Keeping the Bastards Honest. No, Really.

The good folk over at GetUp have developed a nifty new tool - PromiseWatch, an election-promise wiki in which Ordinary Strayans (for which substitute internet activists) can log and look up election promises categorised by policy area and political party. Go on, release your inner election-campaign vigilante!*

Obviously, anything we can do to make politicians accountable for what they say during an election campaign has got to be a healthy thing. But I worry that it might be too little, too late. The credibility gap seems to have grown to a point where playing fast and loose with the truth is accepted, because people think "politicians all lie". Hence the electorate's inability to muster much fury at the revelations of Howard government dishonesty, time and time again. In an ideal world, the children overboard affair would be enough to bring down a government. In Australian political life, too many people don't notice, not enough people get disgusted, the rancorous divide between Howard's battlers and the bleeding heart brigade grows ever deeper, and everyone is poorer for the experience. And a dangerous precedent is set: lie all you want. If people don't find out, it could win you an election, and if they do, they will merely shrug.

So people who want to see more honesty in political life are fighting against the low expectations of the Australian public, cultivated through many years of government mendacity. They are also fighting another, less localised bias: people believe what they want to. The children overboard photos got so much traction because they appeared to confirm what a lot of people were kind of hoping: these queue-jumpers aren't good people, they are amoral opportunists, and our ethical duty to them is adjusted accordingly. Grant them asylum? We should be shooting the bastards.

Likewise, anyone with a passing acquaintance with economics knew in 2004 that Howard could not guarantee that he would keep interest rates low. Some of us - the Reserve Bank, Ross Gittins, various newspaper editorials, and a good chunk of Labor voters - were saying it all along, loudly, but people were not listening. When you're mortgaged to the eyeballs, it's comforting when someone powerful says it's going to be all right. So the battlers voted for Howard on an empty promise, and only now is Howard's recklessness coming back to haunt him. Which looks like a belated victory for truth over lies, except that it took five interest rate rises to drum the message in, when it shouldn't have taken any. Howard never controlled interest rates. People accusing Howard of breaking his promise now are missing the point: the promise was never tenable in the first place.

With this track record, my thinking is there ought to be at least a few promises this time around that are already obvious furphies. Which are they? First correct response gets a new highway over the Great Dividing Range.

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*Disclaimer: my friend skipped pub trivia last week to code furiously for this, so it had better get some mileage.

John Howard: 0.25% Out of Touch?

So John Howard was out by a quarter of a percent on the official cash rate.

Now, my close personal friends and relatives, as well as most of my wider circle of acquaintances, my workmates, all my former uni professors, certain Sydney taxi drivers, and the dude who sells me my Herald on Saturday mornings, know that I am no great defender of Howard's.

But here's the thing. I don't think Howard is unfit to govern because he has demonstrated an insufficient grasp of detail, or because he's not an expert on interest rates, or because he's too old. I don't think any of those things are true. I do think he's unfit to govern because he is dishonest, Machiavellian, possibly racist, demonstrably xenophobic, overly concerned with material wealth, largely impervious to the plight of the needy, bizarrely attached to a romanticised Menzies-era ideal of Australian society, prone to expedient 180 degree shifts in policy, and, embarrassingly, the last great defender of President Bush. Do you see the difference?

I realise that Howard has positioned himself as the interest rate guy. It was all he bloody well talked about in 2004. He is, to an extent, falling on his own sword. So I'm not saying I don't think it's deliciously ironic that Howard slipped up on interest rates of all things. I just don't think it's what we should be talking about.

For one thing, I would rather we weren't talking about interest rates at all. I am tired of the notion that Australians vote for an interest rate, and exasperated that people still don't seem to appreciate the Reserve Bank's independence. Every minute we spend talking about Howard's interest rate gaffe is another minute we spend talking about interest rates. This is both disadvantageous and boring. Monetary policy isn't even a sexy subject by economics standards.

For another thing, it could just as easily have been Rudd - in fact, it was, more or less, a few weeks ago. And it will be again. Just because Rudd is smooth and competent, doesn't mean he's immune to this stuff. Howard is pretty smooth and competent himself, remember. That's one of the reasons he's still here.

And most of all... I just think we can do better than this. I don't want politics to be a competition to see who can store the most arcana. I don't care who knows what about the price of milk, or the name of their contesting candidate in a far-off seat. I don't think it's relevant, and I think by focusing on that kind of thing we are discouraging the kind of big-picture thinking this country needs. You can't look to the stars if you're always worried about tripping on your shoelaces. Besides, I know plenty of people who walk around with all kinds of facts and trivia in their heads. If they are united by one characteristic, it is evident unfitness for any kind of public office.

I'm not naive enough to think we can have election campaign without this stuff. I see that it fits in with Labor's theme of "out-of-touch" (read: senile). And obviously, I'd rather it was Howard slipping up than Rudd. But if we vote Howard out, I want it to be on the merits - or lack thereof.

Then again, it could be I'm just getting greedy - whoops, I mean, aspirational.