It’s Day Ten or something of the election campaign as I write this, and the wonk blogs are getting a bit stabby. As well they might, considering how infantile and cynical and utterly, utterly Jason Akermanis’ self-awareness-level empty the whole thing is.

The one “Great Debate” wasn’t a debate at all, just a series of campaign speeches where neither speaker answered a single Goddamn question while the moderator checked his makeup, and the only interest in it was how uninterested everyone was in it, because it was on the same night as the Masterchef final.

I could sit here and scream like all the other wonks are doing, and while that would feel good, it wouldn’t really achieve much, so amongst the shouting I’ll throw some information at you. This may feel a little strange at first, given how used you have become to the PR-fed soundbites that pass for news these days, and the vacant repetition of slogans that passes for political discourse. Bear with me, though, there’s a point to all this.

A quick glance at any front page over the past fortnight would have you believe that the Big Issue in this election is Boat People, and something called Sustainable Population. The dog-whistling from both sides is so obvious as to be hardly necessary: they just don’t have the guts to come out and say “Hey, suburbanites, pissed off about traffic jams and you can’t get a seat on the bus? It’s all cause of the bloody reffos, innit!!” Now aside from the fact that bad city planning and lack of infrastructure is entirely due to the incompetence of state governments over the past thirty or so years and absolutely fucking nothing to do with immigration, how did population (read immigration) suddenly become important?

Essential Media polled in May and June “what are the issues that will decide how you vote in the next election?”, asking respondents to nominate their top three. Asylum seekers and population in general managed a total of 9% nominations as important. Not surprisingly, Managing The Economy, Health and Education each scored in the high 30s. Daryl Somers Being Burnt At The Stake came in at a respectable, but disappointing 4%.

The Economy, Health, Education. These are the things we want a government to look after. We want to know which side, if any, will do the better job. These are the things that matter to us. Other than the predictable “cut reckless spending and waste” promises from the Opposition, and the occasional promise of a couple of hundred million here or there for specific programs from the government, there has been nothing of substance said on these vital topics. Why not?

The “small target” philosophy of campaigning has been in vogue in Australia for some time now, and its proponents seem to have control of campaign planning on both sides. They cannot and will not be questioned, the strategy is there, for better or worse, and damn the torpedos. Somewhere along the line they decided that the best way to win an election was to ignore all the shit that actually matters to people, because that’s all very complicated, too open to analysis and criticism and error; a slipped decimal point, or a couple of million dollars here or there, or a spelling mistake in a press release will lead to the other side screaming about incompetence, and the gaffe-obsessed media will lap it up and vomit it back all over us. Far easier and apparently safer to create an issue out of a non-issue, make it as simple as humanly (or preferably sub-humanly) possible, and somehow persuade us that it matters. Then, having set the agenda, they can manoeuvre the straw man into the best possible position and then set it on fire.

This means that we have no opportunity to properly examine any real policies, or make an informed decision. They have reduced election campaigning, and political discourse in general, to the level of old-fashioned, simplistic, 50s style advertising. I call it my can of beans theory.

Those of you old enough may remember when food labelling was along the lines of “Stimulates your Q Factor! Here’s a sexy girl you may one day meet if you eat these beans!”. Over time, people realised that they had a right to know what they were buying, so food labelling had to tell you stuff like what was actually in the can. Now, you can pick up two cans of beans, look at the labels, and pick the one that has less, or more if you like, salt or fat or protein or whatever. You make something resembling an informed decision.

Politicians don’t want you to make an informed decision. They just want you to swallow their advertising without any real thought. They want you to be afraid. Imagine Julia and Tony as two cans of beans next to eachother on the shelf. Both labels have a picture of the most perfect-looking beans you could ever imagine, and a logo that just says “THE OTHER BEANS ARE POISON AND THEY GIVE YOU ANAL WARTS!!!”.

This is crap. This is no way for a first-world country to behave. The next couple of weeks are going to suck.

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So, it’s Day Twenty-Five or so, and the Real Julia has stepped up. All I could think of was that West Wing moment of “Let Bartlet be Barlet”, and it seems to be working, a bit. She’s still pretty much full of shit, but she appears to be more comfortable saying words in sentences than repeating slogans. Abbott has taken her lead to a tiny extent as far as I can see, because it’s been about three minutes since I head him say Great Big New Tax On Everything.

I’m reading through what I wrote on Day Ten about the lack of policy discussion, and why both sides hate releasing any detail, and gee whiz, I was right. The Coalition put out a press release with some typos and a slipped decimal place, and Swanny’s going bug-nutty over the economic illiteracy that this implies. Likewise, they’re doing it back to him, yodelling long and loud about budget Black Holes and all this easy-to-say-but-rather-difficult-to-pinpoint “reckless spending”.

I’m trying to keep this non-partisan, but I have to make a couple of points that the rest of the meeja seem, for some reason (ahem, Murdoch, cough cough) reluctant to make. Barnaby Joyce keeps blurting on about debt. Yes, we have some; it’s about 6% of GDP. The rest of the developed world, like the US, the UK, and most of Europe, are running deficits of up to and over NINETY PERCENT OF GDP.

We ran up the debt with stimulus spending, and we are the only developed nation that didn’t go into recession after the GFC. That is largely due to the past twenty years of good financial management by the Howard and Hawke/Keating governments, but a lot of it is also thanks to going into debt to avoid going into recession. Recessions, by the way, cause governments to go into more, and worse, and harder to repay debt, but we mustn’t talk about any of that.

There are so many things we mustn’t talk about in this campaign: Afghanistan, indigenous affairs, pensions, Afghanistan, Climate Change, why shitheads leave shopping trolleys on the footpath, indigenous affairs…. As long as we can blame everything on a few hundred asylum seekers.

We are in danger of becoming completely disengaged, cynical and uninterested. And when a government has power for long enough over people who don’t care, it reaches a point where caring will get you locked up.

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