The truth? Lies work a treat, as history shows

LIES pay. And big lies pay best. That’s the lesson the National Party rubbed in the faces of New Zealanders by winning the most seats in the House of Representatives in the 2017 election.

It’s not really news, of course. Hitler coined the term ‘ ‘‘Große luge’’ (big lie) in Mein Kampf and he and Goebbels practised it. Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and other ‘‘Leavers’’ used the big lie unapologetically during their ‘‘Brexit’’ campaign, as did Donald Trump during the unreality show of his successful presidential campaign.

Many politicians tell lies at times. Often it takes history, or determined use of the Official Information Act, to show them up, as with then Foreign Minister Murray McCully’s claim, in 2015, during the furore over payments to a Saudi businessman, that the Government had received advice from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade regarding the risk of being sued over the banning of live sheep for slaughter exports. A recent response to an OIA request by RadioNZ shows that Mfat ‘‘did not seek or provide advice on the extent of the risk of a claim . . . for compensation . . . against the Government’’.

As Labour’s David Parker has pointed out, as well as McCully, who told the lie, then Prime Minister

John Key and Finance Minister Bill English must have known the truth. They not only covered it up, but forced the allegedly nonpolitical Mfat to do the same. No wonder trust in our public servants is diminishing. But with the passage of time, McCully and Key both retired, and a dramatic election campaign in progress, electors showed little interest in the lie, or in its implications for the public service.

The big lie of the 2017 election was Finance Minister Stephen Joyce’s mistaken claim that there was an $11.7 billion hole in Labour’s budgeting: a hole that no reputable economist could find. That could have been an honest mistake — goodness knows Civis often finds balance sheets impenetrable, and Joyce didn’t manage to pass any of the economics papers he took at university — but if that was the case he could have admitted as much, with a few caustic comments about Labour’s unconventional accounting style. Instead he adopted an ‘‘I know better than all the economists’’ approach, and insisted he was right. English connived with that lie and repeated it ad nauseum: he is forever labelled a liar, too.

With that lie, and the equally spurious claim, supported by repeated accusations by English, and misleading TV advertisements, that Labour would, despite its clear policy, increase income tax,

National beat back the surge of support for Labour. It demonstrated the efficacy of the ‘‘dead cat ploy’’, in which a side under threat throws something dramatic and upsetting (it doesn’t matter whether it’s true or false) into the public gaze, so voters are distracted from the opposition’s message. It worked: Labour felt it had to keep responding to National’s persistence with the ‘‘fiscal hole’’ fiction, rather than dismissing it for the nonsense it was and concentrating on its vision for change.

Labour needs to take some blame for the result, for outsourcing its decisions on taxation to a future working group, and creating policy on the hoof. Addressing the shocking deficits in funding for healthcare and education, punitively low benefit levels, housing shortages and the rundown and selloff of social housing, the persistent problem of inequality (the CEO of Fonterra will ‘‘earn’’ $8.3 million this year: what will its hardworking cleaners take home?), environmental degradation, and climate change, will take money: more, long term, than fiddling with balance sheets can provide.

Serious review of taxation (at least to shift some of the tax burden from consumption, which disproportionately affects the poor, to high incomes; and to tax all realised capital gains), including consideration of wealth and inheritance taxes, and a financial transaction tax, needs to be completed before the next election, so electors have definite tax options to consider as well as spending priorities. Fair changes to taxation don’t spook electors — Labour won in 1999 with a policy of increasing tax.

National won’t do that work. Labour needs to do it, whether or not it forms a government, and to take it resolutely to the people in 2020.