Thursday 29 June 2017

Why do politicians get away with peddling porkies and 'alternative facts'?

Analysis
Posted about 2 hours ago

In my house, if you claim to know something, you'd better be correct.
It's become a common reflex to ask whether the dispenser of facts is 100 per cent certain of their veracity. Such is the quest to be first with knowledge that serious familial opprobrium rains on those who dare to insist they're right when they are not.
So when I recently declared that I was 110 per cent confident that Uluru was the town in which Ayers Rock was located, without so much as a glance at a map or an eight-second Google search, I deserved the ridicule that swiftly followed.
You won't get away with presenting a hunch as fact at my place, so it's astonishing that so many politicians get away with it when the stakes are much higher.
Perhaps it's the relentless nature of the 24-hour news cycle that's left little time for political fact checking, or perhaps they're just a bit lazy.
Either way, some strange ideas about government and public policy are spreading and masquerading as fact when they are not.

And, crucially, allowing this misinformation to go unchallenged can have dire consequences.
Take Liberal delegate Sophie York, who seems to think the Labor Party is made up of people with low IQs.
At the Liberal Council meeting last week, Ms York said people with low IQs "don't all vote Labor" and should be assisted in supporting the Coalition with a pamphlet showing photographs of the candidates and leader to help them make a more "educated" decision.
Outside the meeting in Sydney on Friday night, Ms York stood by her comments, saying some people (in the Liberal Party) "would assume that special needs people would naturally gravitate towards Labor and I know that that's not true".
Do people really assume that?
Those words were delivered just weeks after Ms York appeared on ABC News as a representative of the anti-same sex marriage group Marriage Alliance.
In that outing she offered another hunch, telling viewers that an Airbnb campaign promoting same sex marriage with "acceptance rings" — which feature a 2.2mm gap as a symbol of the gap in marriage equality — would make some people uncomfortable and that they had the potential to become an Occupational Health and Safety issue.
Ms York had a hunch that the rings could prove dangerous if they caught on something.

The rise of post-truth politics

Statements — "hunches" — like these are exemplary of the 'post truth' politics that now provides cover for this kind of intemperate outburst.
Post-truth politics was born in the United States with Donald Trump.

Journalists there are almost exclusively consumed by the question of whether their President is a downright liar or just prone to making an inordinate number of honest mistakes.
It started before the election campaign even began, with what seemed nothing more than a hunch that then-president Barack Obama wasn't born in America.
Since then, truth bending has become an extreme sport in President Trump's White House. It's become pivotal to the Russia investigation, with the former director of the FBI, James Comey, testifying under oath that Mr Trump "lies, plain and simple".
One of his first acts as President was an attempt to ban Muslims from certain countries from entering America; this was on a hunch that Muslim immigrants were largely responsible for terrorist acts in the United States.
The Supreme Court this week permitted a version of Mr Trump's ban on travellers from six mostly Muslim countries — provided those people don't have any particular ties to the US.
But an inconvenient truth landed on the President's desk this week. A new report by the Centre for Investigative Reporting — a non-profit media centre — analysed 201 terrorism incidents that occurred in the US from 2008 to 2016.
It found only 1 per cent of perpetrators or alleged perpetrators of terrorism were from countries listed in Mr Trump's travel ban. An overwhelming 87 per cent of them were US-born.

From Hanson to Abbott and Plibersek

Despite mounting evidence that most terrorism is home-grown, Australia's Pauline Hanson also continues to rail against Muslim immigration.
In the immediate aftermath of the London terrorist attacks, the One Nation leader tweeted: "Stop Islamic Migration before it is too late."
Senator Hanson has also given succour to anti-vaxxers by suggesting there might be a link between vaccination and autism — only to apologise for her uneducated remarks.
Then, last week, she said kids with autism had no place in "our classrooms" despite years of research indicating that the integration of students with special needs enrich the schools they attend.

Video: Hanson: 'Get rid of these people' (ABC News)


Even government ministers and prime ministers have been known to engage in hunch politics.
When it comes to climate policy, for example, the Government now has a collective hunch that carbon capture and storage will make coal-fired power a "clean" energy source.
This has become policy to placate the conservative wing of the coalition — despite the fact the technology has not been proven to work at scale for coal fired power generation.
Tony Abbott as PM also had a hunch about the health risks of wind farms — which are yet to be proven despite several inquiries.

Labor got itself tangled in its own series of alternative facts recently when education spokeswoman Tanya Plibersek tried to argue that $22 billion had been cut from the Gonski school funding program.
The RMIT ABC Fact Checking Unit established this was a misleading statement.
Ms Plibersek has since conceded that while Labor had agreed to tip $22 billion more than the Coalition in to schools, it does not represent a cut in funding.
The amount the Turnbull Government proposes spending on educating the nation's children will rise every year for the next 10 years at least.

Dire consequences of misinformation

Then there's the new citizenship testing arrangements proposed by Immigration Minister Peter Dutton.
Mr Dutton is adamant that requiring a higher level of competency in English language and longer waiting periods for permanent residency will make Australia safer.

The Minister has defended his policy on national security grounds in countless interviews, yet failed to articulate exactly what problem this policy aims to fix.
When asked whether the new citizenship tests were advised or sanctioned by security or intelligence agencies, the best the Minister could come up was that "nothing that the Government does in this space is contrary to advice that we receive".
Arguing that immigrants with a better grasp of English are less likely to pose a national security threat is about as convincing as the claim that Uluru is a town that hosts a tourist site called Ayers Rock.
In an effort to reduce policy to a pithy, sensational line for social media, politicians are increasingly prepared to throw facts under the bus.
It can suit their cause to seed ignorance to divert attention from problems they have no clear remedy for but want to appear to be doing something about.
Fighting terrorism is perhaps the clearest example of this. Britain's discounting of facts and knowledge is what led it to vote to leave the European Union (they just didn't believe warnings about the very real economic and trade consequences) and it's what got Mr Trump elected.
All this has led to doubts about authority, experts and "the establishment".
But, crucially, the spread of misinformation can have dire consequences.
You only need look to the tobacco industry. Think of how many people died believing smoking cigarettes did not cause cancer.

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