[BITList] First year dogged by lies

[John Feltham]

I’m marking the Exam Card for the card first year in office of the LNP.



Even when he knew he would win the election, Tony Abbott refused to risk telling voters the truth. Then came the overreach, the backtracking and the deferred decisions. The question now is whether voters will accept untrustworthiness as a given.

He refused to risk telling voters the truth.

“In the last week of the campaign, Labor will say anything to sway your vote including the most bare-faced lies about the Coalition … There are no cuts to health. No cuts to education. Pensions don’t change. The GST doesn’t change.”

“My aim is to lead a no-surprises, no-excuses government that says what it means and does what it says.”

An early headline example was Christopher Pyne’s attempt to backtrack on the Coalition’s promise that it was on a “unity ticket” on school funding by cutting funding (while claiming he wasn’t) before back-flipping again when no one bought his explanations. Another would be George Brandis sinking his own proposed and unpopular changes to the Racial Discrimination Act by declaring that everyone had a “right to be a bigot” and the debate that was allowed to run for a while about how the ABC needed to be cut down to size, not just for budgetary reasons but because it was unfairly hurting commercial competition such as News Ltd. And who could forget the prime minister’s personal indulgence in the decision to bring back knights and dames or the government’s astonishing request to the United Nations to delist 74,000 hectares of world heritage-listed Tasmanian forest, which the UN promptly rejected.

But did promise in the “Real Action” booklet that it would “continue current funding arrangements for universities”,

Abbott refuses to admit anything, contriving contorted explanations about why obvious cuts to projected expenditure cannot be viewed as cuts since actual expenditure continues to rise, or why legislated changes to policies do not amount to broken promises.

We don’t know how Australians would have reacted had Abbott levelled about the policies that were coming, and tried to explain his reasons when he looked down the barrel of the cameras that day.

But we do have even more evidence that voters react viciously when they feel they have been deceived.

http://tinyurl.com/pndxjyp <http://tinyurl.com/pndxjyp>

Sorry folks but the LNP  FAILED 2011 - 2014.



ooroo








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