Political debate is cheapened when politicians' idea of truth is whatever the public can be convinced to believe

Political debate seems increasingly unhitched from a normal, factual understanding of the concept of truth, and it’s a much more complicated problem than whether the Coalition’s pre-election whopper about maintaining four years of Gonski funding is comparable with Julia Gillard’s lie about not leading a government that introduced a carbon tax.

“Truths” now seem to be things most people can be convinced to believe rather than arguments or assertions that can be factually proven.

And a fast, shallow news cycle, with ever-more splintered sources of information, favours simple claims over complex arguments and rewards endless repetition.

Julia Gillard, for example, clearly broke her no carbon tax promise. But her bald statement – so neatly adaptable to a meme or a ringtone – amplified the factual breach (she began the promised emissions trading scheme with a three-year fixed price, or tax) into the widely held, but false, belief that she’d gone back on a pledge not to have any carbon price at all.

Since 2009, Tony Abbott has promised to increase Australia’s 2020 greenhouse gas reduction pledge above 5% under a specific set of conditions. After the election he insisted 5% was the outer limit, and claimed, despite ample contrary evidence, that this had always been his stance. Reneging on a promise about the end target of the country’s entire greenhouse gas reduction effort – the point of the whole exercise – would seem like a bigger deal than reneging on a promise about the first three years of your chosen mechanism to get there, but apparently this was too complicated an argument to cause much of a ripple.

And as he cranks up the argument over the next few weeks that parliament should pass his carbon tax repeal, Abbott will undoubtedly repeat his line that it “doesn’t even work anyway” because under the carbon tax Australia’s emissions will go up in 2020, not down.

The fact is that unlike, say, direct action, an emissions trading scheme is guaranteed to meet its target by its very design, because the whole point is for the price to vary to make sure it does so. The modelling, now outdated anyway, which showed domestic emissions would be higher, was based on the forecast that to achieve the 5% reduction, 58m tonnes of emission reductions would occur domestically and 94m tonnes of cheaper emission reductions would be bought offshore, which is something the business community is desperately pleading for the Coalition to also do, in order to try to salvage something affordable and workable from direct action. But see how long it took to explain all of that? That’s why it’s so hard to contradict the misleading “doesn’t work anyway” claim.

Similarly, education minister Christopher Pyne is trying to use the complexity of education funding arrangements to get around the clear fact he has broken a promise to keep at least four years of Gonski-level education spending.

Yep, Labor shovelled $1.2bn back into general revenue when a bunch of states didn’t sign up to its deal, but we already knew that.

Pyne is resolutely pointing to this old news and insisting we all “look over there”, but the Gonski signatory states are refusing to budge from the main point – that they’ve been dudded.

That’s making it harder for Pyne to divert attention from the fact that he promised parents before the election there would be no difference in funding levels for four years, and now he isn’t.

Making the whole pinning down the truth thing even more difficult, since policy and promises no longer seem to have to match a clear set of ideological dispositions.

Kevin Rudd was happy to ditch the entire free market legacy of the Hawke and Keating years with a late-election campaign foray into “economic nationalism” and professed “discomfort” with the whole idea of too much foreign investment.

Tony Abbott had had some years to practise his own obfuscatory tactics in the same policy area, using discussion papers and appeasing words to simultaneously satisfy the free marketeer Liberals and protectionist Nationals.

But in government the contradictions are harder to paper over. The Business Council and the Australian Industry Group were straight on to the inconsistency between declaring the country “open for business” and refusing a foreign takeover bid that the competition watchdog said was fine, but which the National party really didn’t like.

Abbott claimed on Friday that Labor had no right to make accusations about truthfulness unless it voted for the repeal of the carbon tax, which he labelled “the most fundamental commitment of all”; presumably on the basis that he says it is.

“How can Labor accuse the government of breaking a commitment if it tries to stop us from keeping the most fundamental commitment of all: the commitment to repeal the carbon tax?” he asked, rhetorically.

Well, prime minister, because one broken promise does not cancel out another, and both sides of politics keep bending the truth. And that’s a fact.