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Rossleigh is a writer, director and teacher. As a writer, his plays include “The Charles Manson Variety Hour”, “Pastiche”, “Snap!”, “That’s Me In The Distance”, “48 Hours (without Eddie Murphy)”, and “A King of Infinite Space”. His acting credits include “Pinor Noir Noir” for “Short and Sweet” and carrying the coffin in “The Slap”. His ten minutes play, “Y” won the 2013 Crash Test Drama Final.

The Liberals Need Moira Deeming!

Sorry, that was meant to read: “The Liberals Need More Redeeming!” but phonics is a harsh master… or mistress, depending on your bent…

Actually, I just realised that one shouldn’t be allowed to decide whether phonics is a master or a mistress because some things – like gender – are determined by what God said. And if God was a bit unclear, then it should be the parents who get to decide one’s gender.

Take me. When I was growing up my father said that I was being “a bit of a girl”, so I embraced that and immediately stopped trying to do anything that involved strength or manual labour. Yes, it was a bit sexist, but hey, what can a girl do?

Oh wait, we have a problem with parents deciding one’s gender and it should be left to the child themselves when they reach an appropriate age…

No, actually we don’t support that either.

Look, I think there are two basic problems with anyone whose gender is different from what we think it should be, and that’s sport and bathrooms… And by bathrooms, I mean safe spaces for women. And by “we” I mean the people who have the right to decide that gender is always clear except for those times we don’t want to talk about because it ruins our argument!

For some reason, I am reminded of being at the urinal and having some guy say to me, “Cold today, isn’t it?” If I’d been braver I’d have said, “Stop looking at my penis!!” (This may be a joke… but it’s only a joke that those with a penis will get… or those who’ve looked at penis on a cold day… or… actually it may not be a joke at all…)

I think it’s the idea that we all need safe spaces, but I can’t quite understand how banning trans people from women’s bathrooms makes them safer. I mean, I get the idea to some extent, but to my limited male brain, it’s like, “Wow, there’s a rule I can’t dress up as a woman, go in to a bathroom and attack a woman. I was prepared to break all those other laws but this one will stop me in my tracks because in order to enforce it, there are security guards checking genitals as one enters…”

I more than happy to let someone who isn’t Posie Parker – a dead giveaway of a name – explain to me what I’m missing here.

Anyway, there’s a bit of an irony about the fact that Moira Deeming sounds like More Redeeming, given her strong Christian beliefs. Of course, when I say strong Christian beliefs I mean the ones that are taken from the bit in the Bible where God issues the Ten Commandments which include the one about not allowing transgender people to read to kids…

Mm, upon checking I find that there’s no specific commandment unless they’re reading to kids on the Sabbath and it’s the one that goes: “Remember the Sabbath and keep it holy and remember if you’re prepared to work on that day, then you’re a sinner who doesn’t deserve penalty rates…”

Or something like that. I’m doing the Ten Commandments from memory, which enables me to forget all the ones that don’t suit me, such as “Thou shalt not bear false witness,” so I can lie my ass off and not have my neighbour covet it.

Or the one about “Thou shalt not commit adultery unless you’re as pissed as Barnaby and don’t intend to remember it unless the press find out!”

Whatever, I did intend to discuss economics tonight after Peter Dutton reminded us the fundamental commandment of our times: “Labor can’t manage money.”

The federal Liberal Party (and the Murdoch media) are reminding me of the famous experiment by Solomon Asch where he tested the nature of conformity and discovered that if you put people in a room where everyone else was clearly giving the wrong answer a large number would just acquiesce and give the same answer.

It’s a strategy that’s worked for years. The only trouble now is that they’re not controlling the room and once someone says, “You’re all fucked in the head if you can’t see that that line is the longest, then you’re either corrupt or stupid and in the case of that guy with the lump of coal, probably both!”, then the only people who won’t nod are the confederates in the experiment.

Sometime later, I’ll talk about inflationary and non-inflationary budgets, but until now I’m just going to leave you with the idea that sometime soon the Liberals will start to argue that the only reason that Labor has a surplus is because they’re high taxing government and that, if Angus was Treasurer, he would have given away a large part of that in tax cuts to the sort of people who’d be happy to employ your grandmother so that she could add to her pension.

The Greens better get their act together because it’s only a matter of time before the ABC have to introduce their leader as “the alternative Prime Minister”…

Oh wait, it’s only when the Liberals are in Opposition that the leader is the alternative PM!

Yes, the Liberals need more redeeming…

But I suspect that they may be beyond redemption!

 

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So, I Love To Say, “I told you so…”

If you’ve been reading me religiously…

That’s a really funny term when I think about it… Shouldn’t it be “regularly”? After all, doesn’t “religiously” mean without question?

Oh, it’s all ok. I looked it up and it does have the meaning of “with consistent and conscientious regularity”…

Anyway, if you’ve been reading me “with consistent and conscientious regularity”… or religiously… whichever, you’ll know by now that you should never doubt me. Remember when I first predicted a surplus?

No?

Ok, I don’t actually remember either but it was several months ago. And even if we can’t find the first mention, I told you about it a week or so before the Budget and before everyone else jumped on the bandwagon.

This is all just gloating and I guess some people would like me to stop and answer the question:

What’s so good about a surplus?

Which, I will agree, is a good question. A damned, fine question.

Well, it’s like this. We have inflation and during times of inflation anything that sucks money out of the economy is meant to be good at taming inflation…

In theory…

The trouble with Economics is that it’s a bit like Psychology and by that I simply mean that it’s not like Science or Maths… It’s more like English where you can interpret a poem any way you like as long as it’s not the wrong way…

Which, is sort of what I’m saying about Economics…

In order to be an economist you have to agree with all the people setting your exam papers until you’ve earned you’re right to be as wrong as all the other economists…

At this point, I could start talking about the debates between Keynesian followers and the followers of Milton Friedman but that would just be the sort of distraction that leads the one person still reading after two more paragraphs to wonder why there isn’t a “My Budget Rules” or “MasterAccountant” equivalent of those cooking shows. Yes, that person would speculate, they could not only discuss the relative merits of double-entry accounting, but in the special challenge section they could come up with creative ways to cook the books… And the best accountant gets to spend a week at the Cayman Islands where they can meet their perfect match and…

Anyway… Look, I get it.

This Budget has upset a lot of people…

Of course it’s outrageous that people are below the poverty line.

However, politically, there’s no way out with that one. If the government were to adopt the recommendations and raise the rate, we’d have even more screaming about the alleged inflationary effect of the Budget which is the consensus opinion of all those economists apart from those who can be ignored because they’d upset the consensus and the interviewer wouldn’t be able to say that economists are all saying that a Budget surplus is inflationary when any simple textbook would tell you otherwise. (Of course, a deficit isn’t necessarily inflationary, nor is a surplus deflationary; it depends what’s spent where!)

