Dog-whistle politics and déjà vu

According to opponents, supporters of an Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS) are engaged in “fear tactics”, painting a “doomsday scenario” which will “bleed the taxpayers dry”; the response is that the “tentacles of the climate change sceptics” and “deniers” have strangled “sensible” debate, because, as Rudd put it, “They are a minority. They are powerful. And invariably they are driven by vested interests.”

The rhetoric is revealing.

The ETS is really little more than a “moralising new tax” (Senator Barnaby Joyce), or a vast conspiracy by “the extreme left” (who, since “the collapse of communism” had “embraced environmentalism as their new religion”) grabbing “the opportunity to do what they’ve always wanted to do, to sort of de-industrialise the western world” (Senator Nick Minchin). According to Abbott, the ETS is “a great big tax to produce a massive political slush fund to provide enormous handouts to favoured groups that will be administered by a vast bureaucracy.”

Rudd’s response is to attack vague Coalition alternatives for “direct action” as “a magic pudding and bucket of red tape”, with “bureaucratic red tape strangling the entire economy through the least-effective, most-expensive system which doesn't compensate families, all funded by a magic pudding, …”

Invocation of Norman Lindsay’s famous illustrated children’s book (1918) to deride some cost-free, never-failing magic solution to our problems has a history in Australian politics (look up Paul Keating), and denigration of bureaucrats and red tape is quite fair. But dog-whistling mainly works “the dark side”, to quote Dick Cheney. A classic piece of recent dog-whistling was Tony Abbott’s description of the global climate change talks in Copenhagen as “some latter-day environmental Munich agreement kind of thing”. “Munich” is code for “appeasement”, craven cowardice, failure to stand up to “dictators” like Hitler, an analogy much abused in the lead-up to the attack on Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi regime.

When pressed on ABC TV's Lateline about the comparison, Abbott employed the standard evasion: “It was a throwaway line in which you would be wrong to invest too much significance.” Abbott’s technique is consistent. As new Coalition leader, he excused his previous description of climate change as “absolute crap” as “a bit of hyperbole” rather than his “considered position”. Given that Abbott’s new Coalition front bench holds a renowned collection of dog-whistlers old and new, the quality of political debate in Australia will inevitably go even further down, taking concern for human rights and peace with justice down with it.