People never lie so much as before an election, during a war, or after a hunt.
Otto von Bismarck
Let’s be clear: lying has always been a part of life, and we are all guilty of some version of it from time to time. But as Bismarck suggests, there are certain domains of life where lying really comes into its own.
Prussian huntsmen aside, it is a sad state of affairs that lying has become such a part of the way politics are conducted nowadays.
Donald Trump, of course, turned it into an industrial-scale project. By The Washington Post’s tally, the now parted US president issued more than 30,000 false or misleading claims during his time in office — an average of 20 a day.
Mercifully things haven’t got quite so bad here — but the signs are not looking good. In what’s shaping up to be a possible election year, it’s important that as a citizenry we remain vigilant to the deceptions, distortions and outright dishonesty that are becoming such a part of our politicians’ stock-in-trade.
Truth be told
A simple definition of lying is to see it as the opposite of truth-telling. In philosophy, the latter is usually defined as those verbal acts where there is clear correspondence between someone’s words and the state of affairs to which these refer. For lying though, definitions are not so straightforward because the lie is a complex beast, with a capacity to assume a multitude of violations.
Montaigne elaborated artfully on this contrast: “If falsehood, like truth, had but one face we would be on better terms. For we would consider the contrary of what the liar said to be certain. But the opposite of truth has a hundred thousand faces and an infinite field.”
In this three-part series, I seek to narrow the field somewhat. I offer a finite — but far from exhaustive — list of the more wanton categories of lies used by our politicians, and which, as many are beginning to notice, have also become an integral part of the political style of our prime minister.
1. The pants-on-fire lie: ‘I did not have sex with that woman’
This is arguably the prototypical lie, one associated as much with the schoolyard as with public office.
The key ingredients are: a culpable individual act; a bald-faced denial of the act; undeniable evidence of the act having been committed. We may be prepared to cut children some slack in the telling of this type of lie, but not adults.
It was so abject in the case of the Bill Clinton presidency as to lead to impeachment proceedings — although it was clear from the start of his tenure that they were going to get Slick Willie on something. As the late Barbara Bush cruelly put it: “Clinton lied. A man might forget where he parks or where he lives, but he never forgets oral sex, no matter how bad it is.”
Prime Minister Scott Morrison has become increasingly prone to the igniting-undies lie. All was plain to see, for example, in his account of the encounter with the young pregnant woman in Cobargo at the height of the bushfire emergency.
Here the claim was not that he didn’t do something, but that he did. “We talked about what she was asking for,” he said. The cameras showed something quite different.
2. Achievement hyperbole: ‘tired of winning’
A different political lie involves not trying to conceal a personal act, but rather to let everybody know about it. This is in the area of exaggeration, hyperbole and outright fabrication.
New standards for this type of deceit — and conceit — were set by Trump: “Decision/deal/outcome X is the greatest and biggest X ever made in the history of our country/the world/the universe” etc.
Australian political culture is less tolerant of this personal big-noting, although Morrison displaying his border security memento — a model boat with caption “I stopped these” — breaks new ground.
More common is the endless boasting and inflating of government achievement. This has become a stock routine in virtually all interviews with government ministers — rolling out zombie lists of statistics and superlatives that no one can follow, or has any inclination to believe.
Think, for example, of those Treasurer Josh Frydenberg set pieces, pre-prepared and ready to be rammed into an interview at the first opportunity. The following, from Insiders in late 2019, is notable for also including the unfortunate “back in black” achievement:
When we came to government, unemployment was 5.7%. Today it’s 5.3%. We have a record number of Australians in jobs. We’ve just produced the first current accounts surplus since 1975. We’ve got the lowest welfare dependency in 30 years. We’ve provided the biggest tax cuts legislated through the parliament in more than 20 years. And the budget is back in balance, already delivered for the first time in 11 years.
3. The smear: ‘intentionally barren’
This category concerns not the piling of praise on oneself, but the heaping of calumny on adversaries.
There was a time when the political putdown produced some of the more memorable moments in the Australian parliament (think “feral abacus”, “mincing poodle” etc). The attack of choice these days, however, is a lower form: the carefully crafted smear aimed at impugning reputations.
Bill Heffernan, in the Howard government, set the standard with his false allegations about Justice Michael Kirby and the use of his Commonwealth car. His gendered Julia Gillard slur was a similar low moment.
The smear is now a ready reflex for many, especially resorted to when political pressure is being brought to bear. Thus when Energy Minister Angus Taylor was being pushed to step down as minister after AFP investigations into the false Clover Moore travel claims, Morrison casually remarked that Gillard had been investigated by the police and hadn’t stepped down. He knew the first part of this proposition not to be true.
There are well-developed techniques to dismiss — even laugh off — those occasions when the smearing is caught out. At a National Press Club address in 2019, Morrison was corrected by Michelle Grattan when he falsely claimed that then opposition leader Shorten — among other imputed inadequacies — had never undertaken financial reform. The response:
I must have just found the performance underwhelming, Michelle, and I still find their performance very underwhelming. So I’ll let others, you know, correct the record as they see fit.