And, politically, we’d have even more people – like Peta Credlin – asserting that we’re giving money to “bludgers” while ordinary people get nothing, as well as people on social media telling us that they have no reason to keep working when they could quit their $100k plus job and live in luxury on unemployment benefits now that the extra $40 a fortnight could enable them to buy a coffee every second day.

But notwithstanding the politics of the thing, I’d have to say that it’s strange that people went from saying before the Budget that it was outrageous that people under 55 weren’t going to get any increase to being even more outraged that it was only about $3 a day. When you say that it only buy a loaf of bread, it’s quite clear that you aren’t the one who can’t afford the loaf of bread!

Ok, it’s true that the increase will be quickly swallowed up by rising prices so stop yelling at ME! I’m not the one who chose the amount and I’m certainly not going to complain about rising taxes if they introduce a rate closer to the poverty line, or better yet a Universal Basic Income, eliminating the need for all time and money checking up to see that people are really miserable while being unemployed and if they’re not, what can we do about it?

Listening to the budget reply from Peter Dutton, I did have the strange experience of thinking that’s a good idea when he spoke about allowing the unemployed to earn more before they lost any payment. I can see several pluses to this idea, but the strangeness of the experience quickly disappeared when he explained that this was INSTEAD of the $40 increase. Yep, you can get even more, you lucky soul, by working ten hours or so hours a fortnight. All you need to do is find an employer who wants you for a small amount of time and if you can do that it’s all fine but if you can’t, you don’t deserve any increase and we’ve saved the taxpayers enough to have an even BIGGER surplus.

Of course, as we all understand from listening to the Coalition over the past few days: A surplus is no big deal. Anyone could have done it. It’s like being a football coach…

You know, come Monday there are heaps of people who know exactly what the coach did wrong and if they were in the same position they’d have an undefeated record. Unfortunately, for Pete and Angus, they were in the same position and they didn’t produce the winning formula, so maybe Bazza telling you what Michael Voss did wrong has more credibility.

 

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Shame The Coronation Lacked Roy And H.G.’s Insights!

As someone who takes no more than a passing interest in the Royal Family, I found myself watching King Charles III’s Coronation. I know, I know, you probably think that I should be interested in the person who has the ultimate say on all our laws and who may with just the stroke of a pen dismiss the Governor-General for no other reason than Linda Hurley starts singing…

Actually, that would be damned fine reason, but the point I’m making is that Charles could step in and announce that he’s appointing David Attenborough as our GG with the express instruction that any legislation supporting fossil fuels is to be sent back to the Parliament without Royal Assent.

Whatever, I found myself watching the Coronation and checking the Twitter comments at the same time. It was unfortunate that they weren’t scrolling along the bottom of the screen as some programs have been known to do, but I should clear up some of the misconceptions:

  • This was a Coronation and not – as some suggested – a silly hat competition with the winner getting a ride in a gold carriage. I mean this was obvious from the fact that Julie Bishop wasn’t the winner.
  • A remark that Princess Anne “was mounted within minutes of leaving the Abbey” by one of the commentators was misunderstood by many. It was not the result of some inappropriate activity in the service due to boredom, but referred to her being ready to ride her horse as part of the procession.
  • Some suggested that Prince Andrew and Prince Harry were seated together. I cannot confirm this, as they were apparently blocked by the feather on Princess Anne’s hat. However, I can say that it wasn’t an attempt to ostracise the poor man by seating him next to someone who’s been accused of having inappropriate relationships. No, Prince Andrew was more than happy to sit next Harry because it took attention away from the fact that his date for the occasion had been unable to get leave from her boarding school because of upcoming exams.
  • It is quite normal for the wife of the King to be called Queen Consort and this does not refer to any consorting that Camilla may or may not have done.
  • It is not usual for the corgis to attend the Coronation. They have not, in fact, been put down because none of the Royals wanted them. They are living with Fergie because none of the Royals wanted them.
  • The Archbishop was not expected to know his lines even though he’s had years to learn them. The fact that someone had to hold a book for him to read from is one of those adorable traditions where priests would show off by reading when most of the congregation couldn’t.
  • No, it would not have been funny if Charles had suffered a heart attack and we had to do this all again in a few weeks.
  • There were shots of people camped out, but they were there because they wanted to be there and not because they were homeless. If they were homeless they’d have been moved to somewhere less visible so that their poverty didn’t upset the King on such an important day.
  • The various gowns of the priests and bishops are not considered dresses (Julie excepted!) I feel the need to point this out so that the groups in Victoria that are protesting Drag Queen story time don’t feel the need to shut down churches. Of course, the protestors are upset that they’re being called Nazis when only one of them is actually a nazi. The rest are just ordinary people prepared to disrupt democratically elected councils, interrupt events where children are being read to and to burn any books that they believe are inappropriate. This is no reason to compare them to people who disrupted government and burnt books.

I fell asleep and missed the part where I was meant to swear my allegiance to the King so I’ll just have to wait until the next monarch…

 

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Vote Dutton, Get Nuttin’! Vote Labor, Get Disappointed…

If you look at politics over the past fifty years or so, certain patterns start to emerge both federally and in state elections. The pattern has consistently gone something like this:

  1. The Coalition are in power because people have been convinced that they’re the more stable party who will govern soundly and be economically responsible.
  2. Eventually people start to notice that this is not happening and get sick of the self-congratulations of the Coalition and think that Labor deserve a chance and that they seem less dangerous than previous Labor governments who were all communists hell-bent on destroying the country by thinking that unions had the right to push for better working conditions.
  3. Once enough people agree with Point 2 and no longer believe what the papers are telling them, Labor wins enough seats to form government.
  4. Some people will express disappointment that Labor aren’t the communists that the papers promised, and that they’re no better than the other mob, but most people are happy for a while because while they haven’t solved everything, there’s one or two glaring problems that have been fixed… such as the Liberal leader who was in charge is gone and the Labor leader who’s taken over hasn’t shown themselves to be a complete tosser yet.
  5. The Coalition do a bit of rethink and stay out of the limelight and try to work out what they can do to regain power. This might mean saying something like, “Well, we really wanted to stick with Harold but once he didn’t come back from that swim, we made the mistake of picking the wrong guy and… Look, it isn’t about us, have a look at what Labor’s doing!” But they usually realise that the best thing they can do is become invisible and hope people forget who they are. (Recently, this hasn’t been happening thanks to Peter Dutton’s attempts to make himself more visible.)
  6. With the Coalition only bobbing up whenever Labor make a mistake, people forget how bad they were and start to grow disappointed with Labor.
  7. Eventually there’ll be some world-wide crisis (oil shocks, runaway inflation, GFC) and the media will give free rein to the Coalition’s argument that this is all Labor’s fault even though the rest of the world is going through the same problem. By this stage, Labor will have also actually made some bad decisions so when it’s all combined, a bright, shiny new Coalition will be elected and they’ll proceed to talk about needing time, core and non-core promises and tell us all that we must have misunderstood: no cuts didn’t mean that there wouldn’t be some adjustments to the funding, and that a promise not to axe something merely meant that they wouldn’t be using that wood-cutting tool when they got rid of it.
  8. Labor have a period of soul-searching where they agree with the media that they got it wrong, while the new government will remind us that the Coalition never get anything wrong and that it’s only the electorate that make mistakes occasionally, which will start the whole process of Now We Remember Why We Voted These Guys Out…

Of course, if that last point about guys looks a little sexist, remember we are talking about the Coalition, so there’s a good chance it was mainly guys because they don’t believe in quotas for women, but quotas for National Party Ministers are just fine.

