Have you noticed how many of your friends and family, coworkers and acquaintances are just determined to get rid of “that woman”, meaning Gillard – but if you ask them why, how little depth there is to their reasoning? Okay, you despise her, and blame her for wrecking the country, but why specifically?

Maybe you’ll hear –

• “Carbon tax”, but if you ask why, and they say “my energy bills”, and you ask them if they’ve checked which part of the increase has anything to do with the “carbon tax” and what compensation they received in tax cuts, they won’t have checked at all.
• “I’m paying more tax”, but they won’t actually have any figures, because if they’ve actually checked, they’d have noticed that, odds are, they’re paying less.
• “Cost of living”, and sure, that has indeed increased somewhat – housing costs, in particular – but if you ask them what government policy led to that, or what Abbott policy would improve the situation, they won’t be able to point to one.
• “Boat people” – but if you ask what possible impact that has had on their lives and why they’re so concerned, they won’t have anything. How much is it costing the budget? Point out that we’re spending vastly more locking them up offshore (the Liberal policy the ALP has now adopted) than we would if we just processed them here, and there’s no response.

But questioning the shallowness of the above impressions, thoughts, feelings often results in a shutdown or hostility. Why? Because you’re questioning away an easy villain, an easy solution, the satisfaction of blaming someone else for every difficulty.

Because once that’s gone, what’s left? A challenging world with difficult decisions? Shut up and leave us with our fantasy!

We can deal with reality after September. And when we get Abbott, and things actually get worse, maybe we’ll be able to convince ourselves it’s someone else’s fault again.

There are a number of challenges ordinary Australians presently face – housing is flat-out unaffordable; energy prices have risen dramatically; the high Australian dollar has seriously hit export industries.

The weird thing is that we’re apparently determined to blame these difficulties on things that have little to do with them. The difficulty I have paying my mortgage or rent must be because of tax to fund “wasteful spending”! Couldn’t be because the Liberals halved capital gains tax, flooding the housing market with investors who doubled the price of housing in a few short years. Increases in my electricity bill must be because of the carbon tax! I’ll completely ignore that if I look carefully at my bill the carbon “tax” component is a tiny fraction of the increase and if I’m in the majority of Australians I’ve had a tax cut that more than compensates for that element of the rise. Tradespeople are now really expensive and we farmers are struggling! Let’s blame that on “red tape” and the “mining tax”, even though the mining sector is the main reason the country has a “two speed economy” with a high dollar and, as the mining industry poaches workers, an increase in the price of labour in the trades. Public services are struggling! Must be because of immigrants, particularly those who’ve arrived on BOATS, even though they’re a tiny fraction of immigrants, immigrants are far from a drain on our economy, and the most significant part of the public expenditure connected with refugees is the idiotic offshore processing regime on which both big parties insist.

Why do so many voters want to believe this? Not just happen to believe this, but desperately want to believe this and will resist learning otherwise?

Two reasons.

First, it’s lovely to have a target on which to blame all your difficulties. It’s not that I’m over-spending or budgeting badly – it’s the government taking my money. It’s not that the government isn’t taxing me enough to fund decent public services – it’s that it’s wasting it on “boat people”. In short, people don’t want to be reminded that actually their power bills are going up mainly for reasons nothing to do with the “carbon tax” – because that reminds them that they’ll keep going up, and their federal election vote won’t make a difference. They don’t want to be reminded that in all probability their taxes as a proportion of income have actually declined, because that makes their spending choices their own responsibility again.

Second, it’s nice to have an easy fix. The Libs and their cheerleaders have crafted a powerfully attractive fantasy – everything wrong in the country can be easily fixed by “axing” the mining and carbon taxes, “stopping the boats”, and ending Labor’s “wasteful spending”. Easy. All we’ve got to do is make Tony PM and suddenly life will get much easier for all of us. DON’T THINK ABOUT IT! Tony as PM is a magic pill which will fix things and don’t worry that he won’t give any detail about what he’s going to do before the election because it doesn’t matter as long as he’s not Julia Gillard. All you have to do is vote for the LNP in September, and feel the satisfaction of punishing an evil woman who is responsible for everything wrong in your life.

By believing in the “Gillard has rooned the country” fantasy, we get to feel entitled and vent our frustrations, which is deeply satisfying, and we get to entertain hope that with minimal effort on our part life will suddenly get easier if we just make Tony Abbott PM, which is reassuring.

If Labor wants a chance in September, it needs to call bullshit on this half-thinking. It’s not that voters are misinformed by the Daily Telegraph and so on – it’s that many of us are actively choosing to buy into a satisfying fantasy, and will hang onto it for as long as possible.

