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AUSTRALIA

Politicians' cognitive dissonance over blaming the system

  • 11 August 2015

When Prime Minister Tony Abbott announced Bronwyn Bishop's resignation as Speaker, he said, 'what has become apparent ... is that the problem is not any particular individual; the problem is the entitlement system more generally'.

This remark was met with some degree of astonishment, coming from the leader of a political party with an ideological fixation on individual responsibility.

Over the three weeks that Bishop faced criticism over her $5000 helicopter flight from Melbourne to Geelong to attend a Liberal Party fundraiser, the running defence was that it was within the rules. It seems that her sense of the controversy was not that she had done anything wrong but that the large amounts of money involved simply 'looked wrong'. She apologised for the perceptions she engendered.

Her comments capture the sense we often have that technicalities are the first and last resort for defending the unethical. It is the acute logic of children caught red-handed: 'You only said that I could have a snack. You didn't tell me not to eat the whole cake.' Since Bishop's resignation, Treasurer Joe Hockey and Labor frontbencher Tony Burke have also faced questions about their own expense claims.

The political context bears mentioning. These are the same parliamentarians who wish to introduce a four-week waiting period for 75,000 young people eligible for the dole (though there is no direct evidence that it helps under-25s to find work); whose response to housing unaffordability is to tell first-home buyers to 'get a good job that pays good money'; who accused mothers of 'double-dipping' paid parental leave though the Labor-instituted scheme was designed to maximise benefit for newborns; who said that an increase in fuel excise would not adversely affect poor Australians because they 'either don't have cars or actually don't drive very far in many cases'.

The entitlements issue may only be about optics, but given that it continues to fester despite Bishop's resignation, other solutions seem required. It is not easy to frame what those solutions might be; this episode has not been so much a surprise as a resounding validation of hardened hostility toward the major parties. The evocation of entitlement rules, in particular, confirms what ordinary Australians often sense: that rules are for exonerating the powerful.

It is the fault of 'the system' when privileged people are able to exploit its defects, but those with lesser means are held in contempt just for
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