Stop The Boats. Great Big New Tax. Moving Forward. Working Families.

Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

On second thought, I take that back. On third thought, I don’t take it back, I just append to it ‘unless you’re going to actually say something for once’.

Which, on fourth thought, would render most of our politicians silent most of the time and our TVs and radios deliciously mute, or at least casting around for another few episodes of Big Fucking Bang Theory.

We’ve all been bitching for years about ‘soundbite politics’, where a complex issue, like tax reform or how the hell do ciphers like Craig Thomson get pre-selection, is boiled down to a few words at a presser.

Soundbites came into existence as politicians realised that they would only get a couple of sentences on the news so they had to make sure they were the right ones. Reporters liked it, because it made their jobs easier both from an editing point of view and in terms of not taxing their intellects by having to decipher a press conference for the rest of us who, mercifully, weren’t there.

Eventually reporters stopped listening to answers to their questions, instead keeping their antennae cocked for that night’s soundbite; politicians realised that they’d only get airtime if they blurted the right catchy words at the waiting seagulls and the circle was complete.

Now I’m wondering if it will keep devolving until Insiders and Meet The Press turn into four monkeys throwing actual poo at each other, rather than David Marr peevishly cleaning his glasses at Piers Ackerman.

Most of you would have seen the footage of UK Opposition Leader Ed Milliband in an interview about a teachers’ strike (If you haven’t, go to youtube and type in ‘Ed Milliband these strikes are wrong’).

He repeats the same sentence (‘These strikes are wrong — I urge both sides to put away the rhetoric, get around the negotiating table and stop this happening again…’) about twelve times with a straight face, regardless of what question he was asked. Should he be criticised for this?

Well, yes and no. Yes, because it’s infuriating pointless bullshit and the best example I’ve seen of the disease that has overwhelmed politics in the past twenty years. No, because it’s infuriating pointless bullshit and the best example I’ve seen of the disease that has overwhelmed politics in the past twenty years.

He knows that, as Opposition Leader, he will only get a fifteen to twenty second grab on that night’s news and there’s one message that he wants to get across, so why give the reporter a single word that is, or could even be construed as, off-message?

Politicians do this all the time, knowing that newsrooms have too many time constraints and think their audience has too few brain cells to deal with real information.

Journalists do it all the time, too. This is why the box-ticker ‘interviewing’ Milliband just keeps asking the questions that are written down in front of him, rather than losing his shit (or, if you prefer, doing his job) and yelling ‘We get that you think these strikes are wrong, can you please just answer the fucking question?’.

He doesn’t want, or, more depressingly, need a real answer to any of his questions because he and his subject are on the same mission: get a soundbite.

So instead of discussing the nuances of push factors, refugee numbers in camps world-wide, the costs of assisting refugees to settle in Australia, seasonal variations and the refugee intakes of other first-world nations, we get ‘laying out the red carpet’ on the one hand and ‘breaking the People smugglers’ business model’ on the other.

Then there’s the Orc-birthing suite that passes for Question Time; the opposition squawk whatever three-word thought-bubble pops into Abbott’s head on his morning bike ride, while the government mouths rhetoric that isn’t so much empty as spun through so many focus groups and PR knob-ends they can’t tell you what day it is.

Or Q &A every time they get a politician on the panel. Every miserable, soul-destroying week there’s a question about asylum seekers, the opposition spokesperson talks about red carpets, failed policies and weeps crocodile tears for those wretched souls who drown on the way. Then the government member talks about breaking the people smugglers busin... you know the drill.

Same with climate change (Big New Tax/Clean Energy Future). Same with Gillard as PM (the elected Prime Minister was knifed in the back by the ALP’s faceless men/Julia is doing a fantastic job and has the full support of the party). A question on any other topic, from literature to animal husbandry, the politicians will find a way to Insert Talking Point B into Tortured Analogy C.

Every issue. Every day. It’s not just infuriating, it’s actually dangerous. The public have become so used to soundbites being news that most of us are now simply unable or unwilling to digest anything longer or more nuanced.

We have lost the right to complain about the grim embrace of the politicians and the press gallery; we, through our short attention spans and thirst for easy answers to complex questions, have turned their co-dependent relationship into a grim ménage a trois.

It’s time for us to get out of bed with these zombies, put our clothes on and throw a bucket of water over them. Only by getting a sharp shock, from actual people, be they No-Carbon-Tax-Juliar rednecks or Occupy-Something-And-Post-It-On-Instagram wankers, will the political class and those that once were journalists get the message: We’re not as dumb as you think we are.

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Justin Shaw is the Deputy Editor of the Kings Tribune and weekly sports columnist for ABC’s The Drum. Follow him on Twitter: @JuzzyTribune

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