
it worked in the old days. It doesn't work anything
(10:48):
like that. And so it's now much more professional, and
it's about advancing my career. I've I've been working up
for 30 years, and what I care about is getting
the top job.
S1 (11:05):
And you link that directly to the incrementalism of campaigns
or the sort of small target nature of the policies
that are announced in campaign. They're piecemeal, you know, they're
all little treats for the voters, but there's no overwhelming narrative.
S2 (11:20):
People have politicians have always wanted to win elections. Yeah.
I mean, in the past they've been juggling between I
want to win the election. I can't do anything unless
I win the election, but I don't actually want to
be there and do something. Now it's much easier to say, oh,
I'll make sure I stay in power and I'll think
about what I can do.
S1 (11:42):
Once I've gained power. Yeah. Um, what was it that
George Orwell wrote in 1984? The party seeks power for
power's sake. You talk about campaigns being much more scientific now.
Less based on intuition, less based on, I suppose, an
ear for what the voters might want or need. Yes.
And you say that parties spend so much money now
on focus groups and private polling to really hone their
(12:05):
message and to appeal to different constituencies? But why would
that be a bad thing if if parties are trying
to serve the electorate?
S2 (12:14):
Well, because if my objective was to learn how I
could sell an unpopular policy by emphasising this bit rather
than that bit, that wouldn't be too bad. But what
they end up learning is on what not to say.
If you listen to politicians, people can say the silliest
(12:38):
things to them and they don't say, I'm sorry, that's
not right. They not they don't say that. They don't.
They don't want to tell any voter anything that the
voter doesn't want to hear. And they know what the
voter wants to hear, because that's what all their polling
and their focus groups have told them. What you can
say that people will agree with.
S1 (12:59):
Yeah. And I mean, I'm just wondering how that's changed
from the past. I suppose now that the vote is
so splintered, we have a lot of people who are
voting for third parties, nearly a third of the electorate.
The major parties need much broader coalitions of voters than
they used to. So they do have to promise a
lot of things to small interest groups or smaller groups
of people, like moms or working dads or tradies.
S2 (13:20):
Yes. They try. They try to have they try to
have something for everybody. And and they do. How worthwhile
those things are. For example, they've got any number of
policies that are they've announced just this week about what
they're going to do to help first home buyers. They
sound great until somebody who knows a bit about it says. Actually,
(13:43):
they're just as likely to make it worse rather than better.
Sounds good, but doesn't actually do good.
S1 (13:50):
This is a little sidebar, but because we have got
the economics editor in the studio, I want to ask you, Ross,
what you made of those big spending promises on housing
that both Labour and Liberal announced that their party launches
last Sunday.
S2 (14:03):
I think that all of them are quite bad and misleading.
They sound like they are helping you afford an unaffordable house,
but that is actually a contradiction, because if I can
help everybody afford the unaffordable, guess what? The unaffordable goes up.
(14:25):
That doesn't solve the problem.
S1 (14:26):
I mean, the coalition has said that its scheme to
make mortgage interest payments tax deductible for certain buyers. And
they've you know, they've obviously they're going to impose means
testing on on that measure. But they point out that
it's only for first homes. So it will actually provide
an incentive for developers and builders to have a pipeline
(14:47):
of money, I suppose, to build those first homes to
build more houses.
S2 (14:51):
I don't agree with that. I don't think that's right
at all. What that's saying is if we can increase
the demand, the supply will rise to meet it. That's
what that's what the first page of an economics textbook
tells you. But it's not what's happening. If that was happening,
if we have a lot of demand, we get a
(15:12):
lot of supply. If that was happening, the price of
houses wouldn't have kept rising for the past 2 or
3 decades. It's because supply does not respond quickly and
easily to increase demand that we've got the problem that
we've got. So the answer is not I'm going to
(15:34):
increase the demand for more supply and that'll fix it.
The answer is actually to increase the supply. And and
that's why the one policy of those that were bandied
around this week, the one I like most, is the
government's policy of spending $10 billion through the states to
(15:59):
do a lot of their own building and then sell
those off to first home buyers and to do it
on a non-profit basis. This is actually a huge amount
of government intervention that says we won't try and get
leave it to the private sector to build these things.
We're going to organise it all ourselves. We're going to
(16:19):
organise the land, the whole bit, because it's happening through
the state governments who have so much say over where
you can build and where you can't build and how
you can build this is this will work. The one
qualification is that we've neglected the building industry. And one
of the things that's been neglected is to have apprenticeships
(16:44):
so that we train up lots of building workers, electricians
and plumbers and all the rest of them. We don't
have a lot of those. So you can have huge demand.
And they say, well, yeah, I'd love to, but I
can't get the workers. And that's what they're saying right now.
And if the one weakness in the Labour Party's scheme
(17:04):
is that until they can produce enough workers, they can't
build a lot of houses. So part of the problem
is the bad functioning of our housing industry.
