Joe Hockey has a fair history of what the media likes to call gaffes.
A gaffe, according to the Oxford dictionary is “An unintentional act or remark causing embarrassment to its originator; a blunder”.
But it’s a light word, implying that someone accidently misspoke, said something that was not what they intended to say, or not what they actually meant.
Hockey’s blunders are not a matter of misspeaking – unless accidently revealing the truth about your view of the world could be considered misspeaking.
Hockey is the Federal Treasurer, so not only is he responsible for crafting the government’s economic policy, he is also speaking as one of the most senior members of his party. His public pronouncements are a statement about the Abbott’s government’s plans and expectations for the nation.
Of all his so-called gaffes, the ones that are repeated most often were not a case of misspeaking. “The age of entitlement is over.” “We are a nation of lifters not leaners.” These statements were not a misrepresentation of how the Abbott government views their policy directions, they were an explanation of it.
Where they become blunders is when the government’s understanding of “entitlement” and “lifters” crashes up against the way the rest of us understand those words.
Bronwyn Bishop is far from the first or only MP accused of rorting the parliamentarian’s expenses allowance. She’s also very unlikely to be the last, but a large part of the public anger at her actions is driven by the perception that, when Hockey talks about entitlement being over, he’s talking about the unemployed, disabled, chronically ill and the homeless; he’s talking about people we think of as vulnerable. He’s not talking about people he believes are genuinely entitled to tax payer money – the people who don’t need it but in his view, have “earned” it.
Abbott attempted to control public outrage by proposing to extend the definition of parliamentary entitlements extended to cover party business rather than exclude it. All he means by that is that he wants to ensure future rorts cannot be recognised as such. It’s just another brick in the wall he’s building between the privileged few and the struggling many, and the underlying flaw is that he, like Hockey and Bishop and so many others in his government, believe that they are entitled to taxpayer funds while people truly in need are scorned for being in need and described as undeserving welfare cheats.
It’s a fundamental misunderstanding of how most Australians view fairness, and it’s on display for the world to see. Bishop’s sorry-not-sorry apology, Abbott’s “great personal respect” for her and their complete failure to recognise any wrong-doing all feed the overwhelming perception of a government out of touch with an increasingly disgruntled electorate.
Bishop’s problem was not just that she abused her entitlements; it’s that it never occurred to her that doing so was wrong. The government’s problem is that most of its senior ministers seem to be endorsing that view.
So the sardonic quoting of Hockey’s “age of entitlement” statement rolls on, and as long as it looks like they want to lean while the rest of us have to lift, it’s not going to end.