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:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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!
- 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.
- 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.
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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