Share Canberra's trusted news:

BORDER protection, health or the economy? The Liberals want border protection or the economy as the prime debate in the election. Labor wants it to be health.

Both major parties are trying to scare us into their way of thinking. In the meantime, continuing to run a broad set of policies or “principles” are the Greens, the Nick Xenophon Team and other cross-bench candidates. Ordinary voters want to vote for someone they can trust.

Scare campaigns do work. Negative, accusatory politics have become the staple of elections. The extent of divisiveness in elections raises more barriers, moves further from evidence and creates further rifts in opinion and people. Both major parties deny the other’s accusations as they seek to fight an election on their own terms. These tactics work – but they undermine trust.

Both parties want us to trust them with a three-year dictatorship. They want a government that cannot be held accountable by the crossbench. PM Malcolm Turnbull recently used the ABC’s “Q&A” to advocate for the totally discredited “trickle-down” economic policies of his conservative colleagues. However, he reframed it arguing “Treasury found last year that for every dollar cut in company tax you got $4 of benefit of growth into the economy, into GDP.”

A question of trust. Poppycock! Andrew Wigley, a fourth-year economics student at Canberra University, points out that what Treasury actually presented in their paper “Understanding the economy wide efficiency and incidence of major Australian taxes” is quite different. The Treasury paper identifies a fourfold factor concerning a hypothetical tax increase not a cut (with all other taxes and expenditure remaining unchanged). Rather than multiplying by four the factor divides by four. (Google: “Turnbull Multiplier Lies”).

The big issue is trust. No matter how it is framed by Turnbull, or anyone else, trickle-down economics simply favours big business. The rich get richer. The poor get poorer. Societies become more divided. In President Obama’s words: “Reality has rendered its judgement: trickle-down economics does not work and middle-class economics does.”

The Prime Minister constantly reiterates Labor’s past failures to “stop the boats”. The Liberals would have us believe hordes of non-Christians are plying the oceans to attack the Australian way of life, to jump queues, to steal Australian jobs and to rip off our welfare system. They would have us believe only the Liberals can save Australia. After all, they copied the US and UK to change the name from Customs and Immigration to Border Protection.

The Labor leadership might plead the same policies as the Coalition on boat people. However, the Liberals argue Labor cannot be trusted on refugees. Opposition Leader Bill Shorten might believe Labor will stand by a “stop-the-boats” policy – but can the bleeding hearts in Labor really be trusted not to overturn the policy? After all, Labor is simply attempting to neutralise the government’s favourite election platform.

Shorten has fought back accusing the Liberals of plans to cut Medicare arguing Turnbull’s denials, promises and reassurances cannot be trusted. First of all, the major cuts to hospitals and the freeze on the Medicare rebate remain in place. Thanks to the crossbench and Labor, the Coalition was unable to introduce the Medicare-destroying GP co-payment. Can the Liberals really be trusted not to deliver a death by a thousand cuts that turn our universal health system into a “haves and have-nots” system of health care?

The Liberals went into the last election with the leader promising “no cuts to education, no cuts to health, no change to pensions, no change to the GST and no cuts to the ABC or SBS”. Six months later the Budget ripped those promises asunder. Of course, that was Tony Abbott (who we could not trust) and this is Malcolm Turnbull (who is now asking to be trusted). The Prime Minister’s failure to override his ultra-conservative backbench on issues such as gay marriage and climate change raises the question more of trusting the party.

The new electoral rules in the Senate put the preferences in the hands of the voters. Whichever major party goes into power – if there is a strong crossbench in the Senate, governments can be held accountable. They certainly have not earned the trust to have a majority in the Senate. With the new rules, smaller parties such as the Greens, the Sex Party, the Secular Party and the Mature Australia Party can all be numbered before the major party of choice with no risk of the vote being lost.

Michael Moore was an independent member of the ACT Legislative Assembly (1989 to 2001) and was minister for health.