When politicians draw on slogans, not courage, nothing improves

The new Country Liberal Party government in the Northern Territory was recently swept into power on a platform that includes a commitment to lower the age of criminal responsibility from 12 back to 10 – what one might call the Ginger Meggs law.

The previous government had raised it from 10 to 12, but new chief minister Lia Finocchiaro says the reversal is necessary “so that young people can be held accountable and that appropriate consequences for their age are delivered”. Maybe it’s time to bring back the lashes – after all, they are 10.

Various health and justice advocacy bodies around Australia have already stepped up to repeat wearily the advice they’ve been giving for decades now, pointing out that treating children as adults can only lead to their moving up to more adult criminalities more quickly and confidently. It costs the earth, increases the likelihood of their return to jail, and stunts their development severely.

However true, though, these responses may be missing the point. This isn’t a policy that’s intended to make a difference.

The tell is that there are absolutely no numbers attached. How many 10- and 11-year-olds would have been facing adult sanctions if the new rule had applied? It can’t be many; it’s not clear that it’s any. State and territory governments don’t often pass laws that are intended to apply to a tiny handful of people unless the Murdochs are particularly outraged.

The new government is supercharging the juvenile justice laws in other ways – bringing back truant officers, toughening bail laws, cutting benefits for parents of delinquents – and it’s possible these changes will actually affect the situation, for better or for worse. The 10-year limit isn’t like that. It’s about advertising an attitude, not fixing a problem.

The electoral evidence is that it’s an advertisement that has struck a chord with the electorate. I don’t think we’re stupid; voters could see that it was a deliberate attempt on the conservative side to stand out as the Nasty Party, and they liked that.

Accusations of racism did no harm – the whole country had run through all that over the Voice referendum, after all, and we as a country had effectively said “Yes, we’re racist: so what?” Like Trump voters, we were secretly relieved to be free of the responsibility of pretending to care about questions of right or wrong.

Across Australia, Labor governments are shocked and scared, gazing at an electorate that apparently rewards nothing but a laser-focused commitment to the cost-of-living question. It’s not just that people want prices to come down; they actively oppose any initiative, whatever its content, that would involve talking about anything else.

The Victorian government is retreating part of the way from its own commitment to raising the age of criminal responsibility from 10 to 14, and the Victorian opposition is increasingly moving to oppose any rise at all. The federal government prevaricated from a commitment to putting questions in the Census that would enable us to know how many Australians identify as LGBTIQA, on the grounds that this would cause "division" – they felt a need to placate the right-wingers and the emerging Muslim voting bloc.

The only issue that doesn’t risk causing division is the universal cross-party consensus that Australians are doing it tough, which is a pity, because it isn’t true. Poor people – people on Jobseeker, for example – are doing it tough, but most of the country is prosperous and the upper echelons are living it up.

If you’d asked any government for the past 50 years if it’d swap its own times for a 4.2% unemployment rate, a 3.5% inflation rate, and a home loan default rate of 1%, you’d have been trampled.

We know what it looks like when a country is really doing it tough. You can tell, because people get into leaky boats and try and fight their way to somewhere else. When Indonesia is setting up camps in Irian Jaya to house despairing economic migrants from Queensland, that’ll be a good marker.

In part, Labor’s electoral rout in the Northern Territory came from being attacked from both sides – both the CLP and the Greens increased their vote share. It doesn’t look as if tiptoeing down the centre lines is a winning strategy. What a winning strategy would be isn’t at all clear.

When various independent bodies attack federal Opposition leader Peter Dutton for having policies that are unworkable, irrelevant and built around culture-war slogans, the response is “Sorry, what’s the point you’re making?”

This is not, primarily, a problem with governments. We can’t make it someone else’s fault that easily. Governments are listening to what voters are spitting.

The worst of Australia’s unfounded sense of narcissistic grievance is that complaining about it comes across as prissy put-downs. But I work with the not-for-profit sector, which has the mission of pointing out to Australians that there are things other than suburban supermarket bills that need fixing, and I’ve got an excuse.

Really, people, right is better than wrong. Have the courage to say so, even if courage is no longer in our lexicon.

Denis Moriarty is group managing director of OurCommunity.com.au, a social enterprise that helps the country's 600,000 not-for-profits.