Bernard Keane

Lies and Falsehoods
The Morrison Government and the new culture of deceit.

Crikey journalist Bernard Keane has written a book about political lies. Those who follow Crikey would be aware of that masthead’s compendium about Scott Morrison, who is an Australian ground-breaker and paradigm extender in this field. 36 lies (plus a bonus lie) form the 26-page dossier of lies at the end of the slim book.

If you’ve read this far and before you read further, I have to acknowledge my reviewer bias - I despise Scott Morrison’s political performance and I have read this book to affirm that view.

But the book is more than a mere listing of Mr Mendacity’s litany of lies. It sets out parameters for lying in politics, distinguishing between the political lies of, say, John Howard’s “core” promises, or Bob Hawke’s “No child shall live in poverty,” and extending to Tony Abbott’s “bullshit” - a technical term taken from Harry Frankfurt’s 1985 book “On Bullshit” and applied to Abbott’s spectacular “flexibility” regarding a range of policy positions which found him, over several years, holding positions inimical to earlier and even subsequent ones. Even on climate change!

Abbott, however, would accept that he had changed his view, and it was Keane’s view that this occurred almost always in order to put pressure on the ALP. Thus, facts did not matter to Abbott. Political advantage did.

Morrison, however, is in a league of his own in Australia, claiming that what most of us would consider to be incontrovertible video or audio evidence of his statements, to not be that at all!

Keane compares Abbott’s “bullshitting,” mainly about Labor, with Morrison’s ways with words and concludes “… Morrison's insistence on lying about his own actions, and the actions of his government, rather than focusing his misrepresentation on his opponents, suggests his lies
and falsehoods are aimed more at avoiding accountability.”

Keane does not limit his book to Morrison. He looks at Trump, at Johnson, at deception in the pandemic, at the role of the media (generally too fascinated by the political positioning to scrutinise the veracity itself) and at “virtual facts.”

Keane’s view of the impact of the internet and social media is that the well-resourced and generally elitist mainstream media of yesteryear has been weakened and depleted of resources to continue to perform at a high standard.

“Memes, conspiracy theories and 'firehoses' are examples of how the new media environment is more hostile to fact-based discourse and more conducive to attractively packaged lies, deceptions and half-truths.”

The most substantial problem in my view (and his) is not the lies - bad as they are. What matters most is the damage to the reliability of government and its accountability, that is a consequence of such accelerating behaviour.

It means that even a new government intent on addressing these problems will take over a badly weakened system that they may be unable to repair. A weak government will not even have the desire.

Technology has not caused the underlying problem, but amplified a tendency already present among us. According to limited research cited by Keane, the oft-spoken of polarisation of the populace is not driven by social media, but by inequality. Economic and educational inequality and its attendant markers create the conditions of polarisation, and social media provides a more rapid location of the poles and coalescence around them.

Keane defines the problem, pointing out that the lies leading to the Iraq War opened a major gateway to it, and posits what can be done. This is not a book for those thinking the system of government we grew up with is doing ok.

After canvassing ways of managing politicians and their lies, and looking at what might be done to make “legacy” media more effective in this area, he concluded that “In the end, though, it's down to the voters ourselves. You can regulate politicians' speech, or improve the media, but you can't vote for a better electorate.”

But “… a solid chunk of the Australian electorate … aren't interested in verifiable facts unless they accord with their own in-group's priorities and views.”

Interesting read for those of us who care about a well functioning democracy. And my first paper book in 4 years!… (plus d'informations)

I wish I liked this better. I like Bernard Keane's writing in Crikey as a political journo, but a novel's a different matter. First, the basic plot about cyber hackers, Wikileaks-style exposures and the power of corporations to control governments, is clever, exciting, and well plotted. If the book were mostly about this, I may have enjoyed it more. However at 544 pages it's too long. Much of the time we are reading the characters' display of a disturbing level of lust. Much of it comes across cliched and no amount of four-letter words enhances it. Keane is a better writer than this. I hope he has another novel in him.… (plus d'informations)

Expectations are a nuisance aren’t they?

Bernard Keane is one of three reasons I am one of the dwindling number of people left in the world who still pays for their news (the other two are also writers for online news outlet Crikey for which Keane is the politics editor). His investigation of and commentary on Australia’s political scene gives me hope that civilisation, as I am want to lament, is not completely doomed. So I was ridiculously keen to read his fiction.

Probably too keen. It’s perfectly readable but in the end was better in the promise than the delivery.

SURVEILLANCE is set very much in the here and now. A multi-national corporation that sells expensive IT security to governments around the world is doing it tough with those governments having a lot less money to spend these days. What the Australian arm of Veldtech needs is for the government to experience an embarrassing security breach of the kind that would prompt some reactionary spending to batten down the digital hatches. Pity you can’t orchestrate such scandals when you need one isn’t it? Turns out…you can.

The story that follows explores some strong themes . The ways in which big organisations – be they government or private – will manipulate their own staff and the wider community for their own ends regardless of the consequences were deftly observed. As were the roles that both mainstream and social media play in our modern world. The rapidity with which events gain and lose the public’s attention, the tenuous relationship between the truth and what is believed, the near-random way in which things can ‘go viral’ and the impact of such intensity on the people at the centre of events are all well drawn. The issue of the insidious ways surveillance is being used against perfectly innocent people, surprisingly given the book’s title, is actually the least deeply explored of all the book’s big themes, though it is certainly there.

Despite all this I struggled overall with the credibility of the book. Because of the sex. One reviewer says he thought the relationships in the book served a useful purpose. I’m glad for him but I thought they were utterly preposterous. From memory there is only one of the half-dozen romantic entanglements depicted in the novel in which neither partner is energetically engaged in affairs with other people. Or wishes to be. The romps themselves are described with much more frequency and detail than can possibly be necessary but the constant daydreaming by several characters about their married-to-other-people sex partners is truly stultifying. And I simply don’t believe that the majority of people spend as much of their time having sex or thinking about having sex as is depicted here. The world would grind to a halt for heaven’s sake.

And because the thing I simply don’t believe is such a big component of the novel (honestly they’re at it like rabbits) I found it impossible to really buy into the rest of the story. Just as I would be getting interested in some aspect of the plot I’d be sidetracked by having to ponder again what grown woman spends that much time thinking about the size of her partner’s sexual appendage?

And all that sex made the characters pretty unengaging for me too. I could probably have dealt with the moral ambiguity of so many people donning infidelity with such ease, but I found their collective obsession with where the next bonk was coming from a bit naff. There’s a hefty 529 pages to wade through here and only one character – a freelance journalist who becomes the media expert on the hacking scandal that forms the basis of the plot – shows any kind of development at all. And as she is the one spending a lot of time thinking about the size of her lover’s appendage there’s not much room for it to be a terribly meaningful development. The rest are really non events. Bit players in a Jackie Collins novel rather than people central to Important Events.

I guess what I wanted from this book was be able to give it to friends who are sick of hearing me tell them why they should care about all the civil liberties we are giving up in the name of ‘security’ and say “see….this is what could happen if you don’t start giving a shit“. Alas all I can imagine most of my friends taking away from my giving them this book would be a belief I have developed an interest in soft porn.… (plus d'informations)