From the desk of Roland Rocchiccioli

IT is unambiguous: “Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness”. It is the ninth of the Ten Commandments. For those who believe, and those who do not, it has nothing to do with religiosity. It is one of the simplest and most important tenets of life. Ineffably, without veritas we are doomed.

Saturday May 3 marks the end of the triennial “Australian Festival of Lies”; that time when, for an allocated number of weeks, aspiring politicians of all persuasion unashamedly bombard us with a litany of misinformation, disinformation, and a wide-ranging pack-of-lies. The barrage is relentless. The spew of vile unrestrained. Their capacity for falsification and obfuscation knows no bounds, nor embarrassment. The blatant falsehoods are created ad hoc as they journey the thorny path to political power.

While rational Australians are perturbed by the notion, equally concerning is the Australian Electoral Commission’s (AEC) inability to thwart the practice. While the AEC maintains an impartial, independent system for eligible voters through electoral roll management, they are not empowered to prohibit political candidates from blatant lying. The conduct code governing federal election events is contained in the Commonwealth Electoral Act, 1918. To be rid of the ugly, destructive scourge would require parliament’s collective will to amend the legislation to include a section outlawing formulated electioneering dishonesty. Sadly, hell will freeze over beforehand! Staying in power is more important than good governance. We have come to the miserable political pass where deliberate lies are the sine qua non for success. Veracity is subjective, and in the absence of deception victory is less certain.

Political aspirants recognise the more outrageous the lie, the more likely the voting public is to believe, and, consequently, the greater their chance of success. There is a raging inclination to believe the worst about others. “The evil that men do lives after them/The good is oft interred with their bones.” Julius Caesar says in Shakespeare’s play: “Let me have men about me that are fat/Sleek-headed men and such as sleep a-nights/Yond Cassius has a lean and hungry look/He thinks too much; such men are dangerous.” The Bard knew, precisely, what he was giving Caesar to say. The dissemination of the foul slanders is rampant. Social media is a vile, putrid cauldron bubbling with inaccuracies and gifting every deranged conspiratorialist with a loudhailer to the world. There is an ugly, societal propensity for seeking-out and sharing barbative gossip; an alarming disregard for empirical evidence. The worst illiterate is the political illiterate. Inexplicably, there is an inclination to believe without quizzing. Hitherto, we believed only half of what we heard, and even less of what we read! Today, we have become more gullible; less discerning.

The longer the anomaly remains unrestrained the greater the risk to our fragile democracy. The German poet, Bertold Brecht, wrote of power unhindered: “Watch closely the film clips of your leaders, walking and talk, as they hold in their cruel hands the threads of your fate.” His words were never more prescient. These are troubled times. The zeitgeist is not Panglossian. We must be vigilant — shouting-down those practices which are self-serving and shrinking the greater-good. There is a prevailing threat! Lying, in any form, and for whatever reason, is anti-social, and detrimental. Contact: [email protected]