Anyway, I just thought that I’d remind people of the patterns as we approach a Budget which I’m sure will be disappointing for many. Ok, it may be more disappointing for Peter Dutton than most people but I’m keeping my options open.

On one hand, there’s a delicate balancing act that Labor have to walk between doing anything vaguely humane – which we all know it what’s called “socialism” on Sky After Dark – and keeping the financial markets happy… So you could say that they’re stuck between a rock and a hard place. (Of course, I wouldn’t say that because I try to avoid meaningless cliches, but I’m certainly not going to stop you.) On the other hand, Labor are extremely fortunate for the first time in my lifetime. For once, the thing hit while the Coalition was in power so the billions of dollars in debt racked up during Covid can’t be blamed on Labor… All right, that won’t stop Rupert’s reactionaries from trying to, but no thinking person is going to say that all that JobKeeper money was all the fault of the Labor Opposition for not stopping Josh and Scott. Of course, it’s also true that no thinking person could have blamed Labor for the oil shocks of the seventies or the GFC, but that didn’t stop the media from somehow suggesting that the economic conditions were the result of something Labor had done, or not done.

Now, while it seems that in the upcoming Budget they’ll be damned whatever, it’s also true that – politically speaking – they’re in a great position. They can get close to delivering the surplus that Joe Hockey promised the Liberals would deliver “in their first year and every year after”. This will undoubtedly lead to complaints that they should have done more in terms of cost of living relief from both the left and the Coalition where Angus Taylor will assure us that, not only should there have been more help for struggling taxpayers, but that his party would have delivered an even bigger surplus.

Politically speaking, however, it gives them the chance to wait until the Reserve Bank has managed to achieve its aim of suppressing inflation. The nearest analogy I can give is to suggest that the attitude of the Reserve Bank at the moment is rather like asking a vet if they can stop your dog barking only to have them put the poor mutt down. It may be effective but it’s completely lacking in both understanding and compassion. Once the Reserve Bank has the economy heading towards a recession, not only will they pat themselves on the back and say job done, but there’ll be a great opportunity for Labor to step up and say, “You know what this pre-election budget needs? A really healthy stimulus in the form of all sorts of things that people wish we’d done when we first got elected…”

Politically speaking, Labor aren’t in a terrible position at all. But then, politically speaking, neither is the worst dictator. Yes, it would be nice if Labor spring a few surprises next Tuesday and actually do things to help the most disadvantaged but I suspect that – if they get the chance – they’ll prefer an “up yours” to the Liberals by having Chalmers announce a small surplus.

 

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Why Labor Are Like The Romans!

Some of you will undoubtedly be familiar with the film “The Life Of Brian” where Reg (John Cleese) rhetorically asks what have Romans ever done for us, only to have one of his followers pipe up with: “The aqueduct”. A minutes later:

“All right, but apart from the sanitation, the medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, a fresh water system, and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”

“Brought peace.”

“Oh. Peace? Shut up!”

I was reminded of this the other day when someone tweeted a list of Labor’s achievements in the first ten months in office which included the national anti-corruption commission, the increase in the minimum wage, cheaper childcare, commitment to the Voice, etc.

Ok, I won’t go on with the list because I’ll start to sound like Reg’s followers. However, I would just like to point out that two of the major criticisms of Labor are things bequeathed to them by the dead Coalition government: the Stage 3 tax cuts and AUKUS. While it’s true that they’re in government and they could stop the Stage 3 tax cuts, AUKUS is a little bit more problematic for them. Were Albanese to stand up and announce that we’re cancelling another submarine deal then he’d leave Australia looking like it really has no idea what it wants in a submarine and by the time we work that out, we’ll have missed the war that we need them for and it would be a shame to be left out because – like the Olympics – when it comes to wars we’re there any time we’re invited.

As for the Stage 3 tax cuts, it’s generally agreed that they’re far too generous, potentially inflationary and the money could be better spent on a whole range of things. The difficulty is that tinkering with them requires the sort of political will that Sir Humphrey would describe as “courageous”. This is not to say that Labor shouldn’t do something courageous; merely that they’re concerned about squawking over broken promises after Labor changed the superannuation rules for balances over $3 million was bad enough because apparently when they said “no SIGNIFICANT changes to superannuation” that included a change that only affected half a percent of the wealthiest accounts.

The question all political parties frequently ask themselves is: Do I want to do the right thing or do I want to get elected? Of course, one could take the view that – long term – doing the right thing should lead to you being elected more often than not. However, this completely overlooks the fact that even when politicians get it right, it may not be until several years later that this becomes apparent. For example, when the Whitlam government approved the purchase of Jackson Pollock’s “Blue Poles” for $1.3 million they were not only attacked for such a waste of money on something as silly as a modern art piece, but, even worse, it made them the subject of ridicule. The fact that the painting is now worth at least $500,000,000 hasn’t led to any of the critics saying that they were wrong… Possibly because a lot of the critics are dead, but the point remains.

There’s hardly anyone who’s trying to justify keeping the Stage 3 tax cuts and refusing to raise the rate of the unemployment benefit on any other grounds than: We promised not to touch the tax cuts and we still intend to keep our promise no matter how silly it is to do so because we remember how much criticism Julia Gillard copped because of the “No Carbon Tax thing” even though she only said it once. But Stage 3 tax cuts aren’t an issue for this Budget because they don’t come in till after then next one, so Dr Jim can just keep saying that, “We have no plans to change them,” and leave it at that.

No, I suspect that the reluctance to raise the rate has to do with something that the Liberals call “sound fiscal management”, which is all about balancing the Budget and that’s the thing about Labor is that they’re all about spending. And tax. Spending and tax. Whereas the Liberals are all about Jobs and Growth, which they had a plan for even if that plan was never explicitly stated beyond the fact that they were in favour of both and opposed to taxing and spending. (Of course, most people would think that if you want to balance the Budget that raising taxes is one way to do it but I’m not the expert here…)

Anyway, I did go out on a limb a few months back and speculate that it would be funny if the Liberals could drag those “Back In Black” mugs out of the warehouse and sell them to Labor if Labor were to actually do the impossible and actually deliver a surplus.

