When a political writer says “this is
what the Abbott government needs to do to improve its standing”,
they aren't saying “it should stop lying and abandon a policy
agenda that stinks”.
They're saying “the government could
persuade people it's not lying, if it would just listen to me.”
I dislike it when people refer to
Canberra as “the Beltway” in imitation of America, but the word
does fill a gap in Australia's political slang. There is, in
Australia's politics as in America's, a kind of
closed-circle-insiderness that the word encapsulates.
As Victoria kicks out one government
and installs another, the political insiders are cranking up their
word machines and telling us that the Abbott government failed
Victoria because it's made a mess of its “messaging” over the ABC
cuts and the $7 GP copayment.
The obsession of political commentators
with “messaging” and “the narrative” is not the application
of a disinterested academic abstraction to political debate: it's a
deliberate use of language to serve a deliberate end.
That end is to protect the
commentator's role as gatekeeper between the government and the
governed. There is no policy so toxic, no lie so brazen, no
self-interest so naked that it can't be sold – if only the people
in charge of the government's “messaging” can find the right
“narrative”.
“Get the messaging and narrative
right”, the commentators are saying, “and we
will praise you. Get the messaging and the narrative wrong, and we
will curse you.”
The
commentators – pretty much all of them – believe that as the true
insiders, they deserve the power to direct our votes and dictate our
outcomes. The government is “framing” the “narrative” badly,
and that, in the commentators' imagination, is why people have been
gathering ever since the March in March to protest the actions of the
federal government.
Why
push the narrative over the truth? Because the alternative is too
horrible to contemplate: people are seeing politics for ourselves,
without needing to view it through the prism of the columnist.
It
doesn't take much effort to find a commentator writing that people
have stopped listening to Tony Abbott, nor is it an effort to find
the same thing written about Julia Gillard, Kevin Rudd or John
Howard.
What
if we are listening to
the politicians, and deciding entirely without the commentators' help
that a broken promise is a broken promise, that a lie is a lie, and
that the “framing” doesn't matter a damn?
Australians
are acutely aware of what politicians are saying to us: they're
trying to lie their way out of broken promises. “No cuts to …”
was unequivocal, and it doesn't matter which minister you send to
stand on the tumbril and pronounce that they're not lying. “Framing”
a lie in the “context” of a “narrative” makes you complicit
in the lie.
We
don't need the blather and bollocks to tell fact from fiction, truth
from lie, or to have the political commentariat choosing our
elections. We can do what we are doing: ignoring commentators trying
to force-fit our understanding of facts into their framing, and make
our own decisions.
Out of
its political culture, Australia created a Beltway of insider
journalists. That's who we stopped listening to.
*I originally had a typo of indisderness for "insiderness". @ForrestGumpp from Twitter likes the former usage as symbolic of the narrative. I kind of agree!
