Richard Farmer's Daily Email Briefing

Timely insights into politics every weekday.

FREE trial

ACCESS BACK ISSUES
HERE

NEWS AND VIEWS
Australia

Other Countries

Is the Bad News Really that Bad?

Thursday, 4th May, 2006

The nightly news channels. The World Today. PM. The 7.30 Report. Lateline. All filled up on a quarter of a percent interest rate rise. Breathless reports about the dire consequences for ordinary Australians.

Houses being sold. Children deserted as mothers are forced back to work. A crisis for aid agencies. Civilised middle Australia is about to come crashing down.

Meanwhile, back at their computer screens, ordinary Australians surveyed the nightly news. And there they clicked on the stories that interested them rather than the ones forced on them by news directors.

Top of the pops at the Sydney Morning Herald was 'I thought the house would collapse' followed by my personal favourite about the bogus spiritual medium. The Reserve Bank's interest rate rise did not make the top 10.

Down in Melbourne , where people are obviously more serious than in Sydney , the Russian woman raped as a child by the American man who adopted her was the most read article on The Age's web site but interest rates did come in fourth.

Not much evidence there that middle Australians - now defined by Labor, I note, as families with an income of $100,000 a year, so they should be SMH and Age readers - are anywhere near panic stations.

Thus my prediction of a minimal impact on the economy; perhaps a little more caution about spending as people consider that they might be in for a period where their income stands still rather than increases.

The political impact will be greater.

Back in March I wrote of the success that the Democrats are having in the United States attacking President George Bush "as a politician whose word cannot be trusted" and suggested that the AWB scandal gave Labor the opportunity to launch a similar attack on John Howard. The interest rate rise, however small and inconsequential in itself, is a further opportunity to impugn Prime Ministerial truthfulness.

Just as an overwhelming majority of Australians believe the Government must have known something about the AWB kickbacks to Saddam Hussein, so too do they believe that John Howard told them that under him interest rates would not rise. It matters not that there was ignorance about kickbacks and no promise on interest rates. The people think otherwise and Kim Beazley is on the right track in talking about trust.

Not that there will be some immediate and dramatic change in the way people will vote in the next election. This is an issue where Labor should just keep on keeping on about trust - John Howard betraying a trust on this, betraying the people's trust on that. Keep finding new examples and the electoral rewards will come if Mr Howard is silly enough to stick around to the next polling day.

Putting the interest rate rise into perspective

The most read story the day after the interest rate rise?

A Malaysian housewife says a bogus spiritual medium duped her into having sex with him 51 times as the only way to exorcise her evil spirits.