Comment

I owe the ALP a great deal, but I am increasingly edgy about where the two major parties are heading, their increasing factionalism and secretive oligarchies … I put the planet first, then Homo sapiens, then other species, and place national interest, my own or anyone else’s nation, some distance down the list. I have no sense of the tribal…

I can still hear it. That word that lands with the brute force of history. That sucker-punch word. The taunt of cowards. That word that incites lynch mobs. Yes, I can still hear it. I always hear it.

Dutton said the prime minister was making ‘Australians less safe’ and called on any protesters who were on visas to be deported. This conveniently dovetailed with a recurring theme of the opposition leader – that migrants and refugees, particularly those from the Middle East, could be presumed to be security risks and were also making the housing crisis worse.

Governments are supposed to be all about accountability. Yet the ‘gap’ widens each year, and the statistics provide stark evidence of this failure. Of child suicides – four times higher among Indigenous than non-Indigenous children. Of child removals – 11 times higher. Incarceration of children, 24 times higher. And on it goes.

A former senior Liberal asked me this week: whatever happened to the Liberal Party’s commitment to developing substantial policies? I had to admit the current Coalition seems to believe it doesn’t need such things, that it can win an election by just being critical and negative, by basically undermining the credibility of the government.

It took a little over six hours for Anthony Albanese to rule it out entirely. That is roughly the length of his nerve. “I have no plans to do it,” the prime minister said. “It’s not our policy.”

An important reason why Australia has fallen short of its potential to be the ‘clever country’, as many have aspired to over the years, such as prime minister Bob Hawke in the 1980s, is a shortage of research funding. Successive governments have happily cut or restrained this funding over many years, and it has also been difficult to interest the private sector – business, charities or high-net-worth individuals – in donating to research, let alone providing sustained funding.

The hard-headed assessment of one of Anthony Albanese’s closest allies is that Peter Dutton is the best thing Labor has going for it at the next election. Not because the unpopular Liberal leader cannot win, but rather because he can. This creates the circumstances for the election to become not a referendum on the performance of the government but rather a choice between Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party and Peter Dutton’s Coalition.

Denial is a funny thing. We have to find slippery ways of trying to live with high levels of cognitive dissonance: the discomfort we feel when faced with the reality that our thoughts and actions are contradictory. We must somehow rationalise the ways in which we fool ourselves. In the words of Seinfeld’s George Costanza: ‘It’s not a lie if you believe it.’ Nowhere is the denial of reality clearer than the political response to dealing with the existential threats posed by climate change.

Last month, when Zali Steggall accused Peter Dutton of racism, Sky News reported that the opposition leader was seeking legal advice. Presumably he chose not to pursue it. Truth is one of the few solid defences available under defamation law.