Is astrology a sound basis for formulating government policy? Or numerology? Reading chook entrails? The Coalition appears to think that sort of thing is a major vote winner, Michael Pascoe writes.
They’re all the same to me, all matters of self-deception at best and fraud more often. Certainly, none should be used as the basis of government policy, yet that is precisely what the Coalition is proudly proposing.
I don’t know what the LNP gets up to in the privacy of caucus meetings, what sorcery is used to keep resurrecting John Howard, but in public the Federal Opposition is wedded to numerology i.e. the belief “in a divine or mystical relationship between a number and one or more coinciding events.”
It was Scott Morrison as Treasurer in 2018 who first chained the Liberal Party to the cult of 23.9, a mystical figure to be used to set the parameters of the nation for all eternity.
Now Peter Dutton has added another number to the LNP pantheon of holy digits, declaring 3 as our magic shield, the number patriotic Australians should aspire to so that their children might sleep safely in their beds, the number that will protect them from the marauding hordes of the cosmos.
At least you get a chook to roast under the entrail reading system. Numerology merely befuddles the simple and distracts the commentariat.
Mine is bigger than yours
The 23.9 is what LNP true believers think must be the upper limit of the Commonwealth Government’s tax take as a percentage of gross national product. It is a nonsense number, as I and others have written about before, but it remains at the core of the LNP’s budget liturgy.
The Mighty 3 is the percentage of our economy Peter Dutton wants to be spending in a decade’s time on things that go bang. That would mean a bit more than $130B a year, in current dollars, compared with the $51B we’re splurging on defence this year.
This holy number has been handed down to the LNP by no less a shaman than the Donald. Already suffering from being known as Temu Trump, you’d suspect Dutton would think twice before embracing an edict from Mar-a-Lago, but numerology exerts strange power over its followers.
The Trump 3 is so special the local numerologists have to approach it in stages, promising the nation a 2.5 as the first step. In the way of numbers, that’s bigger than the 2.33 Labor is pledging, an obvious case of mine-is-bigger-than-yours when men who listen would have been told size isn’t everything, it’s what you do with it that counts.
And that’s why Dutton aspiring to the Trump 3 is so silly. There’s no indication he has any idea of what to do with it. It’s just a number that has no intrinsic relationship to effective defence of the realm.
Doing that might cost more or less than whatever 3% of GDP is in 2035.
Defence spending folly
If the nation’s very survival depends on adequate military defence, a party worthy of governing wouldn’t be playing with magic numbers. Instead, it would be defining what threats might exist, planning how to counter them and spending what was required to carry out those plans.
Adopting the Trump 3 means the LNP wants to be seen as being locked even more tightly than Labor into being part of America’s strategic apparatus, fitting in with America’s priorities in the hope that America might then care about little ol’ Australia if we needed military assistance.
Labor has no greater ambition than that either. It just wants to do it a little more cheaply. Neither side wants to face up to independence, wants to face up to the US being of declining importance and less reliability.
It’s so much easier to just keep doing what we’ve been doing for decades. It would be hard work involving real decisions, some involving political capital,
to work out what threats might actually exist and how best to counter them.
For example, if, as according to our present adoption of America’s priorities, we must assume military conflict with China, such a threat could be countered by not making Australia a target in the event of war.
We would be better served by concentrating on our own defence, returning to the “echidna” strategy instead of hosting offensive military bases and making our biggest defence spend nuclear-powered submarines designed to lurk in the South China Sea.
The wedge
Labor, being haplessly wedged on national security, is not capable of that. It’s not even capable of being honest with the population about the security threats arising from climate change.
Dutton’s LNP, being behind in the polls close to the election, has everything to gain by playing up what the electorate strangely sees as its national security strength.
There’s no contest here about spending wisely, just spending more. If the department and its several ministers over the years hadn’t been so incompetent, we wouldn’t need to spend as much.
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Crikey’s Bernard Keane gives the coalition some credit for being upfront about the need to significantly increase spending. “Even without the withdrawal of the US security guarantee, Australia’s defence spending needs to be increased to make room for the AUKUS disaster, which the major parties are stubbornly clinging to despite the array of evidence that it will fail,” he writes.
“The two questions that must be answered about any increase in defence spending are where exactly the money will be spent in service of which strategic goals, and how can we have any confidence that the Department of Defence won’t simply waste some, most, or all of the additional funding? After the Thales debacle, the Hunter-class frigates, bungled contracts for ADF health services, the deception around the LAND 200 combat management contract, the Anzac frigate servicing contract or the ONESky project, does anyone have any confidence in defence’s capacity to spend money with integrity and competence? It can’t even recruit enough soldiers, sailors and airmen and women, leaving the ADF in crisis.”
A fair summary. But in the absence of answers to such questions, numerology will do for the Australian electorate.
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Michael Pascoe is an independent journalist and commentator with five decades of experience here and abroad in print, broadcast and online journalism. His book, The Summertime of Our Dreams, is published by Ultimo Press.