Anthony Albanese has become the George Costanza of Australian politics. Every explanation requires another explanation, and somehow the truth keeps getting further and further away.
In the hit 1990s comedy series Seinfeld, George offers Jerry advice on how to beat a lie detector test: ‘It’s not a lie if you believe it.’
Our PM should be grateful he doesn’t have a lie detector permanently strapped to him. On recent form, the beeping would drown out Question Time.
Albo’s latest example of his challenged relationship with the truth involves the $6million promised to the Marrickville Golf Club in his electorate, where he regularly attended birthday parties for a local dog and holds an honorary membership he claims he knew nothing about.
Defending the funding in parliament last month, Albo reached for an explanation calculated to make his critics look ridiculous.
‘When it floods in Marrickville, raw sewage flows into the Cooks River. That is what the funding is for,' the PM claimed.
Except it isn’t.
Infrastructure officials confirmed in Senate Estimates that the federal project excludes sewerage works. Yesterday, Albo finally conceded his parliamentary explanation was ‘not correct’.
Anthony Albanese has become the George Costanza of Australian politics, says Peter van Onselen
In hit 1990s comedy series Seinfeld, George offers Jerry advice on how to beat a lie detector test: ‘It’s not a lie if you believe it.’ Our PM should be grateful he doesn’t have a lie detector permanently strapped to him
His defence? The NSW government had stepped in to fund the sewerage work, which he didn’t realise.
Let’s start with the most charitable interpretation of the PM’s blind ignorance. He told parliament something he sincerely believed, having failed to establish whether it was true.
How reassuring.
This wasn’t an obscure project buried in another minister’s portfolio. It was a multimillion-dollar election commitment in his own electorate, to a club with which he has a longstanding association, already attracting scrutiny.
Surely someone amongst his 50-plus taxpayer funded political advisers thought to check what the money would actually buy before the PM stood up in parliament and lectured everyone else?
That’s what briefings are for. Instead, Australians received a confident parliamentary defence that collapsed on contact with the facts.
Perhaps if his office devoted more energy to checking his answers and less, for example, circulating dirt sheets questioning Helen Haines’s integrity after she criticised the lack of process behind the grant, this embarrassment might have been avoided.
Besides, a repair worth roughly $270,000 (the amount being paid by the NSW government) can’t credibly explain away a federal commitment exceeding $6 million.
The Federal government spent up so the Marrickville Golf Club could get a new bar and outdoor dining set up. Rather less urgent a priority than a sewage crisis
Most of the Commonwealth money is intended for a clubhouse redevelopment and other precinct improvements. Invoking raw sewage gave the spending a rather more urgent flavour than a new bar and outdoor dining set up would have.
It was a politically convenient answer that was deeply misleading even if a small fraction of the grant was spent on fixing the sewage problem, which in the end it wasn’t.
Parliament is entitled to accurate information. An honest mistake requires correction, but self-professed ignorance doesn’t settle the question of why the mistake happened in the first place.
Keep in mind, misleading the Parliament is a serious offence. Doing so wilfully is extremely serious. You be the judge of how intentional Albo’s misleadingness was.
At best it was incompetent, even if it wasn’t deliberate.
If this is how little checking accompanies his defence of a controversial grant in his own backyard, how much confidence should Australians place in his answers about everything else? Not much, it would seem.
And that’s the charitable version.
The less charitable possibility is that the sewage explanation was too useful to surrender until officials made it impossible to maintain.
Voters assessing the PM’s credibility on this matter have a substantial back catalogue to consider.
His promised $275 reduction in electricity bills was a furphy. His pre-2022 assurance that he had no intention of changing superannuation rules, turned out to be false. The promises before the last election to leave negative gearing and capital gains tax alone were subsequently abandoned.
It was our lying eyes that were wrong, apparently.
Australians keep being asked to disbelieve the obvious and embrace the explanation most convenient to a PM who appears to have a very poor relationship with the truth.
But as George Costanza reminds us, it’s not a lie if you believe it, Albo…