Next: ‘These are matters for Victoria’, ‘children overboard’, and ‘sexing up the dossier’
Follow the team that follows the money
Nobody digs into corruption in this country better than Crikey does.
Now we’re digging even deeper with our new multi-part series, The Dirty Country: Corruption in Australia, where our team lifts the lid on corruption, telling us how it’s done, who wins and what it costs.
Get involved. Follow the team that follows the money. Save 50% on a year of Crikey — that’s just $99 for an annual membership — when you subscribe today with the promo code CORRUPTION.
Peter Fray
Editor-in-chief of Crikey
Leave a comment
The subject of political lying was addressed by Jonathan Swift some three centuries ago.
… my imagination this minute represents before me a certain great man famous for this talent, to the constant practice of which he owes his twenty years’ reputation of the most skilful head in England, for the management of nice affairs. The superiority of his genius consists in nothing else but an inexhaustible fund of political lies, which he plentifully distributes every minute he speaks, and by an unparalleled generosity forgets, and consequently contradicts, the next half hour. He never yet considered whether any proposition were true or false, but whether it were convenient for the present minute or company to affirm or deny it; so that if you think fit to refine upon him, by interpreting everything he says, as we do dreams, by the contrary, you are still to seek, and will find yourself equally deceived whether you believe or not: the only remedy is to suppose, that you have heard some inarticulate sounds, without any meaning at all; and besides, that will take off the horror you might be apt to conceive at the oaths, wherewith he perpetually tags both ends of every proposition; although, at the same time, I think he cannot with any justice be taxed with perjury, when he invokes God and Christ, because he hath often fairly given public notice to the world that he believes in neither.
Some people may think, that such an accomplishment as this can be of no great use to the owner, or his party, after it has been often practised, and is become notorious; but they are widely mistaken. Few lies carry the inventor’s mark, and the most prostitute enemy to truth may spread a thousand, without being known for the author: besides, as the vilest writer hath his readers, so the greatest liar hath his believers: and it often happens, that if a lie be believed only for an hour, it hath done its work, and there is no further occasion for it. Falsehood flies, and truth comes limping after it, so that when men come to be undeceived, it is too late; the jest is over, and the tale hath had its effect: like a man, who hath thought of a good repartee when the discourse is changed, or the company parted; or like a physician, who hath found out an infallible medicine, after the patient is dead.
Spot on. Swift must have time traveled and met Donald Trump. Either that or there is the horrible possibility that the Trump character is regularly reincarnated. That would be divine punishment indeed.
Thanks SSR.
Politicians have always lied and there have always been enough people to ignore that and support them to give cause for both wonder and concern at what drives people. The differences now are the speed at which lies can propagate, the speed at which the identification and rebuttal of those lies can occur but most importantly the manner in which the volume of lies that can be pushed out can drown anything else.
That latter point seems to be a major stumbling block because, even though it is difficult to accept, the madness that infects those who lie like that seems also to provide an ‘energy’ source that keeps them going in the face of ‘truth’ that would stop any reasonable person in their tracks. The ex-president and his cohort, various members of the LNP and the ALP spring to mind sadly.
“To give cause for both wonder and concern at what drives people.”
Impressive, Unimpressed. I daily wonder at this and have come to very few useful conclusions. I tend to come back to the most likely explanation, that nothing but base instinct drives them at all. A frightening lack of curiosity exists in my fellow human, and far too many of those who are sufficiently curious to seek, find answers in the most abject conspiracies.
As an addendum to that thought is that not much drives people, but many people are driven, the inference being an external agent controls them. I have met a man who was happy to consciously get into excessive mortgage debt on the basis that he would be too lazy if not so driven. At least he was conscious, and his theory not entirely absurd. Most just end up there without thought.
But now they have the likes of of Crosby Textor to teach them how to lie effectively.
“Did Clinton Lie?: Defining ‘Sexual Relations'” https://www.researchgate.net/publication/228168509_Did_Clinton_Lie_Defining_'Sexual_Relations‘
No it isn’t absolutely clear that Clinton.lied. He did take an extremely literal and legalistic definition of the mean of the question.
You literally just repeated a story you’d heard without checking.
Yeah I also thought it was a poor example
I am wondering if the combination of bare-faced lies, denials, incompetence and continuing content-free announcements is now the cause of considerable, and increasing, anger.
Last Friday, before the announcement of the allegation of “historical” rape by a minister, I had lunch with five women friends, all of us retired from university employment for five or more years. I have never heard such anger at government as I did over lunch. I checked with family, other friends and neighbours and heard that being blatantly lied to by our own government is a huge grievance, felt by many.
How have they lived then all these years?
I suspect most voters, come election time, will temporarily disable their lie detector, hear what they want to hear and vote Morrison back in again. Self interest often overrides integrity as we saw today in a particular press conference.