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A Tale Of Two Leaders But Whatever You Do Don’t Say It’s A Race!

A few days ago, I was tempted to write a scathing piece about Adam Bandt’s response to Labor’s 43% target. You know the sort of thing, point out that complaining that Labor wasn’t going hard enough and how well that’s worked as a strategy over the past few years. Like when the Greens got together with the Coalition and blocked Kevin Rudd’s plan for an emissions trading scheme because it wasn’t ambitious enough.

But then I thought I’d have to be even handed and point out all Labor’s faults, like Joel Fitzgibbon.

And then I imagined all the comments where some Green supporter would accuse Labor of just being interested in power and some Labor supporter would fight back and accuse the Greens of being naive and then some anti-vaxxer would say how none of it matters because everyone will be dead before climate change happens because the non-vaccinated are being sprayed with Covid at rallies and the vaccines will kill all those who are vaccinated and we need more people to go to the rallies to fight the government who’s killing the enlightened and then someone would say that vaccines never killed anyone and then someone else would link to a website which explained how investing in gold is the only way to preserve your wealth after the whole system crashes due to Bill Gates being a socialist.

So, I decided it was probably safer just to stick to Gladys, who isn’t the Liberal candidate for Warringah

When I say that she isn’t the candidate for Warringah I’m simply being factual. I could just as easily say that she isn’t the candidate for Bennelong but then I’d start a lot of speculation about whether she’s been approached for the former but she’s holding out for the latter because she doesn’t want to tackle a seat that she might lose.

No, really, I know that nobody is reporting what I just wrote and there are two reasons that nobody is reporting it: 1. They’re all too busy reporting the government line that she might be standing for Warringah and 2. It’s a total fabrication.

Of course, that second point hasn’t stopped all the media salivating like Pavlov’s dogs every time a member of the government rings a bell.

I don’t see Gladys standing for a number of reasons:

  1. How do the Liberals counter the obvious? She had to stand down as premier because ICAC were investigating her for misconduct and conflicts of interest, but we don’t worry about such things in Canberra.
  2. Then there’s also the: So this is why she resigned her seat and didn’t merely stand down as Premier; she was planning this all along. She’s just turned her back on the people of NSW in their hour of need.
  3. The whole Morrison strategy is to talk her up and then say that she won’t stand because an unelected body like ICAC has stood in her way, and isn’t it good that we haven’t rushed into having a federal integrity body!
  4. There’s a distinct possibility that she’d be in Opposition, which might mean that she could become the Opposition leader but it’s hardly the sort of gig that one would willingly take on when you could just try for a much better paying job lobbying for Wagga.
  5. Even if the Liberals won the next election, she’d have to go to Canberra and listen to Scott Morrison’s speeches in the party room.

Of course, I could be wrong, but whatever – the media is full of the idea that the election campaign has started because Morrison is doing lots of photo opportunities and Albo is releasing policies. Personally, I think that Morrison doing photo opportunities is him getting on with what he perceives his job to be, but maybe I’m getting too cynical after seeing this year’s photo of him putting up the same Christmas decorations while totally ignoring basic ladder safety like having someone hold the ladder and putting it somewhere near the thing your placing in position.

Whatever – I thought that the events of the weekend gave voters a tough choice: Albanese who announced a policy on extra TAFE and university places and Morrison who got driven round in circles by the person in the driver’s seat. Ok, it may not seem like a tough choice but last time voters elected the man who wasn’t in the driver’s seat and was content to go round in circles.

 

Image from au.sports.yahoo.com (Picture by Channel 7)

 

Still I did enjoy Leigh Sales hard-hitting question to Chris Bowen last night about electric cars, which – if I leave out a large chunk of the interview – seemed to be: When will an electric car be the same price as a Hyundai i30 – was that an ad on the ABC? Leigh should be counselled! She then suggested that a Tesla was around $70,000 and that this was the sort of question that the average person wanted to know. Personally, I’d like to know when I can get a new Mercedes for the same price as the i30 because the fact that she was comparing a small affordable car with a luxury model like the Tesla seemed a rather strange comparison. So when are Aston Martins going to be as affordable as the Nissan Leaf, Leigh? I think that’s what we all want to know!!

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22 comments

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  1. Kate Ahearne

    Lovely, Rossleigh. As usual.

    I have had my doubts about Leigh Sales for a long time. Did she, or did she not realise she was comparing apples with truffles?

  2. Douglas Pritchard

    We dont need a leader, of any party, or Canberra.
    What is the point of Canberra really except as a party town (and NOT political party).
    Every decision that comes out of the place is made in Washington, and a junior clerk could process the orders
    The Queen has her deputy here to make sure she approves.
    And any perceived “special relationship” is a complete hoot.
    USA has special relationships with every country it trades with, and supplies their weapons.
    Boycott olympics on abuses against humanity indeed…. while it buys its oil from Saudi (Wahabi inclined) and apartheid Israel is blessed with US taxpayer $ `s and weapons.
    Poor old Mexicans get the special treatment too….with a great big wall.
    And we give a great big tick to our friend awash with guns, and does not get the message on racsism, and we could go on.
    Canberra is a great big waste of space.

