Repeated reversals and broken promises are feeding a broader collapse of trust that reaches from economic policy to government transparency and defence.

Anthony Albanese has acquired another cross to bear over recent months. It’s one that will dog him, the more so for having come up in both One Nation and coalition party research, and which is now being wired into their scripts.

It’s the idea that Albanese is a liar. A person whose word and whose promises cannot be relied upon. Who cannot be trusted. Who, caught out, will not admit to conscious deception but who will give earnest explanations for why his earlier statements have been superseded by events, were not made under oath, or meant something else at the time. A person who, when his own words are quoted back at him, will often excuse his dissimulation with the claim that everyone does it, and that his bad example was not even particularly bad.

I have encountered some dreadful liars in politics in over 55 years of observing the species at close range. Albanese, on his record as either a batsman or a bowler, would not even make the first XI on merit or innate skill.

That’s not the important point. He’s being saddled with a reputation for being careless with the vérité at a time when the honesty and reliability of mainstream politicians is particularly at the fore. Moreover, he made very good political mileage over three years in opposition from the wilful and conscious prevarications and fibs of his predecessor Scott Morrison. People have not yet been able to forget Morrison’s knavery and Albanese’s explicit representations that he would be different, indeed would return Australian government to its previous high standards, and to open, transparent and accountable government. Some, indeed, were silly enough to believe him.

Others, too cynical to believe that a machine man without much of a history of idealism, inspiration or exemplary government, nonetheless were inclined to expect that he would honour explicit promises, such as, during his first term in government, that he would not interfere with tax breaks legislated for by the previous government. Or that, before the second term, he would not interfere with capital gains taxes.

As it happens, I think these undertakings should never have been given, least of all by a Labor government. After being given, they should have been repudiated as soon as possible, if only to give a new government the leeway and scope to address chronic problems of the economy.

Breaking constantly reiterated promises has him now described as a liar by his enemies

But Albanese did more than volunteer these promises. He had not even been corralled into his undertakings by the opposition or by the conservative financial press but had made a virtue of them, based on Labor mythology that it had failed to win government in 2019 because it had made too many promises. Even after being elected, he had pretended that he remained committed to the promises, and neither he nor the treasurer, Jim Chalmers, ever thought aloud about de-emphasising or dropping the commitment. Until, that is, the reversal of the promise was suddenly announced, without any effort to prepare the public for the about-face. There was a claim that the reversal was justified by new events.

Even if I thought that the advantages of breaking a promise that should never have........

© Pearls and Irritations