As Otto von Bismarck did not say, “Laws are like sausages. It’s better not to see them being made.” It would have been an odd remark for a leading figure in an undemocratic system to make, or even think privately. But as far as researchers can determine, the real origin was an American lawyer-poet (itself an odd category and presumably a small one), John Godfrey Saxe, who in March 1869 seems to have said “Laws, like sausages, cease to inspire respect in proportion as we know how they are made.” Which naturally brings us to Australian climate policy, in which Net Zero was the result of a political deal that one of the two key members involved called “prostitution on both sides”. Ugh.
But of course famous people have been quotation magnets since long before there was an Internet. Including for disparaging remarks about the sordid qualities of democracy as well as, when at a safe distance, its even uglier rivals.
So revenons à notre Australie, because The Australian Editor-at-Large Paul Kelly just informed us that:
“Former Nationals party leader Barnaby Joyce branded as “political prostitution on both sides” the transactions he did with then prime minister Scott Morrison as the price for the dramatic shift in Coalition policy to embrace net zero as government policy before the 2022 election. ‘The National Party voted for it because of the funds I got,’ Joyce said in an interview in my new book The Twilight of Exceptionalism – The Liberal and Conservative Era 2013-22.”
Gross, huh? And it gets worse. Politics being what it is, one would not be surprised to find a practitioner of that dark art demanding compensation for doing something they believed in. But Joyce is quite clear that he got a lot for something he didn’t believe in:
“‘I keep asking for more and more,’ Mr Joyce said. ‘I said to the party, “If I ask for Morrison’s strides [Australian slang for pants], then I’ll get them”. I think by the end I’d got about $32bn.’ That figure cannot be verified, but the subsequent Mr Frydenberg budget offered immense funding for Nationals’ projects, inland rail, dams, pipelines, upgrades for ports, highways, roads and beef roads, water security, and agricultural and industry development. Asked how he would describe his political battle with Mr Morrison, Mr Joyce offered a remarkable statement: ‘It was a huge deal. It was political prostitution on both sides. I think that’s a fair call. One paid for it and the other one gave it up.’”
At which point you might be thinking Joyce got quite a deal for his integrity, as it was obviously not a valuable object:
“Interviewed by the author three years later, in 2024, Mr Joyce said: ‘I don’t support net zero and people have always known that. But I have had to say so in many public forums because it is a cabinet position. I’ll be proven correct on this point. Net zero is going to fall apart.’”
So he’ll be proven correct on not supporting something he said he supported because everyone should have known he was lying? And at what cost to the nation, since Net Zero policies are economically ruinous and the Coalition collapsed anyway. Plus it was meant to be the right-wing party and here it was dishonestly pushing Net Zero for… um… what? The glory? We think not.
As for the “John” here:
“Mr Morrison described the forces that drove his thinking: ‘I became convinced in early 2021, if not late 2020, that regardless of what we thought, global markets, capital markets, business, had already made up their minds. The world was moving to a net-zero economy. Australia had one of two choices – to be part of that or be ostracised from the global economy. In my view that would be disastrous for us. We might not like it but we don’t set the global rules of investment decision-making.’”
So he was also an idiot. How could Australia be “ostracized from the global economy”? Especially if it made better choices than others? And nobody sets “the global rules of investment decision-making”. Individual firms make investment decisions. Where, oh where, had this man’s beliefs gone if indeed he had any? Or his brains? Or his morals?
Evidently when his party changed course Morrison was firm but flexible, as well as inane:
“It was the right decision at the time. The situation in 2021 was very different to the situation today. There was a different president in the White House. Australia at that time was isolated. We were facing a capital strike basically out of the US. The party has made a new decision. I totally understand the position they have taken. They have responded to new circumstances. There’s a growing consensus now – I don’t think anyone believes this target is going to be reached at 2050.”
So he paid all that money, and did all that harm, in support of a policy he neither thought desirable nor possible because of a confused fear. And politicians wonder why we hate them. And scorn them.
There’s a famous anecdote about John Maynard Keynes meeting US President and New Deal architect Franklin Roosevelt during the Great Depression and being shocked to find that he knew no more about economics privately than he let on in his inane public rhetoric. According to Richard Parker’s biography John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics, Keynes’ open letter to the new president:
“plus the admiration of Labor Secretary Francis Perkins and other senior New Dealers, earned him a private meeting with Roosevelt soon after. But the meeting didn’t go well; Keynes afterward coolly told Perkins that he had ‘supposed the President was more literate, economically speaking.’ FDR, for his part, jauntily told Felix Frankfurter that ‘I had a grand talk with Keynes and liked him immensely,’ but to Perkins admitted less happily, ‘I saw your friend Keynes. He left a whole rigmarole of figures. He must be a mathematician rather than a political economist.’”
It is shocking to find that politicians generally are as ignorant of economics, and as disdainful of it, as their shallow and manipulative campaign statements. And as cynical.
In a low trust society distinguished by a lack of: critical thinking, knowledge of history, numeracy, and with an increasing demand for free stuff courtesy of your parliamentary representative, "democracy" is the 'form of the destroyer' (with credit to Aykroyd and Ramis) in demonstrating the thesis of Tytler.