With all their political capital spent and with their standing in the polls plummeting, you'd be forgiven for thinking things can only get better. I'm predicting they'll get worse, because there really is no way back.
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Lies can take the form of a deliberate untruth, designed to deceive. The best example being Tony Abbott's entire suite of pre-election promises, followed by Hockey's disingenuous budget, and finished with Abbott's attempts to sell the idea no promises were broken. Instead we were all mistaken, we heard what we wanted to hear and not what was said. Sadly for Abbott, all the audio and video grabs of the last 3 years only serve to highlight the repeated lies.
Repeated lies in the form of slogans worked well before the election, but they have no hope of working now, and they are the only strategy Abbott has... so the Mad Monk pulls out his only tool (the shovel) and digs a bit more.
There will of course be forced back-downs as Abbott is periodically faced with a lie he can't talk his way out of. Like the fact that the first of the cuts to Health will start from July 1st.
Lies can also be perpetrated by deliberately hiding the truth. Enter 'Smokin' Joe' Hockey, who for the first time since 2004, chose to withhold comparative tables from the budget papers which showed how different family types would be affected. The excluded papers show that some people on low incomes will lose close to 20 per cent of their incomes, while those on very high incomes will lose almost nothing. Choices are made to include and exclude. While representatives from Hockey's office claimed they were being transparent on the budget, the exclusion was deliberate, in essence another lie.
Restricting access to the truth is another kind of lie, or at least a tool that makes a lie easier to tell . While the best Coalition performer in this area is clearly Scott Morrison and his outrageous Sovereign Borders smokescreen (only to be followed by the even more ridiculous Border Force), Abbott is also doing his bit. The PM's office has been attempting to hide the true cost of renovations to the Lodge. According to the Canberra Times, internal documents show bureaucrats were instructed to give purposefully vague responses to requests for information from The Canberra Times. The Lodge is an important building of National and historical significance, and we should spend money maintaining it. To hide this information only highlights that the children (and not the adults) are in charge.
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But should we expect him to resign?
Following Barry O'Farrell's resignation for misleading ICAC, Tony Abbott said:
"We are seeing an act of integrity, an act of honour, the like of which we have rarely seen in Australian politics."
Reading between the lines, Abbott seems to be saying he would never resign over a lie or a misrepresentation.
Dr Simon Longstaff from the St James Ethics Centre has an interesting take on a potential Abbott resignation. But he comes to the same conclusion... Abbott will never do it.
Abbott did ask an interesting (rhetorical) question on Insiders on Sunday. Why would he and his government go down this path when they would clearly know the kind of adverse reaction they would face (if not appreciating the scale). For Wayne Swan, it's because they are both driven and blinded by ideology.
I'd have to agree.