Fear, uncertainty and doubt (“FUD”) is a strategy used in marketing, propaganda and politics that has its modern origins in precursors dating back to the 1920s. It is based upon the following principles:
• Know the people you are targeting.
• Feed them misinformation that will create in them a state of fear, uncertainty and doubt.
• Suggest that you, and you alone, have the solution.

the greatest FUD campaign of modern times must surely be the conjoined ‘Stop the Boats’ and ‘Our Borders Under Threat”. The LNP initially claimed that terrorists would choose the risky maritime option over the routinely safe arrival by aircraft. When the manifest stupidity of this claim became the object of public ridicule, the terrorist scare was replaced by the ‘uncontrolled hordes of queue-jumpers’ claim with more than a few dog-whistles to the still disadvantaged outer suburb voters. Of course there are no queues which do not measure their waiting list in years, and no places where people on those queues can survive while they wait. Typically, boat people have no travel documents because the governments from whom they seek refuge will not issue them. This means that they cannot travel by air and a leaky boat is their only option. They know they may die at sea, but they are prepared to take that risk in the certain knowledge that they will die if they return to their country of origin.

The ‘Stop the Boats’ part of this FUD is supported by both the LNP and ALP on the faux humanitarian claim that it will prevent drownings at sea. Both have aligned themselves with this FUD, in reality, for political reasons. Neither have addressed the issue of the fate of refugees who are forced back to their countries of origin. Neither have addressed the immorality of using the thinly disguised torture of children, women and men as a state sanctioned instrument of policy administration. Neither have addressed the option of regional cooperation using the money spent on ‘Stop the Boats’/’Sovereign Borders’/’Offshore Detention’ to fund additional resettlement programs for refugees in transit.

Of course, when a FUD works the way this one has, you will always find the main-chancer who will see it as a means to grasp even greater power and create an even greater empire. Scott Morrison is the exemplar. From the beginning of his tenure, his demeanour, language, and obsessive stair, conveyed an innate lack of empathy for the plight of the refugees whose suffering and fear had cause them to risk their lives in the pursuit of refuge and whom he now proposed to consign to the torture of indefinite detention in his makeshift tropical hellholes. This multilayered inhumane FUD constructed upon a fundamental abuse of human rights has enabled Scott Morrison to create his new, all-powerful, mega department. Should the ALP ever find a leader whose moral compass points at the principles of social justice rather than the last poll results, and should that leader one day hold the office of Prime Minister, it is to be hoped that Morrison’s most egregious breaches of human rights are investigated and if proved that his was the guiding hand, he is prosecuted to the limit of the law.

The recent death of Gough Whitlam, the State Funeral for him, Noel Pearson’s oratory, my personal recollections of the impressions Gough made upon me as a young man, what he stood for and fought for, and the sight of Tony Abbott in the front row of the Sydney Town Hall, sparked a memory of a particular English period at school. The richness of the language, it seemed to me and many in the class, was never more evident than in the word “bathos”: that English had a single word to convey such a complex, multi-layered concept applicable to such a multifarious range of human events. And my memory of the discovery of “bathos” was, of course, revived for me, as I’m sure it was for many, when we contrasted the sublime, FUD-free Whitlam and the political descent we must now endure to the ridiculous Abbott