As someone once observed: “Making predictions is hard… especially about the future.” And I once said that I don’t make predictions and I never will.

But, with the Budget only eight days away, I’m prepared to make a series of bold calls :

  • In the next week, while some in the Coalition will lambast Labor for reviewing the spending that they set up under the Infrastructure Fund, Angus Taylor will call for restraint and demand that Labor rein in their spending to reduce the deficit and ease pressure on inflation. Nobody will ask about the apparent contradiction here.
  • The Pharmacy Guild guy will continue to wear his white shirt everywhere, as though he’s just come out of the pharmacy where he works as a pharmacist even though it’s highly unlikely that he has. He will call for greater support for pharmacies and talk about all those bankrupted by a decision that’s yet to have an impact.
  • Malcolm Turnbull will announce that it’s about time that someone did a Menzies, by which he means that an ex-PM forms a new political party from the remnants of the conservative parties.
  • Tony Abbott will remind people that he was once PM and if it hadn’t been for his removal we’d all be a lot better off now because he’d have fixed everything.
  • Malcolm will say that he didn’t mean Tony because he’s too divisive.
  • Tony will say that Malcolm’s the divisive one.
  • Labor will announce a surplus for the first time since the GFC.
  • Peter Dutton, Angus Taylor and Michaelia Cash will all say that they would have delivered a bigger one. This – not the surplus – will be the front-page story in The Australian.
  • Someone will ask the obvious question that if you can deliver a surplus why couldn’t you raise the rate? It won’t be anyone from the Murdoch Misleaders.

Ok, I may be wrong but I did predict Malcolm Turnbull knocking off Tony a year before it happened, Scott Morrison doing the Bradbury when everyone was talking about whether Dutton or Julie Bishop would be PM and one or two other things… All right, two or three good predictions out of thousands may not be a perfect record, but it’s better than the Reserve Bank and most economists.

Finally, just so I’m not called a Labor sycophant, I would like to point out that there is a flip side to the “What have the Romans ever done for us?” scene. While they may have done all those things, in the end, they were still an occupying army so the good that they brought did come with a price… although when I think about it, they may still have been better than Herod who, by all reports, didn’t like children very much.

“Stwike him, Centurion, vewy woughly!”

 

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Labor: “Because They Don’t Give A Sh#t, Right?”

Ok, just to be clear here, I’m not writing about the lack of action on unemployment benefits. I’m saving any comments on that until after the Budget because, well, I can sort of guess how that’s going to play out. Either Labor will do nothing to raise the rate and be widely criticised for it, or they’ll raise the rate by a certain amount and be widely criticised for it. If they were to lift it by say $8 a day, many people would say that’s nothing. And while it probably isn’t enough, $8 is a lot of money to someone who doesn’t have it. If you suddenly have enough money to buy a loaf of bread, it’s a lot better than when you didn’t.

There is, of course, no Goldilocks figure, because if they were to raise it by as much as the inquiry suggested, then we’d have a plethora of cafe owners complaining that this will make it impossible for them to get workers owing to the “generous” unemployment payments.

And speaking of cafe owners, I find it surprising that none of them have been asked about the recent change that makes it possible for some people to get two months’ supply of prescription medicine at a time when it used to only be one month.

While they didn’t ask cafe owners, I did see a really interesting clip of Trent Twomey who was the Pharmacy Guild President, and he was responsible for the quote I used as a headline. The full quote was:

“And you know, it’s just been a really tough week. I’ve had Labor Party Senators and MPs take their phones of the hook because they don’t give a shit, right… I’m sorry I’m a North Queenslander and I don’t mean to swear.”

Of course, he may have very high standards of what makes a caring government. After all, the previous government generously found $2,415,000 for a pharmacy company to expand, and while this company was a third owned by Twomey’s wife, there was no conflict of interest as Mr Twomey was merely on the board that set out the criteria for the awarding of the grants, and not on the one that made the final decisions. That was a completely different group of people that just gave it to the groups that fitted the criteria that he helped create and the fact that his wife’s company did was just one of those lucky happenstances.

However, it wasn’t this, or even the fact that this LNP member was once a staffer for Warren Entsch, who just yesterday suggested that Mr Twomey should stand for the Senate rather than his seat of Leichhardt. It wasn’t even the fact he’s a North Queenslander and apparently swears without meaning to.

No, it was simply what he said in the interview that I found perplexing and I don’t just mean that idea that Labor Party people had taken their phones off the hook, which is pretty hard with a mobile phone, but would render the landlines in their offices unable to take calls from anyone.

Apparently, one single mum had got “her dad to put her house up as equity”, which raises all sorts of questions. For example, is she so poor at financial affairs that she didn’t know how to do that herself, which would suggest that her impending bankruptcy may be the result of factors other than the changes to the collection of scripts? Or does her father own her own house and if that’s the equity which enabled her to buy a pharmacy, doesn’t that mean that he’s the one who’ll be bankrupt? Or will she be homeless after the bank repossesses the house? Or… I mean the comment leads to more questions than it answers.

And then there was the 28 year old Victorian and his girlfriend who saved up for a house. They just got married and the house went up in value and “he put that up to buy his first pharmacy”. North Queenslander Twomey told us: “He’s in Victoria, he’s now bankrupt!” which is lucky because he’s gone broke he’s rung up too much debt and before the changes come in so he can sell our before the tsunami of bankrupt pharmacies put their houses on the market driving down prices… And given they managed to save up for a house before he’d even hit thirty, I’d suggest that he and wife must have good jobs which they can go back to.

Ok, it’s true that we may be talking about potential bankruptcies here, but I’d have to say that this is a strange idea coming from a potential LNP candidate. After all, we’re constantly told how people in business are taking risks and putting themselves on the line and it’s hard and that’s why they deserve a great reward when it pays off. Surely then we can’t worry when a government decision that reduces costs for a handful of people leads to the end of inefficient businesses who can’t make ends meet. Isn’t that the way capitalism’s meant to work?

Now this doesn’t mean that I don’t understand the tears of this North Queenslander who didn’t mean to swear this time, unlike a few months ago when he told us that being able “to prescribe, dispense, administer and review medicines” didn’t constitute specialities and that ‘no one gives a shit’. He didn’t say that he didn’t mean to swear that time, so I presume that he did. He also told us:

‘Currently, I can dispense all things. And I can review all things. But I cannot prescribe all things, and I cannot administer all things. I need to be able to do all four of those for all medicines for all people.’

This led to a number of medical professionals suggesting – rather unkindly – that pharmacists might have a conflict of interest in prescribing a drug when it would be better to suggest something like a specialist appointment or exercise or something non-medicinal, but that seems very cynical. Rather like when Murray Watt – a Labor senator – rudely suggested that Twomey may have had a conflict of interest when setting out the criteria that lead to a company with links to his wife getting a grant.

In my opinion, Watt was the one with the conflict of interest because he didn’t make it clear that Twomey was an LNP member and probable future candidate!

