Illustration: Kerrie Leishman.
I don't think I've ever met a politician who didn't claim a great belief in the innate good sense of the Australian voter. I guess if I were a pollie I'd say that, too. But since I'm not likely to run for office, let me confess I have a low opinion of most voters. They're far too easily conned. And it's clear from their behaviour that, whatever they say, the pollies actually share that low opinion.
The trouble is that most people don't pay much attention to politics; they aren't very interested in it. Among the few who follow it closely, most treat it like football: having picked a side, they give it completely one-eyed support.
The truth is the electorate is gullible. The politicians tell us what we want to hear - basically, that they can solve our problems in ways that involve no cost or comeback - and we believe them. This has become the politicians' art: inculcating the notion there's no such thing as opportunity cost.
Kevin Rudd promised us change without change - new leadership, without that leadership involving anything remotely unpleasant - and we believed him. Morris Iemma pleaded for a fair go - his government had only been in power a year or so and needed more time to fix things up - and we gave it to him.
And then there's that staple of elections, the scare campaigns. They must work because they're used so often - by both sides. It's pathetically easy to make people afraid of some new and unfamiliar policy, any significant change to the status quo.
And yet, if we think back, we see that in any case where the scare campaign was unsuccessful and the change was pushed through, the feared policy soon itself became part of the status quo.
From the time it was first proposed in 1975 to the time it was implemented in 2000, many people lived in fear of ''a great big new tax on everything'' - the goods and services tax. And yet within a year or two the tax was part of the furniture, no great damage was done and life went on.
Paul Keating went from advocating his own version of the tax at the tax summit of 1985 to using fear of John Hewson's version to win the unwinnable election of 1993. Labor went on to oppose Howard's version in the 1998 election and almost won.
But in the more than two years that Labor has been back in power, have you seen any hand wringing over this evil, unfair tax, any sign of desire to roll it back or even tone it down a little? Not a peep. The GST's time of propaganda value to Labor has passed and what used to be evil is now benign.
I guess you can see where all this is leading, but while we're on the GST let me remind you of what it teaches about the way politicians use and abuse the public's longing for something for nothing.
In the 1993 election campaign, one of Keating's seductively illogical lines against the GST was ''if you don't understand it, don't vote for it''. Hewson's big selling point was that, in return for the GST, we'd get a big cut in income tax. Keating countered this by offering tax cuts almost as big without any new indirect tax.
Between the scare campaign and his counter-offer of something for nothing, Keating won the election - much to his own surprise. But it took just a few months for voters to discover how they'd been conned.
Having promised not to introduce a new indirect tax, Keating used the first budget after the election to announce big increases in all the old indirect taxes, about which he'd made no promises. And though he delivered the first half of his L-A-W tax cuts, the second half never eventuated. His claim to be able to afford tax cuts without the GST was false.
Of course, Keating got his just deserts at the next election, when he was thrown from office by a man disavowing any intention to ever do anything unpleasant and promising never ever to introduce a GST.
I remind you of this not to feed your cynicism, but to encourage alert, informed scepticism. Cynicism is the flip-side of inattentive naivety. It arises from the bitterness of people who realise they've allowed themselves to be gulled yet again.
At the last election, Tony Abbott supported John Howard's emissions trading scheme. Not many months ago, he was in favour of passing Rudd's emissions trading scheme - alias ''the great big new tax'' - provided it was suitably amended. Then he saw the wind had changed, detected an opportunity for personal advancement and announced climate change was ''absolute crap''.
Now the closet unbeliever has popped up with a plan he says will be just as effective at reducing emissions as Rudd's scheme, but with no discernible cost to the voter. And according to this week's Herald/Nielsen poll, 45 per cent of respondents like the sound of it.
But Rudd, the master profferer of painless solutions, has only himself to blame for the public's wavering commitment to his genuine scheme for tackling emissions. He's done almost nothing to explain how it would work, leaving a vacuum the deniers and fear-mongers have been quick to fill.
And now the going has got tough, you get the feeling he'd rather change the subject than explain there's no free lunch when it comes to saving the planet.
This is the acid test for Rudd and his government. Was his promise of new leadership just so much puffery?
Will he stand and fight for a genuine solution to the problem he once rightly described as the great moral, economic and environmental challenge of our age, or will he cut and run?
Ross Gittins is the Herald's economics editor.
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