The problem with being a transactional politician like Scott Morrison is that you end up personifying Oscar Wilde’s comment about knowing the price of everything but the value of nothing.
Now politicians have always thrown money at problems – sometimes wisely, sometimes stupidly and sometimes with remarkable outcomes like sending men to the moon.
You won’t read about it in the Australian media other than The Conversation. The story is missing from The Age and SMH and a Google search reveals no coverage in any mainstream Australian media.
What is it that gets so ignored? Just the news that Transparency International (TI)’s 2021 Corruption Perceptions Index (CPI) has put Australia in 18th place – the worst result Australia has ever received since TI’s new methodology in 2012.
What is remarkable about Australian right wingers is their simultaneous ignorance of Australia history and their enthusiasm for opining on it.
The issue becomes significant every year on January 26 but causes problems all year round as, when in political trouble, they dig deep into the kitbag of wedge politics.
Australia Prime Ministers are quick to take us to war and even quicker to commemorate those wars. They are not so quick to provide meaningful debate in Parliament about those decisions.
The Australian War Powers Reform campaign, No War Without Parliament, is now seeking to ensure the voices of some of those Australians most heavily affected by decisions for overseas wars – ADF veterans and their families – are heard.
Despite George Orwell’s Politics and the English Language, there has been a constant battle between rational, comprehensible language and obfuscation and propaganda, and the questions he raised are doubly pertinent in an era which has witnessed a new fall of rationality in language.
Marten Scheffer, Ingrid van de Leemput, Else Weinans and Johan Bullen address the issue in a PNAS paper (2 November 2021). They say: “The surge of post-truth political argumentation suggests that we are living in a special historical period when it comes to the balance between emotion and reasoning.”
In the middle of trying to write some articles on social science polarisation research, and tend the Truth and Integrity Project website and Twitter feed, I was asked to write an article ranking the Labor Shadow Cabinet from one to 10.
At 3 am the next morning it was one of those moments when you wake up wondering what on earth you have done. The only names you can think of are Penny Wong and Tanya Plibersek. If you wake your wife she’ll be furious and, if you are lucky, suggest you have left out Kristina Kenneally.
In 2016 a researcher, Vicky Chuqiao Yang started work on computer simulations of US politics. It was part of social science revolution in interrogating data.
Mitchell Wardrop, in a PNAS news feature (8 September 2021), said Yang “was fascinated by the realisation that the ‘left right’ standoff widely described as ‘polarisation’ was not one thing.”
There has been an avalanche of social science research on polarisation in recent years – much of it assisted by AI driven analysis of social media; some of it building on long accepted social science findings; and some of it sadly a victim of the replication crisis which emerged in psychology some years ago.
In the next few months millions of dollars will be spent on political market research – much of it on focus groups which take the form of group discussions.
Allegedly it allows political parties to identify what people are thinking and how to respond to that. It is not a consultative project but rather one often devoted to testing ideas which form the basis of slogans. It also won’t be much about policy unless it is to elicit ideas for attacks on opponents’ promises.
On August 19 2021 9News put up on its home page a news article quoting the Governor-General, David Hurley, saying “you did as your nation asked” about veterans of the Afghanistan War.
Today more than four months later it’s still there and on many days it’s the first item on the home page news feed.