Politics has descended into a dark place, feeding off downward envy – ABC News

A leaflet appeared in letterboxes in suburban Melbourne in recent days. It has no official authorisation, or signatories, but it is telling recipients why they need to “Vote no to the Voice”.

While we have heard questions or objections from the No campaign on constitutional, legislative and process grounds — some of which have been quite reasonable questions — the significance of this leaflet is that it jumps the shark straight to the issue of money.

The Voice, it says, is going to make you pay more tax. In doing so, it takes this debate into depressingly familiar territory that doesn’t have a lot to do with reconciliation or even racism.

The leap of arguments in the leaflet is that “the Voice forces Australians into Treaty”, and Treaty “could include reparations, a financial settlement, the resolution of land water and resource issues” and Treaty “means Australians pay a percentage of GDP [sic], and are forced to pay rates/land tax/royalties to the Voice”.

The leaflet goes on to say that “the taxes imposed by the Voice are on top of existing taxes [and] this will be the final death blow for our farmers”. It also lists a range of other (untrue) things the Voice will do.

But a week after the Royal Commission into Robodebt released its findings, the politics of the warnings that taxes and hard-earned dollars would be ripped off by the Voice were another echo of the politics Commissioner Catherine Holmes spoke of in her report.

“Politicians need to lead a change in social attitudes to people receiving welfare payments,” Holmes says.

“Anti-welfare rhetoric is easy populism, useful for campaign purposes.”

It’s all about downward envy and resentment: something that has been a feature of Australian politics for much of its history.

The same downward envy

Before the politics of attacking welfare bludgers (generally) that lay behind the way the Coalition government prosecuted its Robodebt scheme, there was the earlier attack on single mothers during the Howard era.

Remember? Single mothers were having children so that they could spend their lives living on welfare. It was one of the underlying rationales for reducing the age of children for whom single parents could receive assistance: it would force them out to work from their lives of indolence.

It was a policy rationale that echoed on into the policies of the Gillard government.

Of course, politicians weren’t always that explicit about such things. But they had willing and noisy backers in sections of the media who would prosecute all of these cases. In the case of Robodebt, they were often complicit in actually naming and shaming people (and, in passing, seem to have gone noticeably quiet in the past week).