Back in 1988, American commentator Michael Kinsley helpfully defined the difference between a politician saying something stupid and a politician making a gaffe: “A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”

The most damaging type of gaffe occurs when a politician inadvertently reveals what they actually think about something – in other words, a truth not about the world itself, but about the weird way they see the world.

And that’s the real problem for Joe Hockey today. Not just that he said something dumb (he did), or that it was the latest in a long line of idiocies (it was), but that it reflected the way he actually sees the world. And the way he sees the world, it turns out, is a problem. Because it’s entitled, and cloistered, and narrow.

Hockey said two notable things today, but let’s start with the worst: “The starting point for first home buyers is to get a good job that pays good money.” There are several problems here, so let’s unpack them.

To begin with there’s Joe’s assumption that “getting a job” is easy for everyone. With unemployment as high as it is, that’s just not true. This would perhaps be less of a problem if Joe weren’t the treasurer, who nominally has some responsibility for unemployment.

And remember, we’re not just talking about getting any old job. We’re talking about getting “a good job that pays good money”. (Forgetting Scott Morrison’s dictum a few weeks ago that people should stop holding out for their dream job and just do some work, any work.) Apparently that’s easy, too. Sick of working in a crap, low-paying job? Go out and get a new one.

Then we get to the question of what “good money” is. In Sydney, which is what Joe was talking about, it’s quite a lot. More that 200 Sydney suburbs have a median house price of $1 million or more. The median house price for the whole of Sydney is more than $900,000.

To give you a bit of perspective, a house price of $1 million might be affordable on a household income of $150,000 a year. But while that price is the norm in a lot of suburbs, that income is not. In fact, only 1 in 6 households actually earns that much money. (I’m comparing the whole of Australia with Sydney here, but it gives at least some sense of just how high house prices are.)

Finally, there’s Joe’s assumption that “good jobs” pay “good money”. But there are lots of great jobs – jobs that do real good for the community – jobs that require serious skills – that don’t pay quite enough to let you buy a house. Counsellors, charity workers, nurses – in other words many of those who work with society’s most vulnerable – many teachers, artists (Richard Flanagan, Booker Prize winner, once contemplated giving up writing to go work as a miner) … The list is long.

So what does this tell us about Hockey’s view of the world? First, that he thinks people earn more money than they actually do. Second, that he thinks it’s simple to get a job that pays well. Third, that he thinks the only “good jobs” are ones that pay you reams of cash. Fourth, that if you aren’t living your dream life you have only yourself to blame. Want to buy a house? Can’t? Mate, that’s on you.

In short, it tells you Hockey has no idea of the lives that ordinary people live. When he thinks about whether or not people can still buy houses, he simply asks himself “Could I buy a house?” And because the answer is “Yes”, he assumes it’s “Yes” for everybody else as well.

The other thing Hockey said today was this: “If housing were unaffordable in Sydney, no one would be buying it.”

If it’s not immediately apparent how moronic this is, consider this sentence: “If gold, sapphire and diamond iPhones costing $15 million were unaffordable, no one would be buying them.” See? The sentence works with any noun. (For the record, someone did buy that iPhone, and, mysteriously, his name was “Joe”. Really.)

Of course “unaffordable” in the context of housing policy shouldn’t mean “unaffordable for every single person in the world”, it should mean “unaffordable for most ordinary people”. And so, again, we come up against the crux of Joe’s problem: he thinks that Sydney houses are affordable because he thinks “affordable” means “affordable for people like me”. Which they are.

(All this, by the way, ignores the underlying assumption, which is that people owning houses is a legitimate policy goal. It’s probably not, but that’s a discussion for another time.)

Now here’s the thing about mistakes in politics. They don’t have to matter that much – unless they reveal an underlying truth, which people also believe to be true. In other words, unless they are an actual gaffe.

And the problem for Hockey is that today’s gaffe echoes almost precisely in tone his gaffe last year about petrol prices not affecting poor people because they “don’t have cars or actually drive very far”. That, too, showed he had no idea how people live.

So yes, Hockey said some stupid things today. He ignored logic, grammar, and economics. But the worst thing he did was to inadvertently reveal, again, the distorted way in which he views the world.

For a long time now, Joe Hockey has had a “good job that pays good money”. It might be time for the prime minister to change that.

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