“Ethics is knowing the difference between what you have a
right to do and what is right to do. -- Justice Potter Stewart” (Engstrom,
2013, p. 3). Chan et al. (2014)
defined ethics as the conventional standards and moral principles that
influence a person or group’s sense of what is right and wrong, good and bad,
proper and improper. Looking at the
topic of ethics as it relates to business communication, we see that “the goals
of ethical business communicators include abiding by the law, telling the
truth, labelling opinions, being objective, communicating clearly, using
inclusive language, and giving credit” (Chan et al., 2014, p. 282).
Since the recent economic crisis, commonly referred to as
the Global Financial Crisis (GFC), many business communicators have been trying
to regain consumer confidence by making an effort to be more ethical in their
communications with the general public (Chan et al., 2014). There is one group, however, who are generally perceived as being less
than ethical with their public communications, and these are our politicians (McAllister,
2000).
The believability of pre-election political communications
has long been a subject of discussion and most voters seem to be well aware
that not all information sources are as trustworthy as others during an
election campaign (O'Cass, 2002). In recent weeks the discussion on ethical
communications has come very much to the forefront of public interest with the
revelations contained within the new Coalition government’s first budget paper (Rajca, 2014).
Many Australian voters believe that the Coalition have now broken almost
all of the significant promises that were made before the election (Rajca, 2014) .
There is “little disagreement among voters that politicians
will tell lies if they believe that the truth will hurt them politically” (McAllister,
2000, p. 24). Chan et al. (2014) described a number of reasons
why communicators may be less than truthful, and we can look to these to try to
explain why there is such a disparity between what the Coalition promised prior
to the election and their current plans for Australia’s future. In my opinion the Coalition have fallen into either
“The Self-Deception Trap” or “The Ends-Justify-The-Means Trap” (Chan et al., 2014, pp. 279-280). If we’re being generous we may say that the
Coalition fell into “The Self-Deception Trap” (Chan
et al., 2014, p. 279) by actually believing that they were capable of
fulfilling all of the promises made to the Australian public during the
election campaign. Perhaps these
promises were not, in fact, lies but merely naïve over-reaching by an overconfident
leader. However, if we were to view the
events in a slightly less favourable light, we may say that the Coalition fell
into “The Ends-Justify-The-Means Trap” (Chan et
al., 2014, p. 280). If the
leaders of the Coalition believed that their potential government represented
the only possible solution to what they perceived as being a crisis in the
Australian economy, they may have decided to promise whatever was necessary in
order to win the election so that they would then be able to address these
supposed issues.
Unfortunately we, the voting public, may never fully know
the truth behind these broken promises.
The only thing that we can be reasonably confident of, is that there
will be more promises made just as soon as the next election is announced.
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