Even in the age of reality TV, the personal isn’t political

When Trent Hunter (pictured right) walked to the podium to talk about penalty rates at a Labor press conference last week, his role was clear. He was there to put a human face on a potential cut to wages, to use his personal situation to argue against a political position.

When Andie Fox wrote in the Canberra Times earlier this month about her traumatic incident with the Centrelink debt collection process, she was condemning the government’s welfare policy using her lived experience.

When Duncan Storrar argued on Q&A during the last election that the government was giving tax relief to people who wouldn’t even notice the change rather than giving him extra money to take his daughters to the movies, he used his financial condition to make a statement about political priorities.

The personal narrative is a powerful tool — not just because it evokes strong feelings of compassion but because it’s difficult to refute. Rarely will the politician being put on the spot have knowledge of the questioner’s individual circumstances and they don’t want to appear unsympathetic. There is also the risk of being seen to invalidate the lived experience of disadvantaged groups.

Yet as Hunter, Fox and Storrar found, there are risks for those using personal experience too. In each case, supporters of the policies they were speaking out against gathered additional personal details and used them to discredit the original claims. In the case of Andie Fox it is also clear that a government department disclosed private information to the press in order to ‘correct the record’.

Supporters of both Fox and Storrar have complained about these attacks breaching privacy. However they were using their personal circumstances to make a political case in a major newspaper and a national television show respectively. How reasonable is it really to expect privacy? It is certainly not realistic.

To be clear, government departments have no business releasing personal information to try and win a public relations battle. It is yet another example of why we should be concerned about the collection and use of data by government.

But Hunter, Fox and Storrar each made themselves the story and the evidence. They didn’t use their personal experience to boost the credibility of their policy contributions. They argued their personal experiences were the reason policy needed to be changed. They did so in a way that was very difficult to ignore.

Too many on the left think a twitter hashtag of one-sided case studies is all you need to overturn a policy. Too many on the right think undermining a handful of cherry-picked examples wins the debate for them. Too few on either side have a framework to actually determine whether a policy is good or bad, so anecdotal evidence and personal stories are their sole metric when assessing government policy.

No-one is advocating ignoring the impact of policies on individuals but not every policy will leave everyone better off. In fact almost all policies will someone worse off, even if it is only the poor taxpayers left footing the bill. Yet who wins and who loses — and whether the ‘right’ groups win or lose — has become far more important than whether a policy actually achieves a legitimate objective.

This is the exact opposite of how it should work. Instead of asking questions that matter — such as: are high minimum wages really keeping people out of the job market; how many businesses would expand hours if penalty rates are cut; and should penalty rates be a matter for individual bargaining? Instead we are told that Trent Hunter will be worse off, as if that is a key factor.

It actually matters very little in policy terms whether Hunter personally loses money from cutting penalty rates or not, even though it no doubt matters greatly to him. Reversing this question makes the absurdity clear: is it now ok to cut penalty rates because Hunter won’t actually lose out after all? The plural of anecdote is not data.

It shouldn’t matter so much whether the individuals at the centre of these arguments are right or wrong. Yet the internet age is notable both for its unprecedented access to personal information and its hyper partisanship. Which means discrediting a person has never been easier, while prosecuting an idea has never been harder.

Political debate has descended to such a level that even if politicians could debate the merits of the policy — and many can’t — party structures prevent them from doing so and the public is largely uninterested. In the same environment where journalists rarely have time to get across complicated policy areas, it seems nearly everyone prefers reality TV.