A New Kind of Candidate, A New Kind of Politics
Lately, I have become politically depressed.
It seems that Australian politics these days isn’t about government, policy, or right and wrong. But rather about spin, sound bites, five second grabs, and mud slinging.
Don’t get me wrong — I know that politics has never exactly been pure, however lately it all just seems to be worse.
It is a very unfortunate situation when you feel like both sides of politics are lying to you. And so, the decision when casting your vote becomes about choosing the lesser of two evils, rather than the best candidate for the job.
However, I would go as far as to say that the problem is not just the politicians. The media, also has its role to play.
Hunter S Thompson — not exactly a beacon of journalistic integrity, I know — wrote in 1972, “there is no such thing as Objective Journalism”. This is certainly true in Australia. Each of the media outlets has its own political leaning, and I will refrain from naming them here.
So again, when deciding which paper to buy, website to visit, story to believe, it is about the lesser of the evils, rather than objective information upon which to base an opinion.
When it is not a biased story, or strategic pieces of information missing, it is the populist fluff about which journalists are forced to write.
Declining advertising revenues in newspapers, news websites, 24-hour news cycles and job cuts in news and media outlets, mean that stories are less about news, and more about attention grabbing and what is going to attract the next mouse click.
Take, for example, the recent Rudd v. Abbott health care debate. The stories to come out of that were not policy, or who will be better off, but rather that of The Worm, and ‘who won’.
Can I say right now, that if I hear somebody say that they decided their vote based upon The Worm, I will jump out of the nearest window.
The problem also lies in media advisors — the people who say, “don’t stand like that, or people won’t relate to you,” and, “make sure you emphasise the broken promises from eight years ago”.
These people are undoubtedly talented and intelligent individuals. But imagine what our society would be like if they used their powers for good, rather than evil. If, instead of trying to make the other side look bad, the political parties focused their attention on creating better policies. Making themselves look better through good governance, rather than just making the other side look worse.
A senior politician once said, “public policy is what government does, and politics is just the crap you have to put up with,” however that won’t help anybody when Australia goes to the polls this year.
How are we, the voting public to decide who would best govern this country, when our politics is about spin and mud slinging, rather than policy and governance?
Clay O’Brien, 23, is the National Programs Director of the Left Right Think-Tank, Australia’s first independent and non-partisan think-tank of young minds to involve young people in public policy.
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