Can I be a wee bit blunt and pose the following question: what is the value-add these days of Richo as a political commentator? Let’s face it, he’s been out of the Labor scene for a very long time. It’s hard – OK impossible – to assume that he has his finger on the pulse of Labor’s internal workings. But on one topic, Richo has recently been on the money: lying is a perfectly acceptable Labor tactic to win elections, according to the Richo playbook. He even wrote a book with the title Whatever It Takes based on this theme. He’s not simply talking about putting a particular spin on an issue. According to Richo, outright porkies are OK if they advance the cause of Labor winning seats at an election.

I was discussing this issue with one of my buddies, a senior minister in the Howard government, the other day. I asked him, although I knew the answer, whether he would have been prepared to tell out-and-out lies in an election campaign. Apart from the inherent dishonesty of telling fibs, his view was that deliberate untruths would be exposed by political opponents and the press, although not always immediately.

These days, the world is very different.  The impact of the legacy media is rapidly falling. And in any case, many members of the Canberra press gallery happily go along with tall tales as long as they are told bythe left. Gone are the days when the press constrained politicians to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.

The biggest whopper repeated ad nauseam during the recent election campaign was the $600 billion figure attached to the Coalition’s nuclear policy. (Pronounced ‘newkiller’ if you are Albo or B1.)

This figure had been concocted by the Smart Energy Council, a registered charity pushing renewable energy. It was always a complete crock based on the worst of the worst-case scenarios, although even that is being charitable (geddit?) to the persons working on the imaginary spreadsheets.

The fact that the lower bound was $116 billion immediately told us that these cost estimates were completely unreliable. But the press gallery hacks simply took the $600 billion figure and rehashed it whenever it suited Labor’s electoral needs.

Apart from $600 billion being an enormous, scary figure per se, Labor was able to use it to forewarn voters of future Coalition spending cuts in other areas to allow for the funding of nuclear power plants. You have to say, it worked a treat, with Albo trotting out the figure even after he had won.

(My view is that the Coalition made a massive mistake opting for full government funding of six nuclear power stations as its only proposal. The alternative would have been to argue the case for a lifting of the ban on nuclear power, followed by invitations for private sector participation with government subsidies equivalent to those available to renewable energy. In this way, the Coalition might have been able to smoke out the size of renewable energy handouts as well as avoid the $600 billion trap.)

The $600 billion was not Labor’s only fib. Another whopper was about the supposed cuts to health and education made by the Coalition government in the early part of their term in office between 2013 and 2022.

This is how this puerile tactic works.  Labor says it will increase spending by 100. The Coalition in government spends an extra 60. According to the electoral tacticians down at Labor headquarters, this is a cut in spending of 40. The fact that the figure of 100 was just made up doesn’t bother these prodigies. If you say something is a cut enough times, it becomes a cut in the minds of some voters at least.

The fact the Peter Dutton was the health minister at certain times when these ‘cuts’ were made added to the story. The reality is that Commonwealth outlays on health (and education) went up every year in real terms when the Coalition was last in power. There were never any cuts, but what the heck. If the falsehood has a political upside, then go for it, seems to be Labor’s view on the matter.

A similar tactic – referred to as ‘choose your counterfactual’ by Professor Richard Holden – was employed by Labor in talking about recent budget outcomes. The preferred base case for Albo and Jimbo was the 2022 Pre-election Economic and Fiscal Outlook statement released by Treasury during the 2022 election campaign.

Recall that time. Australia and the rest of the world were just emerging from the government-imposed pandemic restrictions.  It was extremely uncertain, with economic recovery not guaranteed.

In the 2022 PEFO, Treasury completely missed the two budget surpluses that were coming down the pike, in part because the prices of our main commodity exports were significantly underestimated. But the figures that Albo and Jimbo particularly focused on during the election campaign were the forecast budget outcomes for 2024-25. There was to be a budget deficit of $47 billion on this reckoning for this year.

But if you turn to the March 2025 budget handed down by Jimbo, the budget deficit for 2024-25 is forecast to be $28 billion. In other words, Labor had ‘saved’ over $19 billion, thus demonstrating its superior fiscal management skills.

The audacity of this statement is breathtaking, of course. Labor hadn’t saved anything at all. The budget is expected to be deeply in the red next financial year (and for the following nine financial years). The faux comparison with a quite arbitrary forecast made in 2022 was simply a whopper, but telling the truth and acting ethically are seemingly no longer regarded as necessary virtues by Labor politicians and the sub-industry that hangs off them.

The truly depressing thing is that telling lies was very successful for Labor. The opposition was simply caught flat-footed dealing with the tactic; Peter Dutton and his lieutenants should have been better prepared.  After all, the highly unprincipled Mediscare campaign in 2016 election campaign under Bill Shorten as opposition leader was a taste of things to come. The very idea that Medicare could be privatised was completely fanciful, but again what the heck.

Instead of just allowing the lies to go through to the keeper, Dutton should have had a plan to deal with the untruths, including immediate responses as well as some white lies of his own. Of course, voters don’t want to hear details of how one set of figures compares with another, but it was important to call out the massive falsehoods that Labor was peddling during the campaign.

Another Richo dictum is that the mob eventually works governments out. I’m not so sure he is right any longer with the fragmentation of political messaging and the decline in the importance and quality of the mainstream media. The mob won’t be figuring much out at all because they won’t have the facts to make that judgement.

Where once upon a time there was some collective absorption of political and electoral news, nowadays it’s quite likely that some badly educated, jumped-up influencer peddling various products will be conveying the political news of the day. Forget the ABC 7 o’clock news or the quality broadsheets; their days are numbered.