The ALP needs to concede that punters are facing challenges – but it needs to help voters identify more accurately what they are. It’s not “boat people”, it’s not the “carbon tax”, it’s not “wasteful spending” – it’s challenges like housing affordability and a distorted two-speed economy. And these are things that would only get worse if the Liberals win government. When tackling the Liberals’ faux “solutions”, the emphasis must be on how false is the hope that they would actually help voters. Because many of us clearly really want to believe they somehow could.

And, seriously – unless you are significantly better off under Labor than you were under the Liberals, you’re not paying more tax.

UPDATE: Or to put it another way: leave us our careless fantasy! We can come up with a new one after September when we get what we thought we wanted and things actually get worse.

When a public figure dies, someone who has caused significant change to the lives of many people, it is important to discuss their legacy – and not just if you’re a supporter.

Those who are grateful for what that person did, will certainly put the most positive case for the person who has died. If they have large soapboxes, these hagiographers will have significant influence on the way history views that person. And this matters when the ideas and actions of that person continue to have advocates who would like to see them repeated.

So it is critical that if the person who has died actually caused damage to the world, and hurt people, that the negative consequences of their actions be discussed just as loudly as the claimed positives.

It’s not rude. It’s not inappropriate. People don’t become saints when they die, and their bad ideas are still bad ideas that need to be called what they are, lest people hear the hagiography, forget that they’re bad ideas and think about trying them again.

But please don’t go gloating about people dying. It’s a dick move, whoever they are. It’s a dick move if it’s Chavez. It’s a dick move if it’s Thatcher. It’s a dick move if it’s a hideous dictator. It’s also silly, because it’s hardly a victory that they died – they were always going to. It hardly undoes the damage they did while alive.

For example, Thatcher was a terrible PM who did great damage to the UK. Her policies caused real harm to people in Britain, and have led to many of the problems the country faces today. Anyone trying to promote her legacy is either unaware of what she did to the poor and vulnerable, or doesn’t care. Here’s hoping history remembers her more accurately than the hagiographers would like.

Just don’t be popping champagne corks because some sick old woman has died, okay?

You are making offenders worse.

And you are costing the taxpayer a lot more money.

A reminder today from a UK judge of how slashing legal aid actually costs more money in wasted court time (h/t Quis Custodiet Ipsos Custodes):

What I find so depressing is that the case highlights the difficulties increasingly encountered by the judiciary at all levels when dealing with litigants in person. Two problems in particular are revealed. The first is how to bring order to the chaos which litigants in person invariably – and wholly understandably – manage to create in putting forward their claims and defences. Judges should not have to micro-manage cases, coaxing and cajoling the parties to focus on the issues that need to be resolved. Judge Thornton did a brilliant job in that regard yet, as this case shows, that can be disproportionately time-consuming. It may be saving the Legal Services Commission which no longer offers legal aid for this kind of litigation but saving expenditure in one public department in this instance simply increases it in the courts. The expense of three judges of the Court of Appeal dealing with this kind of appeal is enormous. The consequences by way of delay of other appeals which need to be heard are unquantifiable. The appeal would certainly never have occurred if the litigants had been represented. With more and more self-represented litigants, this problem is not going to go away. We may have to accept that we live in austere times, but as I come to the end of eighteen years service in this court, I shall not refrain from expressing my conviction that justice will be ill served indeed by this emasculation of legal aid.

This is even worse in criminal law and family law, in which litigants are even less knowledgeable about the law and the consequences of errors are even more serious.

Meanwhile, judges in Victoria, confronted yet again by another product of a prison system that is focused on “punishment” and pays mere lip service to rehabilitation, ask why we’re bent on making people who’ve committed crimes in the past worse:

The prison system is failing society by making young offenders more anti-social and increasingly likely to commit violent crimes after their release, the head of the Victorian Court of Appeal has warned.

Calls made four decades ago to reform the system and encourage rehabilitation had not been heeded, three judges said after hearing an appeal against the sentence of a youth with a long history of violence, who had been in and out of the juvenile justice system when he committed an unprovoked knife attack in 2011.

”The community would still ask today why the prison system has to be so antisocial in operation, why it cannot be improved so that people for whom there is a prospect of reformation are given a real opportunity for self-improvement,” said Court of Appeal president Chris Maxwell and Justices Marcia Neave and Stephen Kaye. ”Time and again courts are told that correctional authorities are simply not adequately resourced to provide the sorts of facilities which are essential if those in prison – many of whom have very serious psychological and behavioural problems – are to be meaningfully rehabilitated and assisted so that, when they are released, they will have some real prospect of reintegration into the community.”

Fortunately, the politicians know that they can completely ignore the above because the mass-market media will almost completely ignore it.

