verging_on_random

Aesop’s election fables

November 1, 2007 on 9:25 pm | In Uncategorized |

I really don’t understand what comes over the Australian adult populace come election time. On one side we have politicians making up the most fantastic nonsense … plucking figures out of the air, making extravagant promises that bear no relationship whatever to reality, guaranteeing that they can fix problems that nobody’s been able to tackle for 30 years; and on the other side we have the voting public, gazing at this spectacle with varying degrees of interest or cynicism or innocent belief. But hardly anywhere do we see people standing up and making a statement of the bleedin’ obvious, which would run something like this:

Stop telling such fucking stupid lies you arseholes! How about you stop treating us like gullible idiots and tell the truth for once you contemptible pricks!

I confess I shout this at the television screen two or three times a day, and think it almost constantly while reading the news feeds online. Yet for some peculiar reason it’s still considered bad form to say it to a politician’s face … or at least our journalists seem to think so.

Latest trigger for my neurotic behaviour is the release yesterday of some details of both the Liberal* and Labor health policies. Here are some juicy morsels:

Mr Howard said that under the Coalition plan, up to 800,000 Medicare-funded visits a year would be made by nurses to people aged over 65, veterans and people too frail to visit a doctor.

That’s over 2,000 visits a day, 365 days a year! How cool is that? If he guarantees that there’ll be some hot male nurses by the time I get frail, I’ll vote for him no worries. But wait, there’s more:

Under the plan the number of medical graduates would more than double from 1300 in 2004 to nearly 3000 by 2012.

The number of general practitioner training places would be increased by 50 per cent and the number of places for junior doctors to train in GP surgeries would be increased by 80 per cent.

A further 300 training places would be created for specialists in private hospitals and surgeries.

Now look, seriously, this is just awesome. As far as I know it takes five years to do a basic medical degree and Howard’s gunna double the number of graduates within five years … which presumably means more than doubling next year’s university intake. Hot stuff! See how easy it is to solve problems once you put your mind to it? Likewise all those extra nurses and GP places, it’s like all Howard has to do is state a policy and pooff!! They appear. It really does show how slack the states have been all these years.

What about Kevin, how’s his performance? Well unfortunately he hasn’t yet learnt that you can say any old nonsense you like on the campaign trail. He’s contented himself with using public hospitals to create new jobs for form-filler-outers:

He said the report cards would be used to drive his plan to provide $600 million to state governments to tackle waiting lists. “We will not be extending to the states a blank cheque,” he said.

What is the purpose of making doctors and nurses fill out forms? Well apart from making them earn their generous salaries by doing some proper work:

They would allow the performance of hospitals to be monitored by requiring them to report publicly on the proportion of patients waiting longer than the recommended times for their surgery.

He said publication of the report cards would allow patients to move between nearby hospitals with shorter waiting times.

Heh heh nice one Kevin. I can just see it now … grey nomad convoys camped by the side of the highway, scrutinising the weekly hospital waiting lists. “Grafton’s got the number one spot this week!” the cry will go up and with screeching tyres the Winnebagos will all head north while the hip replacement patients toss on the daybeds in the back and grit their teeth.

In all seriousness … can anyone possibly take any of this bullshit seriously? If Howard’s mob gets re-elected there’s no way on god’s earth that we’ll have two and a half times as many medical graduates in 2012. There’ll be no nurses visiting the elderly and the frail in their homes, or at least not many more than are doing it already. And if Labor gets in they might well be successful in making hospitals fill in more forms, but it’s not going to make any significant improvement in waiting lists. How can I be so sure of all this? Well because state governments have been making empty promises about all these things for as long as I can remember, and if there’s one thing I know for a fact, the federal government is no better at public administration than state governments. Worse, probably.

Deep down I think most people know this. They don’t believe any of the silly ‘policies’ that get waved around at election time, partly because they’re not policies at all. They’re wish lists. And I think that provides the clue why people don’t laugh them at them and drive the pollies who make them into electoral oblivion. Election promises are a bit like the lists we used to give Santa when we were tiny tots. They let us join with the politicians, for a few weeks, in a fantasy world where we all imagine the kind of nation we would have if we could only make things be the way we want by waving a magic wand. We know it won’t really come true, but it’s fun to play ‘Let’s Pretend’.

The truth, as we know from the evidence of lots of elections, is that these fairy tales don’t actually influence many people’s votes, so while it’s entertaining to watch the pollies and the pundits in the media being so solemn about them all, it is important to keep a sense of proportion. As I’m sure Kevin Rudd and John Howard and all the professional journos do.

It would appear, however, that some ostensibly mature adults still take the pollies’ wish lists seriously, as if they sincerely believe that they represent something that will really happen should their preferred team win the big election cup. People like that are kind of cute, like a lil kid who believes he’s gunna get a pony for Christmas from Santa. Then again, they’re supposed to be grown-ups … so all-in-all they’re a bit of a worry.

* I refuse to give the National Party any credibility by using the ridiculous term ‘Coalition’. With any luck, this election will do at least one good turn for the country and eliminate the useless National Party as a political force forever.