Robert Haupt, “Why no-one is nailing the Big Green Lie,”
The Sydney Morning Herald, March 17, 1990, p. 6.

There are two parties running for elections next Saturday and you’re not allowed to vote for either of them.

The first is led by Paul Keating and has the Big Five Johns — Kerin, Hewson, Howard, Button and Stone — on its front bench, along with Peter Walsh. This party I call the Hard Men. Their stance is not so much to question the idea of the free lunch as to ask whether we need a midday meal at all.

In opposition to the Hard Men is the Mellow Feeling Group, consisting of Hawke, Peacock, Richardson, Haines and Chaney. These politicians belong in a Mojo commercial, singin’ nice ‘n’ easy to a low guitar ’bout the beautiful rainforests and how we gonna improve child care and give you all a real good time.

The problem, of course, is that you don’t get to choose between these groups on Saturday. The only choice is between Labor and the Coalition, and since both these parties have elements of each group in them you may not, on Saturday, address the one question that would make sense: How Green is my Polly?

But that is not the only problem with this lack-of-choice election. There’s also the little matter of truth-telling: not the “no child will live in poverty” fibs that are being told, but the big truths that are not.

Whoa, I hear you say. This election about the Greens? Surely the economy is the issue — interest rates and (rising fast on the rails) unemployment? Yes, but the environment is an economic issue. Indeed, the veto on investment projects that the Mellow Feeling Group (through that dedicated vote-dredger Graham Richardson) has handed to the Green movement is the central economic issue of our times. For so long as the Mellow Feelers have a veto over productive activity, our economic performance must remain sub-par.

There is a fabulous irony in this. You see, the politicians who cop the blame for our economic anorexia are not the Mellow Feelers — no sir, they are too busy walking through rainforests for the television cameras. Instead, the buck stops with the graphs-and-numbers boys who are all to be found in the ranks of the Hard Men.

I can never be accused of excessive tenderness towards Paul Keating, but I do wonder why he has to shoulder all the press conferences on the trade deficit, foreign debt, interest rates and, now, unemployment. Why is not Senator Richardson there as well, to answer questions about how much of our dismal performance is due to the green veto?

The answer, of course, is that the cost of the green veto has to be concealed from voters, in exactly the same ways as the cost of tariff protection used to be concealed back in the days of the Country Party. There were those who blew the gaff on the Big Tariff Lie, and they were spurned for their truth-telling. So it is today, with the Big Green Lie.

(Incidentally, the name of Bert Kelly, the South Australian Liberal who briefly rose to the lowly rank of Navy Minister, is remembered today because he challenged the Big Tariff Lie; more senior ministers who defended it are forgotten. Furthermore, while Bob Hawke fulminates against the Coalition’s 30 years of inaction on microeconomic reform, one of the chief obstacles to tariff reform in those years was the ACTU, led by, ahem, Bob Hawke.)

No doubt some will object to my lumping Peacock and Chaney in with the Mellow Feelers. After all, the unelected politicians of the green movement don’t endorse them. But why would they? If Senator Richardson is offering vetoes — a carte verte if you like — it would be crazy for the green politicians to prefer a party that didn’t.

But my view of Peacock and Chaney is that, at the end of the day, they would in Government be trimmers, every bit as much as Hawke himself. They would, in other words, go along with the Big Green Lie. On my marshmallow index of politicians, where the Australian Democrats rate 10, I give these two at least 7.5.

So, who would be ahead, were next Saturday’s choice between the Keating-Hewson-Walsh team and Hawke-Peacock-Richardson? I have no doubt that it would be the Mellow Feelers by a mile. Big Lies are like that: it took 20 years to nail the Big Tariff Lie, and nailing the Big Green Lie will be much harder because of television. So long as the battle between enterprise and Arcadia is fought in pictures (and commercial television cannot convey it in any other way), enterprise will lose every time. On the tube, chain saws never beat trees.

So is all hope of rational debate lost? Not necessarily. As a veteran of the tariff war, I believe in long views. We made progress against the Big Tariff Lie when our economic outlook was so diabolically grim that it had to be addressed. When unemployment re-emerges as our central economic concern (yes, you guessed it: after the election), our appetite for the truth may be sharper. Who knows? Maybe Senator Richardson won’t have to do so much bushwalking.

Hard times demand hard truths. Neither party is telling them, true, but at least the electors — with that kind of collective wisdom an electorate can possess — know it. Sure, the Hard Men have had to go quiet for this campaign. But their day will come.