And in the meantime we all pay more to make things worse.

Destructively and pointlessly bugger up the right to silence, and further waste court time with ludicrous requirements on defence teams which will cause great expense to everyone (particularly the taxpayer).

As if the NSW system of the police not preparing witness statements (ie the actual evidence on which their charges are supposedly based) until after the accused decides to plead not guilty wasn’t stupid enough.

The most absurd thing is that there are lawyers in the Liberal Party who’ve acted in criminal matters. How did it appear to any of them that these were good ideas?

ELSEWHERE: Fellow NSW criminal lawyer Andrew Tiedt is also annoyed – particularly on learning that not even the DPP was pushing for this travesty.

It is totally not true that right after the Daily Telegraph ran a front page this morning with the CRAZY assertion that Conroy’s announcement put him up there with the worst and bloodiest tyrants in history, Christopher Dore was taken out and shot, and the paper’s political journos had their homes burned down. None of the staff at the Daily Telegraph have been disappeared or you would have read about it in one of the other newspapers, and the other newspapers are totally not cowed by Conroy’s enforcers in their smashing uniforms so they definitely would have told us about all the disappearances at News Ltd that definitely did not happen. Gemma Jones was not brutally tortured and when she appears in public today her arm will totally not be in a sling because government freedom agents kidnapped her at traffic lights and smashed her elbow with a hammer.

In short: the Daily Telegraph was wrong to point out how much like a brutal despot is Stephen Conroy, and the bloody vengeance that he has already wreaked on them totally didn’t happen and I’m sure they will be free to publish critical stories about the government tomorrow.

Also, if the leftists hadn’t foolishly guaranteed that precisely no-one in a population of several thousand people would ever commit any kind of crime, well, then we wouldn’t have to do this. Remember the last time an Australian citizen committed a crime and we were all put on watchlists? And we deserved it, too.

Well, no. No, it won’t.

Because all of those are things the Liberals – and this current mob of Liberals at that – do as well. Obviously Labor’s anti-refugee policies are nasty and they deserve censure – but the Liberals’ are even worse. The Liberals are riven by factionalism just as much as Labor, and the NSW-style corruption is a factor of the kind of unrestrained power the ALP had there – the kind of power that Campbell Newman is now abusing in Queensland, and – if the polling is right – Abbott would be free to enjoy federally. The best way to minimise big party corruption is with minority government so the government has to negotiate in parliament, rather than behind closed doors. And if anyone thinks the Liberals in power don’t hand out favours to mates and punish anyone who dared stand up to them – again have a good look at Newman and O’Farrell in particular.

(All recent efforts to punish dodgy state Labor governments – NSW, Victoria, Queensland – have led to even dodgier state Liberal governments.)

Gillard’s promise thing is no better or worse than Howard’s “non-core” promises or Abbott’s admission that if it’s not written down, you shouldn’t believe what he says. I think it’s a pretty poor way to campaign, and I don’t vote for parties that do it – but it’s hardly a reason to vote for the Coalition.

So what does happen if you vote LNP to teach ALP a lesson and hopefully get it to reform?

Well, the ALP and the media immediately conclude it didn’t go far-right enough. The dodgiest candidates tend to be in the safest seats, so the party loses such progressive talent that it had and becomes even more of a rabble. They learn that vacuous populism such Abbott’s is the only way to win in Australia and so they start aping it even more (for an example, see Victorian Labor leader Daniel Andrews’ recent idiotic and costly promise to let juries start making pronouncements on appropriate sentences).

Worse, they learn that they must never ever stand up to News Ltd. Whatever Rupert wants from now on, he gets. (As opposed to if the Liberals lose despite the most partisan media campaign the country’s ever seen – that would be a fantatsic slap in the face for “the king maker” and a massive boon for our democracy.)

Meanwhile, if the Liberals get in, that will be considered confirmation that Australians don’t care about refugees, are happy to let people starve on NewStart, oppose marriage equality, want tax cuts for the rich at the expense of public services. It’ll be carte blanche to get on with further castrating the ABC. They’ll flog off to their mates the NBN we’ve paid for, and when the recent mining investment pays off for the miners, the rest of the country will see little of it because they’ll have repealed the MRRT. Australia will abandon action on climate change and give up on trying to persuade other countries to act (at which point we’ll be in the terrifying position of having to hope that cranks like Monckton and Bolt actually were, against all the odds, right and we can throw whatever we like at the atmosphere with no consequence).

If you want to send the message that you do not care about the poor or refugees, that you want Australia run by News Ltd and all future governments to give it whatever it wants to keep it on-side, that you want us to roll the dice on climate change and you don’t care about equality before the law – then by all means, vote LNP. That’s what your vote will say.

