Moses, for those of you who lack the biblical background, was the leader who led his people around in the wilderness for forty years instead of going to the “promised land”. It wasn’t because his satnav was broken; he’d been instructed by a higher power. “You’ve done the wrong thing, so you’ll just have to wait until I say it’s ok,” said God who, according those wandering in the desert was even more powerful than Rupert Murdoch, who also said much the same thing about the Labor Party. “And I won’t say it’s ok,” God told them, “until every last one of you has died and it’s your children who settle there!”
Albo seems to have a similar plan to Moses. He seems to intend to have Labor wander round in circles for a number of years until the current mob are all dead. His strategy seems a complete misunderstanding of the MeToo# movement. The Coalition propose something which most thinking people would oppose. Labor say they won’t vote for it. The Government then makes the issue all about the Opposition, even when they’ve got the numbers to pass it whether Labor vote for it or not. Labor then backs down and agrees to vote for the proposed legislation.
I’m really not sure what the point of this tactic is. From a tactical point of view, it would be better to say, “We’re not the government and we won’t make up our minds until we’ve seen all the amendments and even then we may just decide to abstain while we wait and see how it all turns out. In fact, we’ve decided to boycott Parliament for the next few months as a protest over Morrison’s use of the phrase: ‘Unfudned empathy’!”
At last that would make them look like they stand for something…
Not that standing for something is actually a prerequisite for winning an election. It just makes one a potentially better government if one does happen to be elected, and one can actually start doing more than starting every third sentence with, “How good is…?”
“How good is Australia?” “How good are jobs?” “How good is coal?” “How good is unfunded empathy?”
Actually that last one isn’t very good at all, apparently. Although it does invited the question: What the fuck did Morrison mean?
Is empathy only ok when it’s funded like it was when the Labor were trying to prise franking credit refunds from people. In Dick Smith’s case it would have been hundreds of thousands of dollars. Poor Dick. Anyway, somehow these and various other things like tax cuts to those who are earning over $200,000 a year and therefore “working harder” are all “funded”.
Or was Morrison suggesting that we shouldn’t be empathetic to those on Newstart because they weren’t having a go. We can deduce this by remembering that Scott the Moribund is fond of reminding us that those “who have a go, will get a go.” Clearly, the unemployed aren’t getting a go so therefore they mustn’t be having a go.
Of course, Channel 7’s “Sunrise” program were in no doubt that the unemployed weren’t having a go, giving us the statistics about how many of them have had their benefits suspended. I’m not going to bother to repeat the numbers because one of the great things about statistics is how meaningless they can be if you don’t have anything more than the raw data. For example, if you are given the statistic that over ninety percent of those surveyed didn’t go out on a Saturday night, it might be worthwhile to also know where the survey was taken. If it were in a nursing home or a jail, for example, it’s hardly a high number.
Anyway, a government department cuts people’s payments because they’re not having a big enough go, or sometimes they’re meant to be having a go in two places at once, and then the government puts out the statistics to convince us that they were right to cut the payments because these are the sort of people that get their payments cut.
It was also interesting that “Sunrise”, the show that helped boost Pauline Hanson’s profile when she was in the political wilderness, also saw fit to equate having one’s benefits suspended with being a “dole bludger”… which is an oxymoron even before one starts to analyse the morality. If one isn’t getting payments any more, can one still be a “dole bludger”?
But it gets back to this whole idea that we want people to be miserable if they don’t have a job. I guess it’s because a lot of working people hate their jobs and think that if they’re miserable, then why should someone else have the right to be happy when they can’t even get a job…
Our Deputy PM, Michael Whatisname, suggested that the unemployed should be prepared to move to get a job. He wasn’t very clear about where there was a shortage of workers. I think that his idea was that it might help if country folk moved to the city and the city people moved to the country. That way they’d all be away from friends and family AND unemployed. That should really show them…
But let’s imagine that someone on benefits in Tasmania were to pack up, procure a tent and move to Queensland to enable them to leave more cheaply in better weather. Why, that would be outrageous. Moving just so they could camp out? Let’s cut them off benefits and confiscate their tent!
On the subject of contradictions, but did anyone else find Andrew Bolt’s attack on Greta Thunberg rather strange given his stance on Adam Goodes? Bolt, you may remember, suggested that Goodes bullied a poor, thirteen year old girl who wouldn’t have realised that the word “Ape” was racist and Goodes should have been able to pick her age in a second and not pointed at her so that security could remove her. However, two years of age makes an enormous difference and Bolt has no trouble writing, “I have never seen a girl so young and with so many mental disorders treated by so many adults as a guru” about Thunberg. He went on to say worse…
But you’re probably right. It’s better not to give him the publicity he so pathetically craves.
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