Big Good Lies

You Can't Handle The Truth

The last week has proved beyond any shadow of a doubt the Australian Government are liars and incompetents, but only one of these is a problem.

There are good lies and bad lies, big good lies and big bad lies, little bad lies and little good lies. You convince your six year old Santa Clause snuck into your house ate a biscuit and left behind a box of Lego, that’s a good little lie. A good little lie is telling your fat ugly wife she’s beautiful.

When a politician stands in front of a country and says, “we are a great democracy, all people are created equal, if you work hard you will be prosperous and happy…” - that’s a big good lie. None of it is true. Especially not in Western countries, who at their height, were functionally fascistic oligarchies wearing a cameral skinsuit, who privately acknowledged not all people were created equal and curated their populations accordingly, and prosperity and happiness trend toward luck and breeding as opposed to merit. But what kind of a world would it have been if the Big Good Lies of the 20th century fell apart? They very nearly did, in the United States in the 1970s. But then a guy called Ronald Reagan showed up with a whole new suite of Big Good Lies and everyone forgot the old ones. Good lies are important, so long as they’re well managed, and the people telling them don’t actually believe them. Your six year old will have a better childhood because you lied about Santa Claus, but you would have a worse life if you came to believe a portly Alaskan really shuffles down chimneys. You will have a better life because you told your fat ugly wife she’s beautiful but if you come to believe that, you might encourage her to go outside in a crop top and that could be disastrous.

There used to be an unspoken consensus on this, amongst people who can, through intellect or preternatural insight see through big good lies. Modern political systems also incentivise not ruining everyone else’s fun, because knowing when a politician is lying can be enormously profitable. Leverage, and the bucket of cash that comes with it, is generally preferable to the smug satisfaction of pointing out a lie.

At some point, very recently, congruent with the broader bifurcation of voter demographics and the rise of social media, some people started to get very agitated about big good lies.

I spent my formative professional years in election campaign offices digging dirt on political opponents, and the truth is, the cool part of the job - the gossip, the smear campaigns, the digging through garbage bins - that is only a very small percentage of the actual labour. The majority of it, is what we called accountability. Kilometres of paper, Hansards, press transcripts, and even bigger piles of budget papers, committee reports, financial records. Red pen for lies, blue pen for facts, and you circle the lies, circle the facts, collate them and produce lengthy collateral, for journoids, for MPs, for the rare punter dedicated enough to actually read the campaign book (there used to be books). But we never used the word lie. We called them “fact checks”. The Facts on Labor’s Energy Policy. Back in the 2010 election campaign Labor had a policy we called “Cash for Clunkers” where they were going to try to pay people to trade in old cars to get carbon emissions down, and that generated an unusually high quantity of bullshit from the Ministers responsible so we called the daily press release on it “Clunker Clangers” - but never lies.

I remember the exact day that changed, in 2013, we dispensed with the pleasantries and just built a website called “Labor Lies” (they still use it) and started posting them. Labor did it to us, the alliteration rolls off the tongue well enough for both. What struck me wasn’t the fact the unspoken rules had changed, but that my colleagues seemed viscerally angry when their lies were called out as well. I’d always assumed everyone else knew the score and it turned out they didn’t. They lie, we know they lie, we say they lie in not so many words, we lie, they know we lie, they say we lie in not so many words. Someone counts the votes then you have a cocktail. In the middle are literally millions of people who don’t care or aren’t capable of caring, and it’s for their benefit all the lies get told in the first place, so they can be content and happy and get 12% superannuation, a Medicare card, maybe a basketball court and a skate ramp if they live in a marginal seat.

It sounds glib, and it’s offensive to modern political sensibilities and peasant moralities, but it’s functionally no different to the lies you tell your six year old or your fat ugly wife. Tell the truth and people’s feelings get hurt - believe the lie and everything collapses.

Imagine for a second one of these HR pantsuit cat lady Ministers has her morning Xanax swapped out for Sodium Pentothal and shows up for a press conference and tells the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth:

“We are not in control of the Australian economy and haven’t been since 1976. We are at the mercy of foreign custodial banks who are circling the Australian property market like vultures. To maintain some vague semblance of sovereignty we must enact policies that artificially inflate house prices, infinitely, and this means importing millions of foreigners, not for labour, but consumption. Even if we wanted to stop, it’s too late to stop without triggering a recession or even a depression, that will be exploited by foreign capital to acquire property assets and convert them to rent, and even if we could figure out how to avoid a recession, we don’t want to stop importing immigrants anymore because they disproportionately form ethnic enclaves in marginal seats where we work, and we are unemployable in the private sector, so to keep these comfortable jobs, we have to keep them happy, and the things ethnic enclaves want are easier to deliver than the things the white majority want. The world is actually heating up, and there is nothing we can do about it, but at a capital strata below the custodial banks are energy speculators and ESG indices who are leveraging all our lies on climate policy to extract enormous wealth from the people stupid enough to believe them, and we can’t do anything about it, especially not at the same time as property and immigration, because their investment in superannuation funds plus housing represents the totality of consumer investment in the Australian economy and if it declines, we will be picked apart by dynastic banking paedophiles in Belgium and Switzerland…”

