inamerrata

Well, there probably was never much chance of me voting Labor this election, but they appear to have taken my ski trip last week as their cue to go completely nutso. As well as raising their lances at windmills they seem to have decided to follow the lead of the Australian Democrats (or, as they apparently prefer to be known, “The Lie Detectors”), and are campaigning under the banner of “Truth Overboard”. They seem a bit out of sync, actually: they were fighting over the GST in the 2001 campaign, when it was a 1998 election issue; and now they’re fighting over the “children overboard” affair three years after that was an election issue.

Anyway, they’ve got an exciting web page up and a PDF listing all John Howard’s lies over the past eight or so years of being Prime Minister (“warning large file!” the site warns). There’s an obligatory rebuttal from the PM’s office. Some of the issues might be worth quibbling over, some of them seem quite interesting (“Lie 26: …; The Truth: In the first term of the Howard Government, 32,400 [public sector] jobs were lost” — awesome!), but most of them just rate a big “whatever” from me.

What does strike me as astounding, though, is that there’s only twenty-seven of them. Over eight years. Around nine per term. Not even four per annum. Under one every three months. From a politician.

Surely the real scandal here is that in an era when foreign policy is in an ascendency, we’ve got a PM who’s carelessly out of practice with the central tool for international diplomacy.