Mastie chef

This isn’t complicated, John. You and Xavier knew the damage was from a burst water main and deliberately tried to pass it off as evidence of failing roads for political gain. You got caught. No essay is required. An apology for treating voters with contempt is.

Dave, spare me the faux concern. You confidently broadcast economic bullshit, refuse to correct it when exposed, and then invoke ordinary Australians as moral cover for your own irresponsibility. This is how Trumpist politics takes hold: confident falsehoods are repeated until they become tribal truths, corrections are dismissed as bullshit, and the person checking the facts becomes the enemy. Once we accept that style of public discourse here, we should not be surprised when we end up with the same degraded political culture. You do not improve Australians’ living standards by misleading them. You do not serve the public by feeding them political fiction on sycophantic platforms where nobody interrupts the performance with facts. You asked what you got wrong. I answered in detail. Four replies later, you have not rebutted a single point. Your concern for Australians would be more convincing if it extended to whether the things you tell them are true.

Dave, you've responded to a detailed fact check by introducing an entirely different argument. Whether government should be smaller is an interesting discussion. It just isn't the discussion we were having. We were discussing whether your description of Australia's economic history in a 90 second clip was accurate. It wasn't. What I think is extraordinary isn't that you got things wrong. Everyone does. It's that you've conceded precisely nothing. Not one factual error. Not one correction. Not one "Fair enough, I got that wrong". You have a remarkable ability to turn economic fiction into confident public performance. The problem isn't just the mistake. It's that once the performance is over, the fiction is simply left behind for your audience to keep repeating. You haven't acknowledged that you confused government debt with the Future Fund. Your reply now explains how the Future Fund grew from around $60 billion to $255 billion which is a baffling addition, given you previously spoke about it as though it had ceased to exist. You haven't acknowledged that you claimed the GFC stimulus was funded by the Future Fund. Or that your broader account of Australia's response to the GFC was wildly misleading. Instead, you've simply changed the subject, which is a perfectly respectable debating tactic, provided nobody remembers what the original discussion was about. When the errors are painstakingly explained, you don't correct the record. You simply move on, leaving the misinformation behind for your audience to repeat as though it were true. I’m reminded of a line from Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses - Explaining this to you has become rather like trying to explain Norway to a dog.