Caveat Emptor: Team Abbott Confused Between Election Campaign and Guthy-Renker Infomercial

Source: Opposition Leader Tony Abbott revealed on Thursday evening that he would not be providing final costings and a full budget impact statement until deep into the last week of the campaign. [SMH]



$200 for relationship counselling for heterosexuals looking to legally marry? Thanks Tony! But wait, there’s more! Bailouts to the chocolate industry in Tasmania? Hey, Tasmania likes chocolate, *and* jobs! What a top bloke! But wait, there’s more! How would you like to be paid your actual wage to stay at home and have children, women who are usually on quite a good wage? How do you get this shiny, shiny, life-changing deal, I hear you ask…?

There can be no real sensible reason to refuse to price policy announcements, particularly in light of a promise to return to surplus with deadline. It seems like a sales tactic, an emotional mugging. Do they really think that voters will be so emotionally invested with, say, the prospect that they can start a family sooner without having to tighten the purse strings - that by the time the cost is announced they won’t even care how much it costs, and won’t be rationally linking it with job cuts in the public service, reduced infrastructure in health and education, and another long delay before Australia gets up to a global standard with internet speeds?

Does Australia want a puppy? C’mon, hold the puppy. Love the puppy. Give the puppy a name. Oh, look, the puppy loves you! How much for the puppy? Let’s not talk about that just yet, we haven’t told you yet that you’ll get a free lead! In *any colour* you choose. But wait, there’s more! Book now and get 50% more cute for *free*! How do you get this fabulous, life-changing deal that may also cure cancer and make you attractive to the opposite sex? Do you even care at this stage? Look at the cute puppy. You want the cute puppy? You *need* the cute puppy. Okay, for the low low price of 26 easy installments of $899.99, (what a steal!) the puppy is yours! If you call in the next fifteen minutes, we’ll throw in some plastic stuff that also looks pretty good at the moment. And another free puppy! And because no exciting infomercial package is complete without them, handy-dandy steak knives! They cut things! How can you live with yourself if you don’t take up this offer RIGHT NOW?

Worse, though - at least at 3am when you cave to the hypnotic tones of the Lifestyle channel and concede that you need a puppy, your 26 easy instalments are a capped and predictable final fee. Policy costings like vouchers for marriage counselling cannot really be subject to an accurate and finite figure. Costs sometimes blow out, and if the costings are not done independently and with sufficient time that they can be subject to critique - they are more likely to do so.

If nothing else, a group hoping to run the country should be expected to demonstrate that they are able to be upfront with the electorate about the realities of their policies, including the costs, in a timely manner that doesn’t look like a sales technique - so that rational decisions can play some part in the ridiculous circus that is the election campaign.

After all, unlike exercise equipment and beauty treatment pseudoscience, an election result can’t be mailed back within 14 days for a full refund.

CisforCurmudgeon: Why Sophie Mirabella is not Gaddafi; On Getting Along

Like all misanthropes, I cherish living alone as a sort of Valhalla-type paradise of win. Hells yeah, every day is pants-free day and I don't have to hide the gin! Unfortunately, the economics of being neither congenitally wealthy nor a high-priced hooker means that securing a one bedroom home within two hours drive of university or work is about as attainable as the Prime Ministership - should everyone else who wants to live in Canberra fall off the face of the planet in some freak accident that rewrites our understanding of gravity I might be in with a shot- otherwise it's housesharing, that quaint university town practice where people you don't necessarily know very well become your nearest neighbours and gen Y select-a-family. At some point, as well, you're probably going to have to leave your room and get to know these strangers you live with.

My current select-a-family is pretty decent. They're both literate, relatively clean, definitively not racist, and most of the time they pay the rent. We've reached a point of self-referential familial comfort whereby we now stage enormous twitter house civil wars over people's opinion of Black Swan (if you're new, you can find my thoughts on the matter here). Housemate B recently saw this film and decided that he liked it. Since Housemate B is in all other respects a gentleman of discerning tastes, I have to conclude that he is either trolling me (a unique experience when there is the continuous and ominous threat that either one of us might shave off the other's eyebrows in their sleep) or that some hipster zombie stole his brain once the film had lulled him into the semi-consciousness such faux-artistic travesty inevitably promotes.

The point is, like parliamentarians (and except for in relation to Black Swan, you hipster nerd) we've probably got more in common than not. All parties are able to recognise that leaving someone else's cheese on the bench to go sweaty is a crime against all that is right and good in the world. Likewise, all parties are aware that picking a fight over cheese is the action of a petty tyrant, and life mostly goes on and everyone gets to keep their eyebrows. Win! I think the important thing is that no one ever gets compared to Gaddafi over who takes the rubbish out, and I think that makes our house of largely itinerant student-types a cut above Coalition MPs like Sophie Mirabella, at least in terms of basic human decency and perspective.

If we want to split hairs on this issue, what Sophie actually said this week was that if PM Gillard believed people were actually willing to pay more for things to offset the risk of cataclysmic climate change, then she was clearly "as deluded as Colonel 'My people love me' Gaddafi". Which is not entirely the same as calling someone a mad dictator, but given the wide range of possible similes to draw other than unstable and violent dictators turning the army onto protesters, it is clear that Sophie was showing the restraint, civility and quality judgment of Charlie Sheen on a drug binge. Also, Tony Abbott gets shouty a lot, and so did Hitler. Not that I'm saying, of course, that the two have anything else in common...


Is it trite to compare what happens in the national parliament to what housemates do when someone won't take out the rubbish, or leaves the cheese to go sweaty on the bench? Yes. It absolutely is. We work on the assumption that our representatives are presumably supposed to be better than this, above petty disputes and the kinds of minor human failings that characterise the interactions of the mere plebeian class. If I have to put on pants and learn people skills in order to go downstairs and use the toaster, by all that is right I expect our politicians - practitioners of the 'art of the city-state', to go at least one better than that. Accordingly, however, when the Libyan people are dying on the streets for the sorts of basic rights we take for granted in this country, it is fair to say that is cheap and shallow, by any standard, to use the name of their oppressive dictator to describe a political opponent who wants to institute a carbon tax.

In other news, South Australians are represented by someone who is incapable of making a rhetorical point without an extended hokey-pokey dance session, so maybe we should just all hope our global leaders have long since lost access to the nuke launch codes, settle them down for a post-afternoon-milk nap, and teach them about sharing, toilet-training and human decency once they wake up. Think back to the most thuggish kid you knew in kindergarten - the one that threw sandpit trucks at other kids and who perpetually had one finger up his nose as though attempting to dig through to his scalp. That kid probably votes now, and there's a reasonable chance he might get elected to the Australian parliament to represent your interests at home and abroad.

Maybe we should just all climb back into the trees and wait for armaggedon, really.

[P.S - The Asshattery Award would go to Sophie Mirabella this week, except the fact that she exists and gets to wander around being a representative of the human race, much less a parliamentarian, makes me so despair of the human race that I want to go curl into the foetal position under my bed and wait for society to make some sense. Also, I think if we're handing out awards for worst human being this week Gaddafi probably ought to make the short list, and I don't want to fall into a Mirabellan rhetorical trap].