Imagine this. Before getting married, a groom promises to be faithful to his would-be bride. He promises it unequivocally. Still, she’s a cautious woman in need of a bit of reassurance, so she asks him over fifty times and each time he unequivocally promises. So they marry. And then, only a year later, he cheats on her with his secretary. The wife confronts him, accusing him (inter alia) of lying to her. His response? ‘I changed my position.’ Point blank she again confronts him, alleging he lied. ‘Just changed my position,’ he repeats.

Does anyone honestly think that sort of defence is anything other than a masterclass in sophistry, casuistry and Jesuitical nitpicking? I mean, sure, the husband did change his position on fidelity in marriage. But it’s precisely because he changed his position that he is a liar. And the exact same point applies to Prime Minister Albanese. He and his government did change their position on negative gearing and capital gains tax. Before the last election they had pledged to voters over fifty times, unequivocally, that for the duration of the next government they would make no changes to these things. There can be no doubt that that pledge must have won them at least some votes.

But after the election they decided that they would make changes. Albo and Co. decided that they would ‘change their position’. But that change is precisely why Albo and Chalmers are liars. Because they promised that they would not change this – would not change their position – and yet they did. Vacuously mouthing ‘we changed our position’ with tedious and monotonous repetitiveness is nothing more nor less than stating ‘yep, we lied’. (And wouldn’t it be nice were the comrades on the ABC to point this out, to say to their favoured Labor PM that ‘changing your position’ amounts to admitting you lied? But don’t hold your breath for that. Explain to me why the Coalition won’t promise to slash the budget of ‘our’ national broadcaster. Because I sure get nothing, nada, from all my tax dollars going to the Ultimo lefties.)

This Albo evasion also relies on, or hopes that, voters and listeners are stupid; that they can’t spot an obviously fallacious ‘get out of jail card’ ploy when they hear it. I’ll repeat myself. It is the very fact that Albo and Labor changed their position that makes them liars. Because the precise promise they had made earlier – to try to win an election – was that they would not change their position in future. But a year later, they did. Hence, parrot-like proclamations that they changed their position are admissions that they lied.

That is one current example of sophistry in action. Here’s another one. Imagine a new old-age home is built. Let’s say it has ten storeys. And for obscure tax reasons the developer sells one unit on each floor, the most easterly apartments, two full years before all the other units on each floor are sold. So ten buyers move in to this old-age home first. And then two years later all the other buyers move in. The easterly people get there first. They’re the original inhabitants of the condo, the ‘first patients’ as it were. Everyone in the new place will get the same vote as everyone else on all body corporate affairs.

So now imagine this. These ‘first patients’, the as-it-were indigenous owners in this building, feel that their having got there first ought to be recognised and genuflected to by the others. They want anyone getting out of the lift on their floor to spend a few minutes acknowledging the original inhabitants of the building, the first patients. And they want a few monthly ceremonies where they, the first patients, get to welcome all the others to their traditional lands. Of course, a good many of the other unit owners in the building – any of them who don’t work for a university, the ABC or a Commonwealth government department – really begin to resent this. They believe the building is theirs as much as those who got there before them, the ones in the most easterly units. They resent these welcomes and acknowledgments.

So assuming all that, let’s say that Chris Kenny comes along – the man who laughably continues to assert that he was right in supporting The Voice. Kenny tells all the newer owners, those who got there two years later, that they are mistaken. They are not being welcomed to their own building. ‘Certainly not, old chap.’ No, the owner of the most eastern unit on each floor is simply welcoming everyone to their particular floor. Indeed, notes Kenny, even the first patients from other floors are being welcomed. It’s really a very inclusive exercise. Really. Or at least that is the line Chris Kenny runs to defend ‘welcomes to country’.

Can you see the sophistry here? The claim that those who happened to get there first are only welcoming all others to a subset of the whole, not to the whole, goes no way at all towards lessening the implicit message that the first patients have some sort of supposed greater legitimacy being there. For some first patients this might rise to an ‘always was, always will be’ insistence. But Kenny does not try to justify the endless welcomes as welcomes to the building as a whole. We’re told it’s a more limited geographical welcome and acknowledgement. Got it?

However, if you happen to live on the fifth floor, being welcomed to that floor – not to the whole building, Kenny assures us – hardly makes the whole genuflecting exercise somehow any better. In fact, it’s not even clear what Kenny thinks is supposedly making his argument work here. If one believes these welcomes are patronising, condescending and aimed at sending an implicit but false message that the ‘first patients’ in the most easterly units somehow have greater legitimacy to be there, even an ongoing ownership sort of claim, then how does Kenny’s characterisation alleviate any of that? ‘You see old chap, you’re only being welcomed to your own floor, not to your own building. Feel better?’

This is some sort of bizarre geographical sophistry at work. The supposed idea seems to be that being repeatedly welcomed to your place in Byron Bay or in Manly – draw the geographical boundaries any way you wish – does not count as patronising, condescending claptrap because it is not a welcome to the entire country that is today Australia. Got it? The whole is somehow less than the sum of its patronising parts. Or maybe more? To be honest, it’s near on impossible to understand what Kenny’s underlying argument is. The casuistry envelopes the whole claim. Nor does this geographical sophistry bear directly on how best to deal with Aboriginal poverty, child welfare and the rest.

And as for Kenny’s suggestion that Australia would have been better off with a constitutional change that entrenched racial (or some other sort of ‘by birth’ or ‘by who got here first’) division, one that steroidally supercharged judicial activism, locked-in sclerosis and made governing by right-of-centre parties orders of magnitude harder than for the left, well, the man’s dreamin’. It was the weakest case for constitutional change I’ve ever seen.

So there you have it. A couple of recent examples of sophistry in action.