Want to say austerity is as natural as belly button fluff? Then hire Dr Karl
|
Version 0 of 1. Watching Dr Karl Kruszelnicki’s TED Talk-style video spruiking the Intergenerational Report is an exercise in enduring secondhand humiliation. Dr Karl, a man most Australians know for his groundbreaking work on the origins of belly button fluff, has now publicly disavowed the report, claiming he wasn’t aware of its partisan political nature or lack of focus on climate change. It’s tough to make a call about who has come out of this situation looking worse. Is it Dr Karl, who took money to explain the purpose of an economic document he wasn’t qualified to analyse and now says he hadn’t even read in full? Or is it the federal government, which has demonstrated a stunning lack of respect for the electorate by hanging Dr Karl out to dry, and failing to respond to his criticisms? Either way, and whatever Dr Karl’s rationalisations after the fact, he was the perfect choice to “sell” the report to the electorate. He is trusted to communicate simple and indisputable scientific explanations for everyday conundrums: Why does lightning strike the same place twice? What’s more hygenic, paper towels or hand dryers? Are cooked mussels safe only if they are open? So if you want to frame a particular set of unfair economic propositions as an incontestable “fact” on the same level as “bacteria cause body odour”, who better to use as a salesman than Dr Karl, Australia’s respected Everyday Science Dad? Portraying brutal inequalities as natural, scientific and indisputable has been a winning strategy for rightwing ideologues, because by doing so there’s no need for them to justify the effect of their politics on the poor. If Dr Karl hadn’t belatedly come to his senses that approach might have worked as intended, despite the flaws of the IGR having been thoroughly dissected. Greg Jericho called it a “farrago of idiocy,” noting that its conclusions follow from arbitrary assumptions about future tax rates. Lenore Taylor noted that the challenge wasn’t nearly as scary as Hockey made out. Stephen Koukoulas said to ignore the scaremongering, that the budget would likely be in a favourable state over the next decade and that future predictions were more “rubbery”. And writing in the Monthly, economist Richard Denniss characterised the IGR as a dishonest attempt to scare Australians into accepting a conservative agenda of low tax and poor services. “If we wanted to have some of the world’s best health, education and public transport systems, we could,” he wrote. “The IGR doesn’t show that we are broke. It shows that if we want to keep cutting taxes we will have to cut spending.” This has been the government’s consistent approach to policy communication: rather than presenting its agenda as the best option among many, it fabricates external crises that create the illusion of necessity. Its program then appears to be the only sensible response, and anyone who suggests a different approach is leading the country to ruin. Joe Hockey’s “budget emergency,” which he has admitted doesn’t exist, was used to justify the necessity of austerity policies that would have had disastrous consequences for the most vulnerable were they not (mostly) held up in parliament. The consequences of Australia’s ageing population are presented as another such bogeyman. In a pre-2013 election address to the Institute of Public Affairs, Hockey laid out the consequences of demographic change: I believe that this will involve some resetting of the national mindset on the role of government ... Addressing the ongoing fiscal crises will involve the winding back of universal access to payments and entitlements from the state. This will require the redefining of the concept of mutual obligation and the reinvigoration of a culture of self reliance. So, it turns out, the “tough choices” politicians are forced to make by the realities of the IGR happen to be the ones we know they’ve wanted to make all along. There’s another contradiction here. Why does the IGR, meant to be an “impartial” or at least rigorous evidence-based document from Treasury, need to be sold to the public by a professional communicator and an advertising agency? Since when does research performed by non-partisan public servants require any other authority to establish its integrity? Surely the debate over the IGR should be over the consequences of its findings, rather than the integrity of the report itself. In his retraction, and especially by admitting he wasn’t given the opportunity to scrutinise the report properly before promoting it, Dr Karl inadvertently shown that the constraints this government puts itself under are those it chooses for itself. By selectively portraying itself as hamstrung by factors beyond its control, as Denniss wrote in the Monthly, Hockey et al shut down alternative views without having to honestly argue against them. But Dr Karl’s stuff up, far from being a spur to own up to this approach, is already being spun as having proved the government’s central contention about spending. As Chris Kenny wrote on Thursday, the mistake of hiring Dr Karl in the first place was “a classic case of how governments never spend other people’s money as wisely as individuals and the private sector spend theirs, the multi-million dollar campaign (we don’t know the exact cost) was fronted by a trenchant government critic”. “Better to save taxpayers the cost of the campaign and just spruik the importance of the report yourselves — you know, like politicians used to do, by advocating and prosecuting arguments,” Kenny continued, somehow missing the point that Hockey needed the IGR to be seen as neutral and not owned by his government in order to claim its authority for his “reforms”. Dr Karl’s conscience has clearly compelled him to front the public and admit he had no idea what he was talking about, and he’s pledged to donate his fee to needy schools. He made an understandable mistake in assuming a report from Treasury might not be so partisan. Dr Karl should be cut some slack for having owned up to “not realising the nature of the beast that I was involved with”. After all, as the whole scandal shows, the IGR does really belong to the government, and so do its assumptions. So if Hockey and his government consider its findings (and the consequences that flow from them) to be as natural and non-negotiable as the burps, farts and earwax that make up Dr Karl’s oeuvre, then they need to make that case. |