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Pauline Hanson is a hypocrite. But voters are worse

Tim Dick

Pauline Hanson's hypocrisy as populist outsider doing a preference deal with the establishment Liberals in WA shows that allegations of hypocrisy mean little, if anything, in politics.

There is little, if anything, appealing about Hanson the politician and her odious One Nation party. She revels in ignorance. She stokes prejudice. I once heard her sing a duet of I Am Australian in a Tamworth pub, and sing she cannot.

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Yet hypocrisy shouldn't be the slur it still pretends to be, given how widespread it is in Australian life and how necessary it is to political productivity. The practice of saying one thing and doing or voting for another is endemic, in politics and life, yet there is both good and bad hypocrisy. We'd be much better off having people explain the contradiction rather than refuse to take a different position based on different considerations. Better be called a hypocrite than make a bad decision in fear of it.

Rather than hypocrisy, Hanson's preference deal is better seen as just dumb politics, with the numbers from the WA election proving it.

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While most allegations of hypocrisy are aimed at politicians, the far more frequent offenders are voters, often denying things for others they demand for themselves or those they know.

Such as landlord parents despairing for their children unable to rent, work and save their way onto a home of their own – yet happily buying up investment properties and deducting the income losses along the way to second, third, fourth property riches. It's so hard for them, they say, yet so good for us – something must be done, just not that something.

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Property is an excellent example of the continuing hypocrisy demonstrated by conservative governments taking astonishingly risky approaches to governing in the national interest.

The Turnbull government, like those that went before it, refuses to stop subsidising property speculation through negative gearing. Even the discount in taxing the enormous capital gains partly funded by that tax rort is off-limits. Government policy encourages the economy's over-reliance on housing, but the Coalition, supposedly the safe pair of economic hands, declines to take the obvious risk reduction.

The environment is another instance of government hypocrisy. The Abbott administration-cum-disaster threw out the best mechanism currently available to curb dangerous emissions and reduce the peril facing the planet, the opposite of safe policy. Instead, it was recklessness masquerading as conservatism.

On drugs, most Australians are hypocrites to some degree. Much of the country speaks with one voice on illicit drugs: keep possession criminal, throw suppliers in jail, some would put users there too. All while we drown in alcohol, not-so-merrily swimming in the stuff, happily drinking while we tut-tut at tragic addicts we pass on the street in desperate need of help.

No one in their right mind should think cocaine, meth, or heroin is anything other than horrifically destructive as a habit, or dangerous even as a one-off experiment. Jordan Duffy, at 20 barely a young man, knows that now, having given his girlfriend, Janie Panton Roberts, the drugs which killed her. He has to live with her death the rest of his life, plus last week he received a conviction for drug supply, a fine and good behaviour bond – for carrying out what was a joint decision to partake. Yet Ten News said he "only received a slap on the wrist".

In my former work as a defence lawyer in Sydney, the carnage I saw wrought even by cannabis, the so-called soft drug, became depressingly familiar. Far too many of Australia's young people in desperate need of help, which is far too hard to get given the paucity of funding which will remain insufficient as long as drug use remains seen as a criminal matter rather than a health one. Addicted users of illicit drugs are thoroughly derided – junkies! – while heavy drinkers are not.

Hypocrisy permeates public policy. We take taxes from permanent residents, those who have chosen to make Australia their home, who live, work, contribute to society, yet churlishly refuse them the right to vote. Scandalously, Australia requires New Zealand workers to pay the levy for the National Disability Insurance Scheme, and denies them any benefits from it.

It's evident in what voters demand of politicians, both in their performance and their pay. Taxpayers hate paying generous pensions to politicians, yet when the former premier of NSW gets a handsomely paid and ethics-approved job at a bank soon after resigning, all hell breaks loose. What's Mike Baird supposed to do? Go on Newstart?

Barney Frank, the retired long-time Democrat congressman, explained the hypocritical contradiction in American expectations of politicians' performance in his autobiography, Frank. It applies in Australia too.

"Legislators who accommodate voter sentiment are denounced as cowardly, and those who defy it are just as fiercely accused of rejecting democratic norms," he wrote. Voters tended "to alternate between them, depending entirely on whether or not they agree with the official's substantive position."

Frank thinks hypocrisy is required to get anything done in politics, trading votes to get the numbers to pass legislation. Like many things in politics, the trick is convincing voters your hypocrisy is justified.

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