Ian Warden | Can the Liberals convince Canberra everything is Labor's fault?

I ask this chequered question not only for the joy it gives to roll out and appreciate these lovely words and terms for human crankiness (the sweet musicality of 'cantankerous' and the evocative mental pictures of the blue-faced peevish hopping on the spot!).

No, I also and especially ask it because we found out this week that the Canberra Liberals plan between now and the 2024 ACT election to put their faith in Canberrans' perceived peevishness over the estimated cost of proceeding with stage 2B of the tram.

The Liberals this week confirmed they will go to the 2024 election opposing stage 2B that would extend the tram's perambulations from Commonwealth Park out past the doorsteps of the prime minister (at The Lodge) and of this columnist (in the aspirational suburb of Upper Garran) and on to Woden.

For this to be an election winner for the Liberals they will need to be proven right in thinking Canberrans (ostensibly among the most privilege-cushioned, smugly contented bourgeois people grazing anywhere on Earth) have a brooding, dyspeptic side and are itching to vent their spleens by voting in a splenetic, government-kicking way.

As a student of this intriguing city I am less interested in whether the Canberra Liberals win power at the next election (although I dare say I will flee Canberra and seek asylum in Wellington in progressive New Zealand if they do) than in whether they are proven right about this city's temperament.

"How can anyone look at this data [in the just-published Productivity Commission's Reports on Government Services] on housing, health, justice and police, and say the Barr-Rattenbury government is performing as it should, and our rates are being spent on critical government services to serve the community?" Liberal leader Elizabeth Lee seethed this week.

"What is clear is that the ACT is failing badly across these areas and more because of decisions made by this government including siphoning money from housing, health, and critical government services to pay for the tram. Without substantial investment in these services, the ACT will continue to fall behind, and the Canberra Liberals are committed to ensuring that does not happen."

The ABC said Ms Lee was seething that "cuts by the ACT government in education funding over the past decade resulted in a teacher shortage crisis, violence and bullying in schools, and toxic and hazardous materials in classrooms. City maintenance is neglected: grass is not mown, footpath cracks are not fixed, and the roads are littered with potholes".

What excites the inner social anthropologist/inner political scientist in the thinking Canberran reading Ms Lee's seethed catalogue is the possibility that, so comprehensive its range, it will somehow politically work by nudging Canberrans into imagining everything they think unsatisfactory in their lives is the Barr government's fault.

Academic political science abounds with studies that show how electors in their moody irrationality can with time (and the "It's time" factor plays a well-known role in the readiness of the weary-embittered to change their voting patterns and to kick out governments) blame governments for everything; for the weather, for erectile dysfunction, for fungal diseases of their gardens' dahlias, for Nick Kyrgios, for everything in life that nettles and disgruntles.

A classic instance of this (beloved of political scientists) is the famous Jersey Shore shark-attack vote of 1916. A very few shark attacks off Jersey beaches in the summer of 1916 somehow turned Jersey voters against the federal government of President Woodrow Wilson and they, Jersey's disgruntled, voted against Wilson in nationally-peculiar ways in that November's presidential election.

Whether or not Ms Lee's catalogue of ACT horror-shortcomings and of their being due to financial siphonings off for trams is sincere and accurate it may be that, harped on enough from now until the 2024 election (by which time, with Labor in power since the olden days of 2001, the "It's time" factor will be beefy in the extreme) it will work its cantankerous magic in enough simple, impressionable minds to give the Liberals victory.

And there is particular genius, conscious or subconscious, in Ms Lee and the Liberals' prominent listing of the city's "potholes" in their catalogue of the city's discontents.

READ MORE IAN WARDEN COLUMNS:

Keen students of Canberra and Canberrans have noticed how the potholes have somehow taken on (perhaps in this they are an equivalent of Jersey's generally harmless sharks of 1916) a subconscious emotional/psychological/political significance over and above the mere fact of their being temporary minor pocks and blemishes in tarmacadam.

They, the actually insignificant potholes, have in simple, suggestible minds come to symbolise something hugely psychologically significant. The pockmarks stand now for the decay not just of roads but of hitherto smooth, unblemished, painstakingly maintained life and civilisation, especially as we have known them here in immaculate and lavishly well-serviced Canberra.

If they are astute the Canberra Liberals will invoke the emotive trigger-spectre of the "potholes" in everything they say and do between now and election day in 2024. It may be (and one suspects the canny Liberals are already on to this) that there is something about the sight and sound of the word, that, like the bell Pavlov sounded in his famous experiments that induced anticipatory drooling in his laboratory dogs, sets ACT voters drooling at the thought of a change of government.