What Turnbull should put out there is the old line, “..You stop telling lies about me and I’ll stop telling the truth about you..” Absolutely anyone who watched Shortens performance on 7,30 on Thursday night with Leigh Sales (available on ABC Iview) would know and understand if they didn’t already, just what an oily, sly, slippery and slithering reptile of a character he really is. Although it was a slick, unstoppable torrent of words he was just SO annoyingly smarmy and may as well had LIAR tattooed on his forehead.
Worth noting that Grace Colliers background is in the union movement
“….No one should be shocked by Bill Shorten’s Medicare scare election scam. There is a reason this present crop of Labor types is so at ease telling bald-faced lies to camera. Like Shorten, most of them are former union officials and, as such, are expert in the art of devious, malicious deception.
These guys have run hundreds of enterprise bargaining agreement campaigns, which are mini election campaigns in the workplace. Union officials regularly have relied on far-fetched lie-telling to force frightened workers, like herded cattle, through the right gate.
Though an EBA campaign occurs within a single workplace, and an election occurs across the national landscape, in both processes a political contest between labour and capital occurs, and that contest leads up to one defining moment: a democratic vote for all. PM must tell voters home truths about Shorten
Both sides vie for the hearts and minds of the voters, and put material out to state their case. In the end the voters are often overwhelmed, bewildered. They cannot read everything, so instead they take a leap of faith. Voters cast their vote to the side they like most and trust them to tell them how to vote. Then they hope for the best.
The way unions win EBA campaigns is by telling terrifying lies to the workers about the conditions and entitlements they will lose if they vote yes to the EBA. If management hasn’t anticipated the lies, it is not positioned to counter as it should. It doesn’t prepare the workers beforehand for the lies that will be told and doesn’t strike back hard afterwards with direct communication, even ridicule, setting out the truth.
Instead, management reacts with shock and outrage-induced paralysis sets in. On display is the processing of its personal emotional response to the lies (how could they say this stuff, it’s an outrage!), which workers are not interested in. Leadership falls by the wayside. Campaign momentum and control is lost.
In the same way an EBA provides the means for unions to control a workplace, a federal election provides a chance for unions to control our government. Our present election is not a referendum on keeping Medicare; it is a referendum on whether we want the unions running Australia. Shorten is the union rep, screaming about how we are all going to lose our entitlements. Is manipulation of vulnerable people via the use of scary nonsense an unethical thing to do? Labor cares not; it is a tried-and-true EBA tactic. Anyway, the end justifies the means.
Malcolm Turnbull is the manager, caught up in his own indignation. Has Turnbull ever been in an EBA campaign? Not likely. He must be reeling at the effrontery and wondering how low this union bloke is prepared to go. While Turnbull is busy denying the lies about himself, he is not pointing out the facts about his opponent.
If the community had the truth about Shorten put before it, very few would vote the way he asks. For Turnbull, shattering trust in Shorten would be an easy task, especially among the traditional Labor base. Labor’s brand is that it cares about the low-paid workers and puts people first, yet the party couldn’t have chosen a leader more unfitting, more ridiculously inappropriate, to promote it.
Shorten’s history can be found on the transcript from the Royal Commission into Trade Union Governance and Corruption. Past case studies include Chiquita, Cleanevent and more. Under Shorten’s rule, his union boomed, inflated by false membership numbers gained by dirty deals done dirt cheap. How much wage theft occurred, how much did the lowest paid miss out on? Perhaps half a billion.Shorten derided penalty rates as fanciful in the real world, a gold standard, when justifying a dodgy deal done behind the backs of workers to trade their wages away. These words, his exact quotes, should be used in a brutal advertising campaign.
Today, Shorten’s campaign runs partly on dirty money. Dodgy deals, done behind the backs of workers at Coles, Woolworths and more, have been funnelled through a union into Labor. There are probably 500,000 workers missing out on penalty rates, unlawfully, right now. Turnbull could stand up and condemn this and demand Shorten renounce it.
When the 7-Eleven wage rip-offs came to light, Shorten used the case to announce a policy to increase penalties on employers. But his proposed reform exempts small business, meaning 7-Eleven franchisees wouldn’t be caught in Labor’s so-called plan to catch them. Turnbull could point this out and pose a question along the lines of: Is this a genuine error, just staggering stupidity or has yet another dodgy deal, somewhere, with someone been done?
Shorten calls Turnbull a rich man’s Tony Abbott. Turnbull should call Shorten a celebrity union official to the rich and the best friend a corrupt business could have. Turnbull should say all of the above and more.
For as long as he doesn’t, of the two men, who do you think the voters will see as stronger, hungrier, more determined: Shorten, who has the guts to tell outrageous lies about Turnbull; or Turnbull, who hasn’t the guts to tell simple truths about Shorten?