  3. Phil Pryor

    There’s that picture of a pumped up pig, grinning absently as one might expect from a lazy, ignorant, overconfident, shallow lying swine. The failure at advertising lies who has never worked, never done a thing on merit, backstabbing boneless bastard, is a vomitous vulture on the political landscape and political pox, pustular and putrid, for his murderous misfit laziness and incompetence about vaccine supply, old people’s home, quarantine issues. Scheming scandalous scum infest the conservative ranks, solid faecal fraudery. Why are Australian voters so bonelessly brainless in not wanting to punish this glaring criminality??

  4. New England Cocky

    Ah, Rossleigh, I think you may be onto something here. Gladbags would not want to campaign against a barrister & Olympic Champion in a sporty electorate, so genteel Bennelong would be much more fitting as the incumbency of Little Johnnie Howard, the second Prime Minister to be booted out of Parliament together with his party, plus it is just a few blocks down the road towards town from her last NSW electorate.

    But as a political sceptic, surely Scummo would be threatened by having a formerly politically powerful woman challenging his ”exalted position” as spiritual leader of the Hell$inger$ Cabinet of self-serving politicians dancing to the tune of foreign owned multinational corporations?

    Oops!! Silly me ….. I forgot the roundabout of fossil fuel executives masquerading as ”policy advisers” to insure that prime NSW black soil farmland is degraded to never rehabilitated wasteland by CSG polluting the Great Artesian Basin water that is relied upon by farming enterprises.

  5. HENRY RODRIGUES

    Phil P….. the boneless brainless voters are just that. They haven’t got the necessary brain cells to evaluate, access, and award genuine political effort. Instead take the easy road and just vote for the incumbent, as long as it doesn’t change their lifestyles, like watching the footy, swallowing a maccas,
    avoiding confronting their cosy ideas of priviledge and entitlement, as citizens of the first world.

    That revolting caricature of a human, complete with the toothy grin of a slimy used car salesman, represents all they want and aspire to.

  6. leefe

    NEC:

    ScoMoFo won’t mind having Gladys under him in Canberra. He’s a bully and he knows she is easily cowed by stand over tactics. She is very much his sort of woman.

  7. Rossleigh

    Morrison now seems to be suggesting that Gladys won’t run… Maybe she read the reasons above….

  8. Roswell

    Who will he wheel out next? Peta Credlin? Margaret Court? Janet Albrechtsen? Tamie Fraser? Janette Howard? Jen?

  9. Max Gross

    Sideshow Scott thinks his job is to pose for photographs. That’s it. That’s all he thinks the PM’s job is. That and siphoning public funds into LNP crony pockets.

  10. Gangey1959

    Thank you Rossleigh. Interesting read, as usual.
    I used to enjoy watching the Bathurst 1000. When it was a race between real cars. Cars that meant something to Australians. Not this imported crap.
    Watching MS drive the meisterwanker around Mt Panorama was painful in the extreme. Talk about inane conversation.
    And to top it off, Skaife didn’t “oops” the ejector seat button down the main straight, or at least get the pm to push it. That’s a photo-op gone begging. And where were the questions about the Australian car industry, and “tech not taxes” ? FFS.
    And then we have gladbags von binchicken being paraded as a candidate for the big house. Yeah. She should be. I’ll wait til the judgement comes dwn, but I’m thinking porridge, not Australia’s capital. isn’t it amusing how a hanging offence in a non lnp person is a quirk of charachter in a liberal. Mr dastyari should have been locked up for life, but the minister for coal and gas and his family are model citizens, nothing to see here.
    I do understand why the Labor party have said at this point in the campaign that there is no deal with the Greens. In 2019 it was played against them. Hard. The Greens would do well to accept the plan as it stands, and play to it’s strengths in order to shore up Labor votes where they might otherwise go to alternative independents. This petty schoolyard sniping is just stupid, and will only help the “frat boys and cheer squad” stay in power. Who is to say that things won’t change post election? The budget is in a state of ruination the likes of which we have never seen before, so previous statements there may have to be revoked. Get into power and change the climate goalposts.
    The important thing is for NOT the lnp to win the next election. Nothing good will be achieved from the not guvvm’nt benches.

  11. Kaye Lee

    A few months ago, this was the story……

    Berejiklian is a Liberal team player who keeps her grievances about Morrison private. But, in private, she is scathing. The NSW Premier has told Liberal colleagues she’d have preferred that Peter Dutton had won the last federal leadership ballot – she’d rather be dealing with Dutton because Morrison is so unpleasant, she’s said. She’s described the PM as a “bully”.