Assuming you could even persuade someone who’s lived immersed in a river of watery horseshit their entire life that any of that was true, what’s the point? No one benefits, unless you’re smart enough to go long on Eli Lily & Co before the run on Prozac in the wake of it. People just want their superannuation account, a roof over their head, a Medicare card. To not be chopped by a Sudanese machete monster. Most people that is. You probably want some esoteric nonsense like an ethnic enclave of your very own, a trad wife or an actual living anime girl. I want to never pay taxes and have driverless cars. But the lies aren’t for us. We’re a fringe of a fringe. The system, as designed, was never stress tested against people like us pointing out the lies every day online. It was designed for people like us to exploit the lies for profit, and when enough people stopped doing that, the system broke down.

“The public has a right to the truth”, is one of my most hated political canards. No one has a right to the truth, you have a right to draw your own conclusions, and act accordingly. If everyone has a right to the truth all the time, why don’t you tell your six year old the truth about Santa Claus? Why don’t you tell your fat wife she’s a sow?

The great irony of Australian politics is the ponderous collapse of civil society, the death of once great parties, the end of public trust, or rather, public acquiescence, isn’t because people started seeing through the lies at all. It’s because politicians stopped being good at telling them.

I once worked with a bureaucrat who was one of the architects of the 1996 post-Port Arthur gun reforms. He told me how for years, they lived in absolute terror there would be another mass shooting. Because they knew themselves, statistically, they hadn’t removed the risk or even really reduced it. They knew it would see a decline in suicides and domestic violence homicides, they were satisfied there would be a tremendous drop in enough metrics that the policy would be considered a generational success - but every actual criminologist and intelligence analyst said the same thing - mass shootings are black swan events that are impossible to predict or prevent. He wasn’t scared because he had vast empathy for the poor sods occassionally getting clipped by psychopaths. He was scared because he’d lied. And the politicians were scared because they’d lied too. There was always going to be a risk it would happen again because you can’t legislate away the dedication of psychopaths. But no one wants a Prime Minister to stand up and say: “We’re going to take your guns away but there’s a chance it won’t work, there’s a chance some dedicated psychopath will join a gun club, buy a farm, stay off the radar and plan another attack.” Of course not. They want a Prime Minister who says “we’re going to stop this from happening again” and have a majority of people believe it.

And that’s where things start going south for us.

The question at the heart of Australia’s decline isn’t, did we stop believing the lies, it’s if they started believing them or did they stop being good at telling them?

Because that they’re lies is without question. The uncomfortable truth for those of us on the Right of politics is that the majority of them are good lies. It’s good to tell the public that everyone should be treated equally, that they can work hard and be prosperous, that they’re safe and free. We would do the same thing. Those are good things to say, even when they aren’t true. Paul Keating stood in front of the Australian people and said what a great multicultural society we aspire to be - while introducing mandatory detention for asylum seekers. He didn’t say “we aspire to be a tolerant, diverse and cohesive nation, but we’re going to lock people up in cages while we check their papers first.” He just said the first part, and everyone believed it. There was a decade long consensus on mandatory detention of asylum seekers as a result.

The looming problem for the Australian Right, which will be brought into sharp focus now One Nation is polling ahead of the Liberals is we’ve been shouting the truth into a black hole for so long we might not know how to lie well, and we will have to, if the country is to thrive and survive. The borders have to be closed, immigration reduced to 5 digits, maybe less. The economy will have to be deliberately, carefully deflated, a recession we have to have. Taxes will have to go up, and freedoms, the buzzword for the Right following recent events, will have to be curtailed in case anyone tries to stop us. But the leader who does these things, will have to stand on a podium, deny any of them are happening, say that some are happening but they’re good, distract the public’s attention (free money? a war?) and somehow get away with it.

That ability is what has diminished into obscurity, left right and centre of Australian public life. And it’s not like they’re doing it alone. Capital and consumer markets, the entire media and entertainment complex, every living person with a boat that has a flushing toilet, are all trying to help sell the core social and economic messages of managerial democracy. The world’s most powerful technology companies, through accident or design, are helping the Right sell ours. And no one is cracking a majority. Because no one is believable. None of them have that intangible quality that makes them convincing, authentic - charming.

As an erstwhile factional operative I’d frequently end up on preselection committees and I’ve met dozens of nascent politicians. I came up with a fool proof system for testing how well they’d actually perform. I’d invite them for a beer at either Ryan’s Bar or Establishment in Sydney on a Friday night, big corporate meat markets, and I’d say to them, if you want the faction’s support, stand up and go introduce yourself to 3 random punters at the bar, tell them you’re running for Parliament and tell them why they should vote for you. The overwhelming majority wouldn’t do it. They’d think I was joking, or they’d start sweating. Politics, especially deeply factional politics in the Liberals, attracts the terminally awkward. But on a handful of occasions someone did it. And one time, a guy got up, saw a group of three pretty women in cocktail dresses, gave them his business cards and got their phone numbers. He would end up being a Minister.