 

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The Weak In Politics!

Yes, yes, I know, all right! I was channelling Donald Trump who, this week, referred to Biden as a “week president” even though he’s been there for years now, which is much longer than a week. Unfortunately, it turns out that another post where one-time Trump lawyer was called a “cereal liar” was not one of Humpty Trumpty’s at all. It was, in fact, a parody. However, these days parody is just as plausible as reality.

For example, take Jacinta Nampijinpa Price’s praise for Lachlan Murdoch:

“Of course Lachlan Murdoch, whose family have provided a beacon of light in a sea of woke darkness, via the necessary media platforms that deliver genuine, common sense and fact-driven News reporting for our benefit.”

Admittedly this was prior to the defamation settlement with Dominion, where in a victory not seen since Christian Porter took on the ABC, Rupert and Lachlan managed to not only have a massive win, but they also managed to save Dominion from embarrassment in court by settling and offering to pay them a figure in excess of a billion dollars… Of course, when it’s converted to US dollars, it’s a lot less. And if you think that it’s not that much less, let me say that I would be more than happy to live on it.

Anyway, I didn’t want to focus on the Murdochs because, as we all know, their days as a significant news organisation are over and they’ve been reduced to publishing the local newsletter for the Liberal Party. I was more concerned about the sins of the Labor Party today.

I could start with Dan Andrews. For those of you not in Victoria, there was recently an IBAC inquiry into the awarding of a contract to a union before the 2018 election because it was suggested that there was pressure put on the public servants to ensure that the union got the million-dollar gig. While I’m sure some of you remember that the Morrison government assured us that ministers should be making the decisions rather than public servants and that it was perfectly fine to give billion dollar contracts without tender to companies that had nothing more than an office in a bathing box at an unspecific location, this was given to a union, which is different because while unions are dodgy, no company in the history of the world has ever been involved in corrupt behaviour, including the one who paid me to write that sentence.

Anyway, the inquiry found that, while the approaches by certain staff may have put undue pressure on public servants, the pressure fell short of corruption as IBAC defined it. This was outrageous… Of course, when I say that it was outrageous, that’s because lots of Liberals and fellow travellers were outraged because when they set up the rules governing IBAC, they were in power and so they set rules that made it almost impossible to find a politician guilty of anything unless they’d already been charged, convicted and written a memoir where they admitted everything. This high bar was not meant for the Labor Party and it’s outrageous that the same rules apply to them.

The trouble with politics is, of course, that we don’t apply the same standards to everyone and that we tend to approach it rather like our support for a football team. We don’t think that there’s a problem when our team gets away with something that should have been penalised, but when the opposition do it, then the whole system is corrupt and the officials are probably in cahoots with the opposing coach.

Speaking of sport though, I must say that I used this analogy today and that I was rather pleased with myself: The Liberals are like a team that’s at the bottom of the ladder and losing badly, but content themselves with the idea that other teams have been there and played finals just a short time later. However when asked whether they need a new coach or better recruiting or a new game plan, they tell us that it’s all fine and they may even get their past captain out of retirement because he was the one who led them to all those wins back in… what year was it again? Anyway, he’s an icon…

And while sport is a game, politics is about people’s lives. While some have the luxury of saying that both sides of politics are just as bad as each other, I’d like to point out that the very phrase “both sides of politics” shows just how much we treat it like a sporting contest. There are a lot more than two sides and it’s about time we started insisting that politicians stop trying to win and we get a bit more bipartisan consensus… Yes, I know it’s those other ones who are causing division; I’m on the same side as me…

Labor were foolish to go into the last election promising to preserve the Stage 3 tax cuts but it’s too late to be wise in retrospect. Now they’re stuck between the desirability of – at the very least – tinkering with them, and the inevitability that if they do something as simple as say we’ll stagger them over the next three years, they’ll be attacked by the Opposition with support from some in the media who are currently saying that the tax cuts are unaffordable and inflationary, and if Labor can’t balance the Budget then they should give up and give the Coalition a chance because they’re such sound economic managers that they’ve… oh, did I mention that the Coalition stopped the boats… or at least, Scott Morrison stopped any news about boats…

When it comes to raising the rate of unemployment benefits, there’s not really a case against it. Ok, I can think of several but then I can also think of several arguments for getting someone to wander into a meeting of the NRA and shouting that there’s a shooter loose with a gun and can someone just take him out?

I mean, it would be nice to balance the Budget, but given that it hasn’t happened lately and I’ve been completely incapable of balancing my own budget since secondary school when I spent my lunch money on Twisties and kept the balance, you can sort of see that there’s an argument that somehow balancing a budget may not be the healthiest option – either personally or for the nation as a whole.

Yeah, I guess we don’t want the unemployed living on Twisties…

 

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The No Case – Which Is A Little Ambiguous, I Know…

Now, when I wrote the “The No Case”, I suddenly realised that it sounded like I was arguing that there was no No Case… which after hearing their arguments, I’m starting to think that maybe that’s about right.

I mean, first we have people complaining that there is an information campaign being funded, so why isn’t there a disinformation campaign being funded?

But then today the “No Campaign” released their ad campaign and their slogan.

Basically, it said:

“Will the Voice cure cancer? Will it prevent climate change? Will it cure erectile dysfunction? Will it bring peace to the Middle East? Will it get the Russians out of Ukraine? Don’t know? Vote No…”

Ok, I may be guilty of saying something that’s slightly wrong but compared to some of the the things that the “No case” is saying, I think of got the gist of it right…

The slogan of “Don’t know? Vote No” is the sort of thing that Scotty From Mad Men would have come up with: that wonderful trick of advertising companies of helping something to stick in your brain by making it rhyme, because when something sticks, it clicks. Slogans like “Be Wise, Alkalise!” or “Beanz means Heinz” (which only partly rhymes even though they’ve deliberately spelled Beans incorrectly to make it look like it rhymes with Heinz…).

But less trivially, when you break down what they’re saying it’s this: “Look, if you’re ignorant that’s fine, don’t inform yourself: Just vote no.”

Obviously, this would be a lot less effective because, not only doesn’t it rhyme, it draws attention to the central fact that the campaign led by Warren Mundane is mainly aimed at appealing to the ignorant…

Now before you get on your high horse and say that you’re well-informed and you’ve read the hundreds of pages of detail and you’re still voting no because you have some concerns, let me assure you that it’s not you I’m talking to… just as it’s not you that the ad campaign is aimed at. After all, it actually says, “If you don’t know…”, which is a pretty clear indication that it’s not appealing to the informed.

Still it would be interesting if Labor or The Greens or the Independents were to apply this strategy to the Liberals. You know something like: “If you don’t know what the Liberal Party’s energy policy is, don’t vote for them!” Although in that case, it might qualify you to stand as a Coalition candidate.