    Berejiklian went so far as to tell a colleague that Morrison’s behaviour was “evil”. She and many of her colleagues are still angry at the fact that Morrison’s press office phoned political reporters in a background effort to discredit her, so-called “briefing against her”, over the vaccine rollout a few weeks ago. They accuse Morrison’s staff of doing the same during the bushfires of two years ago: “Usually he briefs against her for doing her job with some measure of competence,” said one of the Premier’s loyalists. “He doesn’t like the contrast – he makes himself look big by trying to make others look small.”

    Among Berejiklian’s inner circle, it’s considered a joke to call Morrison “the Prime Minister for NSW”. They consider Morrison to be the Prime Minister for Morrison and no one else.

    https://www.smh.com.au/national/even-berejiklian-is-fed-up-with-the-pm-who-she-privately-regards-as-an-evil-bully-20210827-p58mde.html

  12. Michael Taylor

    Wow. That’s gold.

    We’re led to believe they’re all chummy. Or rather, Morrison pretends they’re all chummy.

  13. Kate Ahearne

    Gosh, Kaye.

    How DO you do it?

  14. Henry Rodrigues

    The one Scummo is most ‘chummy’ with, is himself, when he is in the shower.

  15. Michael Taylor

    Kate, she’s like a bloodhound.

  16. Kaye Lee

    I agree with the school of thought that this was orchestrated purely so they could trash talk about ICAC to cover their broken promise about a federal body.

    Another very interesting thing to remember is that the trial of Obeid had to be delayed because of Gladys and Scott making remarks in the media that could prejudice the trial. The judge was pissed off.

    The judge reserved her strongest criticism for Berejiklian and Morrison who had made separate remarks about Eddie Obeid and Ian Macdonald just weeks before the trial had been due to start.

    “Neither the premier of NSW nor the prime minister of Australia is properly to be regarded as simply a politician whose views might not be deferred to. To the contrary their views might be thought to carry weight even if expressed in the context of party political rhetoric. . .

    “Were I persuaded (and I am not) that the Prime Minister of Australia or the Premier of NSW made the remarks attributed to them aware that the criminal trial of Edward Obeid and Mr Macdonald was pending on a charge that alleged an agreement between them that Mr Macdonald would wilfully misconduct himself in public office with the intention of benefiting Edward Obeid and his family (including in that connection his son Moses Obeid), that conduct would be, at the very least, reprehensible given the obvious potential of those remarks to undermine the right of the accused to a fair trial according to law.”

  17. corvusboreus

    Roswell,
    Bettina Arndt would probably accept nomination.

  18. wam

    Beauty, Rossleigh, what a startling beginning with the loonies and the white-anter to stimulate thought. I couldn’t agree more.
    Now, how about a look at where scummo gets his $billions to chase another miracle by changing his pork barrels into silk purses?
    Perhaps, gladys can’t stand because ICAC will release before the election?
    However, to clear one error, she has admitted her Ruby disaster?
    When the ABC dumped kerry the new regime’s questions ranged from the aggressive and unanswerable for labor to ‘would you like me to nod, mr abbott, whilst you tell us how bad julia is?’ These days, in darwin, the majority of ABC producers have form in murdoch , and it shows. Although, in terms of a variety and diversity of experience, that is not hard to understand. A bias, ‘If you didn’t like the chief minister’s announcement, please call’ is the usual fare.
    ps
    corvus a look at her sites and this might help?
    https://greens.org.au/magazine/why-australian-greens-need-mens-wellbeing-policy

  19. corvusboreus

    Wam,
    Yes, the greens page acknowledges a necessity for discussion on societal attitudes to potentially toxifying influences on assumed perceptions of masculinity, whilst Ms Arndt gave a sympathetic media platform to a systemically enabled perpetrator of child rape.
    WTF kind of point R U trying to make?

  20. 2353NM

    I can get Leigh Sales’ point about electric cars being the same price as an i30.

    You can pick up a new i30 for about $28k, the cheapest electric car (not hybrid) will cost you around $45k. Until a manufacturer has enough courage (or support from a government) to import an electric car for around the price of an i30, there will not be a mass take up of the technology. Regardless of your desires, if you can’t afford $40k+, at this stage you won’t be buying an EV in Australia as there is practically no cheap second hand purely EVs for sale

    If the mass take up happens, there will be a better market in 2nd hand electric vehicles (and less fear in the ‘battery dying’ at some point in the future) which will get some of the older, less efficient and more polluting petrol/diesel powered vehicles off our roads. And before you start talking about batteries dying, ask a cab driver how long their battery lasts in their hybrid Toyota.

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