One of the things you hear often in political circles is a proposal being acknowledged as a good policy, followed immediately by an assertion that it couldn’t be done because the public wouldn’t wear it.
Broken election commitments are a variation on this, where governments rule out any intention to do something unpopular or controversial, but change their position after the election when they are less vulnerable to electoral damage.
The federal government’s decision to start means testing the private health insurance rebate is long overdue, but it is clearly a broken election promise. The private health insurance rebate is bad public policy, but it is popular.
In the lead up to its own Budget, the Queensland government is floating the idea of scrapping the eight cents a litre subsidy on fuel. This is an extraordinarily bad policy which now costs $600 million a year, but it is also very popular with the public – who wouldn’t like the idea of a widely used commodity being cheaper? – and a gift to any Opposition looking for ways to lay hits on the government.
I detest broken election promises – particularly ones that were explicitly unequivocal, such as these two examples. But these are still good policies in this instance. It’s like a reverse example of the old cliché to ‘love the sinner, but hate the sin’ - I strongly support the actions, but dislike governments deceiving voters.
Governments are often pilloried as lacking in courage or conviction when they rule out making changes that are believed to be good policy, but wildly unpopular. But it is obvious why governments try to minimise the number of unpopular things they do – you could hardly expect otherwise in a democracy.
In one sense, we have ourselves to blame – often calling for strong action while opposing anything that we feel will make us personally worse off. You can never fully remove the practice of broken political promises, but if more people were prepared to speak out in support of good policies that we know are unpopular, it might slightly reduce the need for governments to make quite so many of those promises in the first place.
6 Comments
I agree Andrew.
One of the big problems with any sort of populist legislation is that it is very hard to undo later. Lots of the Howard government hand-outs to specific groups were questionable policy that was acceptable during a boom. But now its very difficult to remove them because people have assumed that they will continue and decisions and commitments have been made on that basis.
Andrew
I would be interested in knowing how governments can avoid ‘deceiving’ voters, given that they don’t have crystal balls and can’t foresee future events.
Should they preface each commitment they make with a disclaimer along the lines of: “Of course, if World War Three comes along, or something else similar in impact but presently unforeseeable, this policy may have to change to take into account the change in circumstances…” – which I think would get them into as much trouble as just breaking the promise?
As a sometime election candidate myself, and someone who tries to tell the truth at all times, I always found this to be a real dilemna. If you qualify a statement, voters are really quick to pounce on “So you might not do this in government after all?” – they seem to want an absolute commitment, regardless of how unreasonable this is.
I’ve often compared it to the promises you make in real life. If I arranged with a friend to dine with them tomorrow night, promising faithfully to be there on the spot of 7, and on the way to their place had a car accident and ended up in hospital, I would be shocked (to say the least) if the friend’s reaction was to accuse me of breaking a promise and say that in future, he wouldn’t trust me.
Yet that’s exactly how we treat – and you appear to be treating – the promises made during an election. When they’re broken, we should listen to the explanation of why it was necessary to break them. If its a reasonable explanation, and one that possibly coudn’t have been foreseen when the promise was made, then I don’t think we should have a problem with that.
In a realistic world, we would regard politicians’ commitments as statements of intent – what they plan to do, should the status quo remain the same. It is the voters’ demand for absolute certainty in an unpredictable world which creates the lying politician.
Zoomster
Of course if there is an unpredicted and significant change which is out of the government’s control, there is good reason to re-examine whether some pre-election commitments & promises might need to change.
I don’t see how this could apply were the Qld government to break its promise to retain the 8 cents a litre fuel subsidy. Much as I hate the policy and hope it is scrapped, it is highly dubious to suggest that the Qld government didn’t know about the difficult economic and budgetry situation before the election.
OK, Andrew, but by putting the private health insurance rebate and the QLD petrol tax in the same basket the impression you give is that they’re the same thing.
One breaks a promise made well over a year ago, when things were dramatically different and the other breaks one only a few weeks ago with little change of circumstance in the meantime.
You don’t make that distinction, and the implication therefore is that both promises have much the same status.
Well I think there is a very clear link Zoomster – they are both categorical promises which were both clearly broken (assuming the petrol subsidy promise is broken). And (in my view) the broken promises would lead to a better policy outcome.
One may have a better excuse for being broken than the other – although I find it hard not to feel that Labor was looking for an excuse to break the promise on the health insurance rebate, because many of them clearly felt previously it was bad policy – but they are both still broken promises.
I agree it would be better if there was a more realistic approach to the reality of government and changing circumstances.
And I do think that most of the electorate is fairly understanding if changes in circumstances require a promise to be broken, as long as politicians are up front about it. In my view, it is one of the main reasons the GST decision hurt the Democrat vote so much – not that key election (and post-election) promises were broken, but that there was a refusal to acknowledge this.
I would say that that’s because of the different nature of the Democrats to other parties.
I knew a lot of people (I know it’s anecdotal, but after all, most politics consists of listening to rustlings in the undergrowth) who told me they were voting for the Dems in the Senate purely so that they could make sure the GST wasn’t too extreme.
Given that was their sole reason for voting Dem, it served as a major destruction of trust.
The different nature of the Dems – which relied almost entirely on the voters trusting them to ‘do the right thing’ – meant that this destruction was far more catastrophic for them than it would be for other parties.
Otherwise I agree with you, which is always a jolly thing to do in political discourse.
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