#auselection

Apparently it’s a mammoth election period this year: an entire eight weeks. That’s not that long. If you measured election campaigns in units of Better-Call-Saul, this stretch of time would still fail to reach 1BCS.

Be warned though: the length of this election is the only thing that will end up distinguishing it from any other. We’ll vote some arseholes in on the back of some fantastic promises, with the only criticism being levelled at the consistency of their words. “Oh, so Malcolm Turnbull said this. Odd, because a few years ago he said this...”. 

You might as well reject a racist pamphlet on the grounds that it has a typo.

The Coalition will lambaste the Greens for standing by a policy years ago that they’re now criticising; Labor will point out that the Coalition promised [x] last time round but that [x] never happened so why should we believe them now. Also, how can we trust a party that’s had leadership instability (like every party for the past decade).

Criticisms will be anchored to the artifice of politics rather than examining how handing over the reigns to any one specific party will affect people in Australia and around the world. Sod whether or not someone backed a policy before, what does that policy mean right now?

Twitter will join in. "Malcolm Turnbull says he’s in touch with the people, and as a rich white banker, he should know!” Good one twitter. Criticise your leaders for being unrelatable, and then when someone like Barnaby Joyce takes over for a bit, "nail” him too for being a ruddy-faced buffoon who’s too much like the rest of us. Too rich and white, too regular Joe. Jesus Christ twitter, find a politician whose porridge is just right. A banker who lives on the streets perhaps? Or a plumber who subsists on truffles and champagne.

There are huge, systemic issues currently plaguing Australia and once again we’re going to spend eight weeks somehow thinking we scored a point by finding a clip from 11 years ago that shows Malcolm Turnbull accidentally dropping a sandwich or something. We’re focusing on performance, rather than frameworks or outcomes, like audience members sitting in a burning theatre thinking the flames will go out as long as none of the actors forgets their lines.

Worse still, policies will be analysed on an individual basis rather than as part of a mesh of ideas that all affect each other. Again, missing the systemic in politics and focusing on the daily and specific. Our immigration policy, for example, will be examined in isolation: how many asylum seekers can we adequately care for and do we have the infrastructure to support them? But it might surprise you that closing tax loopholes is as much a part of immigration policy as our attitude to offshore detention. Close the loopholes, keep billions of dollars in Australia, and suddenly we can afford to help many more people. Instead of buying 57 fighter jets for $24bn, couldn’t we instead buy 47, and use the saved money to improve conditions on Manus Island?

The way we deal with one problem affects our ability to deal with others, but that’s not something you hear discussed or analysed in the news. It’s also not part of our mental skillet when it comes to analysing all the election talk. Instead it’s the same tired, daily digest of looking at each policy and soundbite by itself, further engendering in all of us a total lack of understanding of how the world works and how we could vote to make it better. 

During an election, ironically the last thing we all need is the hype and coverage surrounding an election.

We’ll come out the other end none the wiser, left with a new prime minister buoyed by some promises that either won’t matter in a few months, or that will be retrospectively unmade. And the same abhorrent, destructive behaviours will continue, because no one endeavoured to tell us what was actually going on.