Whatever, it does seem as though the Coalition are prepared to sell out First Nations people by doing whatever it takes to disrupt the Referendum because Labor are the ones proposing it. Since Dutton took over as leader, it’s hard to think of anything that he’s actually supported, even the censuring of Scott Morrison over the fact that he failed to keep his own people informed about his multiple ministries. “Look a lot of us are pretty upset that he did all this stuff behind our backs and we think it was wrong, but putting that on the record,, no, we’re going to go and pat him on the back after the motion.”

Imagine if Pete and Warren and Jacinta had been around in 1967 when there was that Referendum allowing the Aboriginal population to be included in the census and for the Commonwealth to make laws around race. We’d have had: “What laws?” and “We need more detail as to how they’ll be counted”; and “How will we get the census forms to people living in remote communities?” and “This won’t lead to any practical improvement in the everyday lives and any closing of the gap!”

Actually, that last point might actually have some validity…

But even if it does, that’s still no reason for voting down the 1967 Referendum, any more than the fear that the Voice won’t make enough of a difference. The point is that the Voice will either do some good or, in the worst case, do not much at all. Either way, it’s worth a chance.

What are we left with, if those who have No idea were to succeed? We’d have to the garbled mess that Jacinta Nampijinpa Price argued for on Insiders which was a lot of local voices that wouldn’t have a central voice in Canberra because once it went to Canberra then people would have to listen to them and that wouldn’t be right because once they were in Canberra then they’d be part of the elite and not worth listening to. You know, they’d be a Canberra voice like her and all the other politicians, so we need to just do something else.

Basically, the poverty of the No case is in their slogan. In general, I’d argue: “If you don’t know, FIND OUT before you open your mouth and make a fool of yourself!”

 

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The Obvious Question That Peter Dutton Should Be Asked At The Next Presser…

Before I move on to Peter Dutton…

Yep, you’re right we’re all sick of Peter Dutton. I mean, I know that if you snuggle up to him that you’ll find that he’s not a monster and if you talk to him privately you’ll find that he’s a really, really warm bloke and that all this beating up on the vulnerable is only because it’s his day job. In private he’s more than happy to show compassion and be nice to anyone who has a problem with getting a visa for an au pair girl or two…

But I feel that I need to question if the media have been asking the obvious question before I start talking about the things that need intelligent discussion and to give my advice to the current government and the Reserve Bank and just about everyone… Of course, I think you all realise that when I give my advice that it’s just that and that they can take it or leave it and that it doesn’t give me any sort of veto power. Given the way that certain people are behaving, it seems that they think that anyone with the right to give advice has some sort of way of insisting that the advice is listened to.

Before I move on to Dutton though, I’d just like to give you my reasons for opposing any sort of law that gives religious people any sort of rights at all, because, well, the Royal Commission found that some of them were abusing children terribly and if you want to pretend that it’s not happening and that giving religious people any sort of voice will solve the problem then you must be one of those left-wing people that argues that just because some people who have something in common with some other people then we should damn all those and pretend as though it’s the issue…

As for the Royal Family, well, need I say more… they’ve been taking advantage of children for generations. From arranged marriages that were all about forging the right alliances to denying their children any sort of love because they have nannies to provide that, the Royal Family has been so dysfunctional that if they were in a working-class suburb there’d be a social worker quitting out of sheer frustration at their lack of humanity… And apparently prior to the 20th century they were even worse.

But back to more topical topics…

It seems that Peter Dutton is adopting the strategy that was so successful for the opposition to the mining tax. On one hand, it was so unfair and costly that it was going to drive all the mining companies out of Australia and that they were going to shift their mining operations to some tax haven that not only didn’t have oppressive taxes but didn’t have any mineral deposits, thus enabling them to make the sort of losses that didn’t lead to having any profits to tax. On the other hand, the mining tax wasn’t going to raise the sort of revenue that made it worth creating…

Similarly, Voldemort…

Sorry, I know I shouldn’t be making fun of Dutton’s appearance. It’s something that he can’t help. Apparently when two or three of his follows do the correct incantation, he has to appear whether he wants to or not.

Mr Dutton is using a similar tactic by suggesting that the Voice won’t have the power to make any significant changes, but it’ll also be so far reaching that it will have the power to veto the Reserve Bank when it wants to raise interest rates… An argument that I’m not sure has the populist appeal that he’s hoping for.

Whatever, we’ve seen the Right Honourable MP, Dutton, attack a reporter by suggesting that their question was a typical ABC question and ask them if they lived locally. Unfortunately for Mr Dutton, they did, but fortunately for Mr Dutton they hadn’t asked the right people if they supported the Voice. They’d been asking the various Indigenous groups about it and the only people worth talking to in Alice Springs are the shipowners and the people in the streets…

Yes, according to Pete, there are only two sorts of Indigenous people, one is not worth listening to because they’re saying things that don’t match what the people in the street are saying, making them some sort of elite, and the other is worth listening to because they tell him that the first group aren’t worth listening to…

However, I haven’t heard any journalist ask the Man Who Nos Everything the important question which is quite simple:

“Given your call to send the AFP in, was there a time when you, as the Minister in Charge of the AFP thought of doing that yourself?”

Yes, I know that his answer will be either that it’s a typical ABC question or that things weren’t as bad under us because I didn’t care then.

But it’s still worth asking.

 

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Back To The Future, Starring Peter Dutton

For those handful of people who haven’t seen it, the plot is basically about Marty McFly whose father, George, is bullied by his boss, the odious Biff Tannen. Marty ends up going back to the year that his parents meet and fall in love and by a series of random events, he disturbs their meeting potentially leading to his non-existence because without them meeting, then he wouldn’t’ exist… which logically would mean that he wasn’t there to upset the meeting leading to the sort of time loop paradox that it’s best not to think about… particularly if you’re a Hollywood film-maker who has two more movies to make, using the same basic formula.

Now, I now that you’re thinking that I’d be casting Peter Dutton as Biff, the not very bright bully but you’d be missing the central theme of the movie which is that altering just one small thing can have enormous consequences for the future, so sometimes you just need to lie low and try to keep out of the way because if you get in the way, it can have consequences such as non-existence for either you or the party you lead. Unfortunately, neither Marty nor Dutton find that easy. In the film, every time Marty gets called chicken, he responds by getting into a fight; similarly every time Petey gets criticised, he responds by attacking someone else. While it’s usually the Labor Party, I suspect that he isn’t too fussy.

If you go back over the past and look at the way Dutton responds to things it fits into two basic patterns:

  1. “We were happy to work on this in a bipartisan way but the other side wouldn’t agree to everything we wanted and insisted on having an opinion so they’ve made cooperation impossible and that’s just typical of those lying, abusive types who don’t understand that this should be above politics, and why we’re the only fit party to govern and why I’m the best person to lead.”
  2. “There’s more to this and I’m aware of things that you don’t know about thanks to my secret information which I can’t make public so you’ll just have to trust me, but I can assure you that there is a lot of incorrect information circulating and only I have the correct information and you shouldn’t question me because you don’t know what I know.”

