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Malcolm Turnbull and the Liberals have lost the plot

On 2 July 2009 I received one of these horrible letters with tear-off ends in the mail. It's not clear why it needed to be so complicated, since it was only advertising material from the Liberal Party of Australia, represented by Senator Michael Ronaldson. And what material! They've spent the last few weeks slating the Labor [sic]Party for alleged misconduct, including the claim of a mail message which I mentioned last month, and which proved to be fake. Not surprisingly, the opinion polls show the Liberals in general and their leader in particular to be very much out of favour: instead of coming up with any useful suggestions, they just try to denigrate the current government.

What do you do when you're in a hole? If you're Liberal, it seems the answer is “keep digging”. This letter was fully in keeping with their recent behaviour, and although I don't have much respect for either party, it greatly annoyed me, not least because of the trouble I had to go to to open it:

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What I can read from this message is:

• It offers no solution. It just complains.

• It ignores the current global financial situation. Every country in the world is currently going into debt to keep the economy running, and in all probability the Liberal/National coalition would have done so too. The real situation is that Australia is riding the global downturn better than most western countries. But they couldn't say that now, could they?

• It uses stupid arithmetic to make the repayment time look worse than it is. The only promise this document makes is that if they come to power, they will take 30 years to fix things. So why should anybody vote Liberal?

Sent a letter to Senator Rolandson asking for an explanation, and even attached a http://tinyurl.com/senator-rolandson tag to this page. I strongly doubted that I would get a reply, but in principle a representative (even a senator, I suspect) is expected to reply to letters from constituents.

He did reply, dated 20 July 2009, but there wasn't much relevance to my letter beyond acknowledging that I disagreed. In particular, he didn't explain why it would take the Coalition 30 years to pay off the debt.

This isn't really about Senator Ronaldson, of course—this incident is just a particularly offensive manifestation of the current state of Australian politics. I've seen Labor do just as badly. But it still offends.