When words become meaningless

Posit:

Hysteria, tautology and hyperbole are killing national discourse. Furthermore, those who should know better are doing nothing more than sharpening the partisan knives.

Exhibit A

Tony Abbott and his mates on the religious right are trying to make the upcoming postal survey on same sex marriage a battle for the moral future of the country. He has conflated this postal plebiscite with free speech, moral decline, and religious freedom in one of the great political overreaches in living memory. By failing to repudiate Abbott, Turnbull risks turning this thing from merely a shameless cowardly act into a referendum on how out of step the government is with modern Australia.

Exhibit B

Mathias Cormann gave a rather purple speech to the Sydney Institute a few days ago, and basically likened Bill Shorten’s run-up to the next election to Lenin’s return to Russia in a sealed railcar.

Cormann used the word “socialist” six times in the speech, and spent a great deal of effort trying to cast Shorten as an Antipodean Corbyn who is out to trash Australia’s centrist democracy and torpedo the economy via personal tax reform.

“The Berlin Wall came down 28 years ago, which means roughly 18 per cent of Australians enrolled to vote were born after the fall of the Berlin Wall and the failure of a system of government that destroyed the economies of eastern Europe.

“His rhetoric is the divisive language of haves and have-nots. It is socialist revisionism at its worst.”

The trouble with calling someone socialist or communist when they patently aren’t is that you render those terms meaningless. You also hollow out your alternative vision for Australia as nothing more than a partisan high-five. You reduce debate to nothing more than a caricature versus a straw man.

In casting a private school educated centrist politician as Lenin reborn, Cormann lost a great chance to frame a national debate on inequality in terms of Liberal party solutions. Inequality, tepid wage growth, and housing unaffordability are issues that are pushing many voters towards Labor. Cormann’s blinkered approach, and the fresh memory of him smoking a cigar with Joe Hockey after formulating the most unfair budget Australia had seen in years, does little to budge the stereotype that the Liberals are all-in for vested corporate interests.

Exhibit C

Following the removal of confederate monuments in the USA, there has been a growing push in Australia to recognise that our own memorials to colonial history might be very divisive to indigenous citizens.

Rather than have a measured debate about this, Malcolm Turnbull (who is playing to the worst angels of his party/nature) ripped the histrionic playbook right out of Tony Abbott’s hands.

“I don’t think this has got much momentum, this is very much the Labor, Green, left sort of fringe.”

“…we can’t get into this Stalinist exercise of trying to wipe out or obliterate or blank out parts of our history.”

Stan Grant’s op-ed piece presented a unique opportunity for Turnbull to take ownership of an issue that risks running out of control and creating further racial divisions in Australia. Turnbull simply preached to the choir, leaving a vacuum to be filled by motivated political extremists online and in the streets. It was yet another example of him being a calculating chief executive rather than a civic leader. His entire prime ministership has been nothing more than threading the needle between factional forces in his own party and centrist policies to stop the bleed of votes to the opposition. This isn’t leadership, it is the craven prolongation of office.

With Trump’s response to the events in Charlottesville, we’ve seen that a nation without non-partisan psychic leadership in a time of crisis risks irrevocable schisms that can take a generation to resolve.

In conclusion…

…if it weren’t for Shorten’s unpopularity — and , seriously, he’s about as likeable as a cane toad — the Coalition would be heading towards a historic landslide loss in the next election. It’s disappointing that Turnbull has failed to live up to the man who gave that speech in 2015, but it isn’t surprising. There’s enough biographical information on the Prime Minister to suggest that he values the prestige of the office more than its societal imperatives.

If only our politicians provided actual leadership on politically divisive issues, rather than allowing the further bifurcation of society. They can blame each other or the media as much as they like, but they were elected to do a job with responsibilities that they seem unwilling to fulfil. Bipartisanship is nearly dead, and no-one seems willing to restore it to full health.

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