Examples of the latter are when he talked about the riots on Manus Island, when he talked about the Solicitor-General’s advice and when he said that Sarah Hanson-Young wasn’t followed. Examples of the former are just about everything else he says.

Like Marty, he’s now stuck in a time loop where he’s altered the future and if he doesn’t find a way to fix things, he’ll disappear. Unlike Marty, most of the audience won’t see this as a problem.

When the various political commentators are suggesting that Dutton is safe from any leadership challenge because nobody else wants the job, you have to take a deep breath and actually think about that for a moment so that you get the full implication of what they’re saying which is something like: “Look if Paul Fletcher starts counting the numbers then it’s all over for Dutton because one thing that Fletcher has all over the current leader is that nobody knows who he is.”

Of course there are a whole lot of other questions that nobody is asking like:

  • Did Matt Kean decide not to stand for the NSW leadership so that he could find a safe federal seat and take over from Dutton, saving the party from complete oblivion?
  • If Sussan Ley tries to mount a challenge will she fail because the party isn’t ready for a female leader or because they’re not ready for someone who has a bad hair day even when she’s wearing a wig?
  • If the polls don’t improve will Dutton announce that he’s declaring Queensland is no longer part of Australia and he’s retreating there with the remnants of the LNP to become First Minister And Overlord of The Republic Of Kingsland because the Queen is dead?
  • Will Scott Morrison tell everyone that he was in a shop just moments after praying for God to show him a sign when he saw one which said “Gentlemen” and he took that to me that he should challenge Dutton for the leadership?

While all of these seem far-fetched, consider what’s happened lately. Julian Leeser resigns his shadow cabinet position, but Dutton tells us that he’s in the minority because the overwhelming majority of the Liberal Party MPs support the “No” position, which is a strange argument to mount when you’re quite happy to ignore the polls which tell us that the majority of Australians are supporting a “Yes” position.

Then Dutton demands that Albanese apologise to Leeser because, apparently, it’s all the PM’s fault that the shadow attorney general decided to follow his own beliefs and resign.

And if we go back just a few short weeks when we were being told that there was no need for an Indigenous Voice because there were eleven Indigenous MPs and so they were already well represented in Parliament, but now the very same people who argued that, are telling us that the problem with the Voice is that it’ll be in Canberra. It’ll be a Canberra Voice, like the Canberra bubble and the Canberra republic. No, Canberra things are bad, say the Liberal Party. I mean, you’d never catch them in Canberra… And even if you did, it’s unlikely that the media would report it because what happens in Canberra stays in Canberra…

So, go on, tell me that I’m the one with the far-fetched scenarios, and that the photo of Peter Dutton doesn’t have him fading away by the minute…

 

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Why I Support Liberal Values…

In the wash-up after the Aston by-election, Peter Dutton asserted that there was nothing wrong with Liberal values and that he saw no need for any basic change. This is not to say that he didn’t heed the lessons from the loss which apparently are that Labor ran a nasty campaign by reminding voters that he was leader of the Liberal Party.

Now I’d just like to say that I do support Liberal values. All right I did have to look them up on a website because it’s one of those things that everyone talks about as though we all know what they are because everyone must know or else they’d have to be clearly defined.

Once I looked them up, I found that there were heaps and heaps of them and that they were slightly different in each state but, here in Victoria, they were contained under three subheadings: People, Families and Communities, Free Enterprise and Reward for Effort, and Parliamentary Democracy and Rule of Law. Under each subheading was a list of things such as: “We believe in the inherent dignity, responsibility and potential of all people” and “We believe in conserving, protecting and sustaining our natural environment and national heritage”.

Even the potentially more contentious Free Enterprise and Reward For Effort subheading had things that were hard to argue with. Take this one, for example: “We believe that where the private sector can deliver a service efficiently and fairly, an unnecessary burden should not be imposed on the taxpayer.” While it’s possible to argue about the relative success of privatisation, it’s very hard to suggest that one thinks that “an unnecessary burden” should be imposed. Ok, we may get bogged down in semantics about whether it’s necessary for those who are providing jobs for people out of some sort of altruism should have to pay tax just because they’re making several million a year from their philanthropy.

So, I can certainly see where Mr Dutton is coming from, even if it’s hard to see where he’s going to. But then I guess that’s been the whole problem of the Liberals ever since Tony Abbott was so effective in stopping Labor from achieving anything in government…

Well nothing apart from the NDIS, beginning a National Broadband Network, the Gonski blueprint for reducing inequality in education, a carbon pricing scheme and avoiding a recession during the GFC.

Once Tony replaced Labor he set to work on his agenda for government which basically consisted of the following:

  1. The adults are back in charge and we’re open for business so the economy should be all right now.
  2. Women can have a rolled gold maternity leave scheme so what more do they need? (Later scrapped because it cost too much)
  3. More Knights and Dames will give Australians the sort of rewards they need for their work. However, before we’ve given them to more than a handful of Aussies, we need to give one to Sir Prince Philip… or should that be Prince Sir Philip.
  4. Handing down a Budget that rewarded the lifters and punished the leaners, making the leaners even leaner.

Abbott was considered so bad that the Liberal Party replaced him with Malcolm Turnbull who they’d dumped just a few years earlier. Turnbull, as a millionaire from Point Piper, was a bit too left but after he promised that he wouldn’t do anything as PM apart from tell everyone that things were ok now that they’d removed that Abbott character who didn’t do anything wrong but just didn’t sell his message, the conservatives and the extremists buried the hatchet and made Turnbull leader. Unfortunately, they didn’t bury far enough away from Tony Abbott who once again showed his determination to outdo Labor by becoming even more destabilising than the deposed Kevin Rudd.

Of course, not doing anything wasn’t enough for some in the Liberal Party who felt that even though Turnbull was sticking to his word, he didn’t really want to do nothing and that he probably even harboured impure thoughts about doing something to prevent climate change and, while impure thoughts aren’t enough to convict you in a court of law, Peter Dutton announced a challenge which he lost. After the loss he pledged to be loyal but not so loyal that he wouldn’t rule out another challenge.

When it became clear that simply doing nothing as PM was no longer an option for Turnbull, he did the only thing that he could do which was resign. While this seemed to open the door for Dutton, Scott Morrison had been quietly telling colleagues that when it came to doing nothing as PM, he could make Malcolm look like someone who had a full agenda.

And so it came to pass that those who knew him best, rejected Peter Dutton as leader because they found Scott Morrison a more appealing candidate.

I think that I should probably repeat that: Dutton was rejected by his colleagues in favour of Scotty from Marketing.

Yes, when it comes to Liberal values, I must say that now that I’ve looked, I find that there’s a number that I’d find it hard to disagree with… It just makes me wonder why on earth the Federal Liberal Party ignores most of them, most of the time.

