As lies go, Mediscare was a whopper. The electioneers that conceived and executed it are masters of their dark art, for its consequence was extraordinary.
Phone calls to cancer sufferers telling them their funding would be cut by the Coalition or day-of-poll text messages purporting to be from Medicare asserting imminent privatisation were clearly compelling.
[All aboard the ghost train for Labor’s Mediscare campaign]
A post-election quantitative study of 1000 voters by JWS Research concluded:
“Health was the dominant issue for voters in the 2016 Federal election campaign, with 57% nominating health issues as a key vote influencer, including 39% who nominated hospitals and health care generally and 38% who mentioned Medicare specifically.
“Medicare was the dominant issue for ALP voters (59%), followed by economic/ taxation issues (50%), education issues (42%) and employment and jobs issues (36%) also rating highly.
“Supporting the late-campaign effect of Labor’s ‘Mediscare’ campaign, there was above average mention of Medicare as a vote influencer amongst people who voted on Election Day (46%) and those who only decided their vote on Election Day (41%).”
It seems probable that Mediscare cost the Coalition between four and six seats, thus a far more respectable majority.
Does this matter?
Fibs are hardly new to election campaigns, and the headline “Politician Fails to Tell Truth” is unlikely to shock. However Mediscare was distinguished by its brazen combination of audacity and marginal seat impact, setting a new benchmark for effective electoral mendacity. (Yes, I’m well aware Angry of Brunswick will rush to the keyboard justifying Mediscare, or citing more outrageous deceits by the Coalition, but for the sake of debate, stay with me.)
A big lie, well told, injected into debate not long before the final whistle can not only change the result very significantly, it carries little or no legal, political or financial risk for the perpetrators after the poll. Champagne anyone?
This is unlikely to escape campaign planners; a strategy that shifts four to six seats can’t be ignored, because elections are lost, not won.
[Turnbull won’t ‘privatise’ Medicare, but he will destroy it]
Oppositions don’t win them; their job is to reach minimum expectation in order to remain standing while the incumbent is booted out. Governments don’t win them; their task is to grimly hang on to marginal seats as voters swing against them nationally.
If you reach back through 116 years of Australian federal elections you don’t find a triumphant procession of victors carried to office on the shoulders of ecstatic voters, you see losers wondering what the hell happened when they thought they’d been doing such a wonderful job.
Turnbull toppled Abbott because he wasn’t cutting any mustard for the Australian public. Abbott had been the antidote to an unacceptable Kevin Rudd, who in turn had knifed the unloved Julia Gillard, who had ironically replaced dysfunctional Kevin ’07.
Rudd was the remedy for a decade of John Howard, who originally stayed a sufficiently small target to allow Paul Keating to be ejected. Paul Keating was the replacement we had to have for Bob Hawke who was the crowbar we used to lever out unpopular Malcolm Fraser. Fraser had been needed to replace the untenable Gough Whitlam who called time on woeful William McMahon.
This pattern of incumbent collapse continues back to Edmund Barton and since that time their electioneers have hunted for ways to increase the despicability of the opposition. Within this context Mediscare proves effective falsification a strategy that parties would be cavalier to ignore.
[Essential: Labor keeps lead as Mediscare hits home]
Next election invented scares must surely be anticipated by major parties. In realising that little can be done to counter blatantly confected claims an “if we can’t beat ‘em join ‘em” response seems probable, for doing nothing would be manifestly foolish.
Social security to be halved? Why not? Minimum wage to be scrapped? Sure. Super to be taxed at PAYG rates? Good idea. If it passes a two-day credibility test with swinging voters, let’s take it for a trot.
It is likely that third parties will front the dueling deceptions, but the brutal success of Mediscare cannot be ignored.
The consequence of this will be further dumbing down of debate with votes falling against the less convincing liar.
May the worst man lose.
*Toby Ralph is a marketing consultant and board member who, among other things, has worked on nearly 50 elections around the world.
And then you put your foot in it by 2 weeks after an election having ScoMo come out and say that states should privatize hospitals and schools.
Can’t really be a scare campaign when its exactly what has been floated now.
There’s more than one way of privatising a government program other than selling it to private companies. It’s the policy of the Coalition to privatise the cost of doctors’ visits to either patients or doctors by introducing a patient co-payment or reducing the doctors’rebates, both ending bulk billing.
For a porky, nothing could reach the level of the $100 roast due to the carbon price.
If Mediscare worked & the Coalition believe they lost seats over it then all the better. Because now they realise the issue is dynamite & will be reluctant to touch it lest they be booted out of office.
The right wing of the Liberals don’t believe in a socialised national health system. Have we so quickly forgotten Tony Abbott addressing the G20 leaders in Brisbane in 2014 – rather than taking the opportunity to raise global issues he was boasting of his $7 Medicare co-payment. Rather than boasting of our superior health system he was bemoaning having trouble making it as mediocre as the systems in many G20 countries. He & his backers were/are determined, vowing to ‘persist’ with undermining Medicare, here’s part of the transcript:
‘The other reform that has proven very, very difficult for us is to try to inject more price signals into our health system. For a long time most Australians who went to see a doctor have been seen at no charge and we would like to see a $7 co-payment for people who are going to see the doctor. In most countries this is not unusual. In most countries, this is standard that the doctor can charge a fee, but it is proving to be massively difficult to get this particular reform through the Parliament.
I don’t have any magic answers to the problems that we face. I think that all we can do is explain the reasons as carefully as we can and to persist for as long as we can with these reforms. ‘ T. Abbott, 15 November 2014
It is not a good career move to get yourself elected on the back of what the electorate sees as a lie – Keating L-A-W, Gillard no carbon tax, Abbott no cuts. As for unprovable (one way or the other) assertions about your opponents (they’ll cut medicare, let in asylum seekers, blow the budget) – their effectiveness depends on the track record. As “predictions”, I’m not convinced that the mediscare claims are morally different from, or any further dumbed down than, $100 roasts and Whyalla wipe-outs. In each case the predictors are probably equally sincere/cynical (take your pick). What is new is the media used (text messages etc) and the specificity, targetting and unanswerable lateness that this allows.
Two problems Toby:
(1) The “Mediscare” campaign was effective because voters knew the liberals would LOVE TO privatise Medicare, despite their denials that were actually going TO DO SO.
A more truthful campaign may have been “THE LIBERALS WANT TO PRIVATISE MEDICARE” but the effect would have been about the same. In fact, it has been argued that “Mediscare” was actually based on far more believable evidence than that used to justify the Iraq invasion.
(2) The loss of seats and the near equal 50%;50% vote was pretty much locked in at the start of the campaign. Blaming “Mediscare” is a fig leaf covering more fundamental problems.