S1 (17:16):
Yeah, I do. I do think they have an apprenticeship
program for that worker pipeline problem, but it's probably not
going to be, let's face it, anything that's fixed before
at least a decade away. These promises on housing and
everything else cost costs money. That money has to come
from the federal budget somewhere. But we don't hear a
lot about that side. Um, or at least we haven't
so far. You say in your essay that the laws
(17:37):
of economics have been suspended and that, you know, both
parties don't really address how they're going to pay for
their promises.
S2 (17:44):
Yes. They tell you about all the extra spending they
can do. They tell you about the taxes that they're
going to cut various proposals to cut taxes permanently, temporarily.
This tax, that tax. Well that's fine, but how does
that add up? What is that? What? Where does that
leave the the budget deficit? You would have thought that
(18:06):
it's going to leave the budget deficit much worse, unless
they've figured out ways to pay for it. If they
figured out ways to pay for all of this stuff
they haven't told us yet, maybe they will tell us
before the election's over. I hope that's the case, but
I have a fear that the government and the opposition
(18:27):
are really hoping to get through it without having to
answer any of those kind of awkward questions. But the
other thing is, this is one of the my main
criticisms of election campaigns. No one is ever again game
to say I'm actually going to increase a few taxes,
(18:48):
because they know that the other side will just tell
lies about it and scare people.
S1 (18:54):
Yeah. And I mean, I think we've already seen a
little bit of that with Labour saying very much that
the coalition's going to cut without any hard evidence. It's
just a sort of an allegation that they're making at
this point. You do. Right at the sort of conclusion
of your essay that the voters are really on to
this malaise of the major parties, and the democratic system
has found a way to address it, which is that
(19:17):
people are increasingly directing their votes to third party candidates.
There's a demand for them, and the supply has popped up,
you might say.
S2 (19:23):
Well, yes. In that case it has. Yes. The first
preference vote for neither of the two major parties at
the last election was the highest it's ever been, almost
about a third. So 1 in 3 people didn't vote
for either Labor or Liberal. I won't be surprised if
(19:43):
that's a bit higher this time. Mhm. That I think
is really the answer. What worries me is that the
two sides have been boxing it out for so long
that they've actually fought each other to a standstill, where
neither side is game to say anything. But I've got
(20:05):
a few lovely trinkets and that's my policy that I'm
going to do for you.
S1 (20:10):
Yeah.
S2 (20:10):
I mean, we have a lot of serious problems, and
that involved controversial changes, some changes that are nasty, some change.
All changes That can be misrepresented by your opponent as
being much worse than they really are. And I think
the two parties have fought themselves to a standstill, where
(20:34):
neither side is game to do anything, much for fear
of what the other side will say. But I also
think that the tendency for people to say, I'm disillusioned
with both of them, I'm going to vote for somebody else,
a good independent or the Greens or the teals. I
(20:54):
think that could break this standstill that the two big
parties have got themselves to. Because and especially if if
neither side gets a majority, one of them will have
to do deals with the independents and the minor parties.
And when they do, those parties will say, well, we'll
(21:17):
give you our support provided you do a few few
important things. You can see this with Julia Gillard's Labor
government in 2010, but you can see it all around
the place in various states. Minority governments are quite common
at the state level, and when they come in, they
really do things. When the people in the middle have
(21:43):
power to extract commitments from either of the big parties,
they do.
S1 (21:48):
Yeah. So the idea that the third party intervention or
the third needing to negotiate with the third parties, basically
takes both of the major parties out of their comfort
zones and pushes them forward into some new and possibly
exciting area of policy. I love that idea or your
analysis there that both the major parties are almost in.
It's almost like a toxic co-dependency or something, and there's
(22:09):
mutually assured destruction if either of them tries to do
anything with outside certain parameters.
S2 (22:15):
Yes.
S1 (22:16):
Yeah.
S2 (22:16):
Well, that's the way it seems to have been.
S1 (22:19):
Yeah. Ross, that has been such a fascinating chat. I
recommend to listeners to go and read Ross's essay on
The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald websites, if you
haven't already. It's a really cracking read and, um, very perspicacious,
I think. Thanks so much for being with us, Ross.
S2 (22:37):
My pleasure. Jacki.
S1 (22:41):
Today's episode was produced by Julia Katzel with technical assistance
from Josh towers. Our executive producer is Tammy Mills, and
Tom McKendrick is our head of audio. To listen to
our episodes as soon as they drop, follow Inside Politics
on Apple, Spotify or anywhere else you listen to your podcasts.
To stay up to date with all the election coverage
and exclusives, visit The Age and The Sydney Morning Herald websites.
(23:04):
And to support our journalism, subscribe to us by visiting
The Age or smh.com.au. Subscribe. I'm Jacqueline Maley. Thank you
for listening.
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