If you want to send the message that Labor’s behaviour has been dodgy and you’re disgusted with it and you want them to actually be a progressive party – then the choice is obvious. Vote for the Greens and preference Labor above the Liberals.

That’s what your vote does. It tells the decision makers which way the electorate wants policy to go. In broad terms – further to the right, to inadequate services for the poor, to cruelty to refugees, to whatever Rupert Murdoch wants; or to the left, towards adequate welfare that doesn’t lock people out of employment, to humane treatment of refugees, to civil liberties.

Please be careful with it.

That leaf is cunningly shifting concerns about your honesty into concerns about what the hell this crazy opposition leader might do. The trick Howard pulled before the 2004 election, when even his own party was calling him a “lying rodent”, was to audaciously turn that around by making the word “trust” not about his general dishonesty and “non-core promises” and shiftiness, but about the fear people had that Latham might be a bit of a loose cannon as PM.

Same thing applies to Abbott. It’s clear from polling that even those voters who don’t like Gillard don’t like Abbott much either – and the reason for that is that their gut tells them not to trust him.

Which is why hammering the “fast one” he’s trying to pull will resonate. Tony Abbott is trying to pull a fast one.

What is this “fast one”? You know already. It’s that he’s trying to trick voters into thinking he can cut taxes, reduce revenue, whilst not creating a huge deficit, and not cutting any services voters care about either. Which, when you stop to think about it, is not just too good to be true, but absurdly so. And isn’t the thought that he thinks you’ll buy it more than a little insulting? He thinks you’re an idiot!

And you can’t console yourself that maybe it doesn’t matter, maybe he’ll just cut stuff you don’t care about – because if that were the case, he’d come out and say it! If he’s trying to keep it quiet, it’s pretty obvious why. Because it IS the stuff you care about.

Once you’ve thought about it, it’s impossible to miss. You can’t help but notice every time you see him. Every interview Tony does, every speech he gives, he dodges the critical question about what he’ll slash to pay for his promises. Every TV appearance he refuses to specify the slashes to public services that he must be planning to engage in to balance the budget.

And every press conference he physically flees to avoid the questions gives the ALP fresh material for a devastating montage of Tony Abbott running away from scrutiny like a gutless wuss (particularly combined with that footage of Abbott scrambling to the House of Representatives exit with the “gazelle-like” Pyne), which also conveniently neutralises the “strong bloke” image he’s been attempting to cultivate.

Make him confront the same problem that confronted Gillard in 2010 – that everybody strongly suspects he’d do what he’s trying to avoid admitting he’d do. Make it impossible for him to get over the line without nailing his colours to the mast and making some promises that would haunt him in government.

“Tony Abbott is trying to pull a fast one.” It will resonate because it’s true, and because it’s what people actually fear about him anyway. Give a name to their fears, and make it not matter that the media cover up for him – because every evasion reinforces that he is, indeed, trying to pull a fast one.

ALP MPs need to dismiss the crap about Craig Thomson (the response is: Thomson is not an ALP candidate, and he’ll be out at the next election – what will actually affect voters is whether Tony Abbott gets to pull a fast one or not) and ALP MPs resigning (when should they retire? After they’ve committed to another term?). Point out that these are questions about the past, and the big question is what could follow the 2013 election if Tony’s shifty gang slips over the line into government. How confident can you be that you won’t be the victim of his cuts when he doesn’t want you to know what they are?

Tony Abbott is trying to pull a fast one. Remind everyone you know.

PS Another phrase we should hear a lot of: “just like Campbell Newman has done in Queensland”.

And if he runs off from press conferences refusing to answer questions on his “Plan”, then that is ALSO the story.

Cheer up, guys, you might just get away with it.

Because voters need to know precisely what this candidate for high office actually will do. Or at least what he says he’ll do, so that they can hold him accountable if he does something else. But you’re just letting him get away with vague, impossible claims, claims that he can magically increase revenue whilst cutting taxes and decrease debt whilst only specifying revenue decreases and not slashing services. He can’t do all these things at once! He has to make a choice! Make him make a bloody choice!

He’s going to have to make these choices eventually, if he manages to slither across the line to being PM. Voters kind of deserve to know which choices he’s going to make before that happens.

Oh, and there’s another one now – he reckons government should be able to pay for disasters like the floods out of general revenue without increasing taxes, slashing services or blowing out the budget. HOW? How would he achieve this miraculous feat? Has he discovered an impossible, elusive type of economic magic, or is he just an ordinary politician telling everyone what they want to hear and not caring that he won’t be able to deliver?

That’s what you’re there to test! For god sake, please do your jobs!