I saw former NSW Liberal leader Mark Speakman say in the last election about some daily wankery he was flailing on it isn’t a popularity contest. Other politicians have made similar remarks recently. It quiet literally is a popularity contest. Played by nearly identical rules to high school. The best politicians are good looking and charming. The best worst looking politicians are extremely charming. The least charming least good looking politicians are exceptionally competent, but you didn’t used to need many of those because there’s heaps in the bureaucracy and it’s more important to have affable, charming liars out in front of the curtain explaining all the harsh truths.

Somewhere along the line this stopped. And the only explanation I can think of is they all started swallowing their own bullshit.

All the best politicians I ever worked for hated voters. Despised them. One, would only attend public events with a staffer armed with a pump pack of hand sanitiser in a satchel and you’d have to douse him in it between handshakes. He’d get back to the car, put his head in his stinging hands and say “I was born in the wrong century, I should only have to see these people when I’m collecting taxes with a spear”, then he’d wind down the window, beam at some punter and say “Great to see you! You’re doing amazing work! Your wife is beautiful!” He’s frequently walk off podiums and go straight to his staff and say “do you think they bought all of that?”

It goes without saying he was on a 50%+ primary.

One of the side effects of believing your own bullshit is it makes you credulous of everyone else’s bullshit. And this, I think, is where the problem starts for Australia. Because I think as a generation of politicians started to believe their own lies, they committed the most cardinal sin of all - they started believing our lies.

In our increasingly radical times it’s only mild apostasy to suggest politicians lying is a good thing and it’s the quality of the lies of that’s the problem - but to admit that voters lie too is pure heresy. But it’s true, it’s an inalienable truth. The entire polling industry would collapse if anyone knew. And I think the fact those frequent lies have now wormed their way into political consensus is proof positive of where the collapse starts. Take, female and ethnic representation in Parliament. Convene a demographically sound focus group and ask 8 people, 4 women and 4 men if they want to see more women in Parliament. More ethnically diverse candidates in Parliament. They’ll all say yes. You’ll get the odd outlier, especially amongst the women, but by and large, people will say the most socially agreeable thing. But it’s a lie. And we know it’s a lie because they don’t vote for these things. Cabramatta, in NSW, the largest Vietnamese enclave in the country, and a flashpoint for this argument in the last two Federal elections, consistently voted for Nick Lalich, a Yugoslavian émigré who wouldn’t have looked out of place in the cast of the Sopranos. He was Mayor of Fairfield for 10 years before he became MP for 20 years. The Liberals kept running Vietnamese people against him and they keep losing. In 2011, a landslide election, the Liberals ran Dai Le, the poster child for Vietnamese immigrant politics and she lost to Nick. Every focus group, every poll, the burghers of Cabramatta said they wanted someone who looked and sounded like them except they didn’t. They wanted Paulie Walnuts. They wanted a big bouffant and a sharp suit.

What the electorate really wants is someone to do all the things they really want but they can’t say. That’s why the best politicians are so good at picking up women (often to their detriment). Politics is seduction with an audience, and seduction works on sub-conscious desires. It’s why against all logic I can have the body of a Ukrainian taxi driver yet never want for female companionship. I had an affair with a woman once who had my name in her phone as “Scooter” and I asked her what it meant and she said it was “because you’re fun to ride but I wouldn’t want my friends to see me on you”. It’s the same logic with voters. Once upon a time everyone involved was polite enough not to mention these things. In 2013 the Tony Abbott landslide was so big the only way to parse it against the Tony Abbott has a woman problem narrative was for every adult male to have voted for him. But the truth was millions of Australian women were secretly going to vote for him, despite telling everyone who asked he was a gross pig who wanted to take their reproductive rights away or whatever. Labor, the media, the chattering classes all fell for this. When anyone with an ounce of perspective or experience with the human condition knew full well what would end up happening.

Credulity is the enemy of all great works. As the Russians say, doveryay, no proveryay - Trust, but Verify. When politicians start credulously believing what the public say they want, it’s a slippery slope to believing what subsequently tumbles out of their own mouths. And once that happens, there’s no going back. As William S Burroughs famously said:

“Cheat your landlord if you can and must, but do not try to short-change the Muse. It cannot be done.”

Lying to yourself is all together the worst thing. “You can’t fake quality any more than you can fake a good meal” Burroughs continued.

The only way out now is a scourging through a period of aggressive, and no doubt self destructive truth telling. To remind everyone why the Big Good Lies were so important in the first plays by feeling the searing pain of unvarnished honesty. To labour the Burroughs metaphors, our own Naked Lunch, “the moment when everyone realises what’s really on the end of their forks.”¹

The Australian public and the political class will have to grab each other by the shoulders, look into each others eyes, and tell the truth and it will go about as well as if you did it to your fat ugly wife. But short of some great Apollo coming to save us it’s probably the only way through. Historically, the people who do this do not tend to do well. Messengers tend to get shot, and prophets tend to get martyred. Truth telling falls into that category, and should be avoided by anyone aiming for longevity.

Just ask blokes with fat ugly wives.

1. that’s not actually a Burroughs quote, it’s from J.G Ballard’s introduction to a 1990s edition of Naked Lunch.