 

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Don’t Let The Prefect Be The Enema Of The Should!!

Ok, I’ve heard the phrase, “Don’t let the perfect be the enemy of the good!” far too many times for me to take it seriously.

What – in the end – does it mean? Apart from you should just roll over and let us do what we want…

Of course, I’m not actually referring to the deal that Labor and The Greens failed to strike back in 2009 because we all know that it didn’t work out well and I would like to speak generally and not about anything specific…

HOWEVER…

I do have a tendency to go where the idea leads me and I may end up talking a wee bit specifically…

Generally…

I don’t see why the perfect would want to be the enemy of the good, given that it’s perfect and all. I mean, why would the perfect go around making enemies? It’s like all those annoying people who are just to good to be true but then you find that they are and you have to re-assess your whole life because you always thought…

Anyway, implicit in the phrase is the idea that if one makes the perfect the enemy of the good, then it’s because of something that the good has done and not because of the perfect’s holier than thou attitude…

Not that the perfect doesn’t have a right to be holier than thou because it’s fuckin’ perfect after all…

Look, you probably know where all this is going: The Liberal Party, in one of the biggest surprises since they voted against censuring Scott Morrison over his multiple ministries because they all understand that the boss should be able to take over whenever his decides that his underlings aren’t God’s chosen, announced their decision of the Voice.

And, I do understand that you can be concerned about the Voice without being a racist. After all, as I pointed out last week, we didn’t get a clear answer on Julian the Lesser’s question about whether the Voice could give advice to the Reserve Bank, and let me be quite clear that I don’t want any Indigenous body telling the Independent Body that they can’t raise interest rates and have Phil Lowe called a racist when he ignores it. I want those interest rate rises because they’re good for us and, like the Liberal Party, I presume that the Voice giving advice to the Bank about not raising rates would be because they don’t know what’s good for them… Just like most of us who don’t seem to understand that it’s better to get inflation under control now, even if it means that we lose our house, because we can surely pick one up cheaper and we’ll have saved so much sleeping in our cars…

I’m not expert. I assume that Peter Dutton has many experts telling him what to do: The National Party who assured us that they were the ones on the ground and apparently, Littleproud wasn’t just talking about Barnaby Joyce there; the Murdoch experts; and that guy in the Senate… Um, I always get Anick and Rentuck confused because it’s hard to follow their deep understandings of all things science.

After all, why waste time being indoctrinated with Year 9 Science when you’ve learned all you need to know out of the Disney book, “Our Friend The Atom(That’s a link to the tv show, not the book, because I was worried that anyone wanting to read it wouldn’t be able to…)

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that the senator who argued that global warming was caused by gravity would have watched this and thought…

No, you’re right it’s a pretty bold statement that Rennick actually thought but anyway…

I’m not making this up. Look I know that it gets a bit confusing at times but I want to make it very clear that these things are not satire:

  1. Rupert Murdoch’s engagement ended two weeks after he said that he hoped to spend the rest of his life with this woman…
  2. Peter Dutton actually spent several months pretending that he was considering his position on the Voice before adopting the position that he wanted practical things so that an apology to the Stolen Generation… Oh no, sorry, wrong one… a Voice isn’t what the indigenous people who said that they wanted a Voice actually meant; they meant that they’d like the Liberal Party to follow the Nationals and tell them what they really wanted because nobody should listen to people in Canberra unless it’s us.
  3. Not only did this man actually do this but he spread it far and wide as though he comes off well by boasting about his grasp of Year 8 Science to people who have university degrees at the very least.

 

 

Ok, I know what some of you are thinking about number 1 and shame on you. Rupert Murdoch is the symptom, not the cause and his death wouldn’t solve all the problems of the world…

But I think it’s important not to let the perfect be the enemy of the good!!

 

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Why The Liberal Party Can’t Win Elections And Other Predictions That Will Looks Silly One Day…

I’m old enough to remember Gough Whitlam winning in 1972… I wasn’t old enough to vote, but I was nearly old enough to be sent off to Vietnam as a 20 year old.

That was one of those strange little bits of hypocrisy that the Liberals are so good at: in 1972 they opposed lowering the voting age because people under 21 weren’t mature enough to consider the issues but they were old enough to be conscripted into a war… or rather, “police action” because there was no war declared so that’s why it took so long for the Vietnam vets to get recognition from the government for many of their issues…

Of course, that’s the past and I only bring it up because, after the Liberals lost the election they were sensible enough to change the policies that they’d only been clinging to because they owned them and by the time they were voted out, only a handful of voters agreed with them. For example, they didn’t go to the next election promising to return National Service and send troops back to Vietnam. Neither have they ever suggested raising the voting age. As for the recognition of China, it’s only in the past few years that they’ve gone back to arguing that Labor are the captives of the CCP.

Jettisoning these policies meant that – by the time Labor had been attacked relentlessly by Murdoch and had started to fall apart at the seams – they could present themselves as a reasonable alternative… even if that reasonable alternative was the party that blocked supply and worked with the Governor-General to organise the closest thing to a coup d’état that this country has seen.

Now when we compare that to the Liberals of today what we find is that Peter Dutton is quite content to argue that they don’t need to change their values and that it’s quite ok, to be a policy free zone because they’re in opposition and that means saying no to everything because that worked for Tony Abbott and you don’t expect anyone in the Liberal Party to come up with any new ideas.

Of course, I could be pedantic and point out that the Liberals in government frequently demanded policy of the Labor Party but, as Dutton said, they intend to stay true to their values and one of the most consistent values of the Liberals has been hypocrisy.

As I may have mentioned before, I once cast a play with a group of students and one of the girls wasn’t happy that she didn’t get the lead. Being a reasonable sort of chap, I met with her and listened to her grievances which, in summary, was that she thought that she was best and so did her friend and that she thought she was better then the girl who got the role and there must be something wrong with my judgement. After listening to her, I didn’t point out that not only wasn’t she the best but she wasn’t the second best or third best or even in the top six. I merely pointed out the obvious fact that she hadn’t been in the room when the others auditioned and neither had her friend so while they formed a consensus they really weren’t in possession of any information that would inform a sensible decision. I merely bring this up because it reminds me of Liberals appearing on Sky After Dark.

The basic trouble with Dutton saying that sooner or later they’ll have to fix up the mess that Labor created is that the subtext is that you voters are all stupid and you’ve voted for the wrong party and it’ll be up to us to repay the enormous debt that Labor has run up when they didn’t pay off the debt that we ran up and interest rates have caught them out and…

Yeah, I don’t think that’s going to play well until we all forget that Josh gave away JobKeeper money to companies whether they needed it or not.

And when Peter Dutton suggests that part of the trouble was that Aston was in Victoria and the Liberals aren’t doing well there… then, the rest of his party can relax because Victoria is a fairly insignificant part of the country and not at all relevant in general election…

And when the Liberals say that they’re no longer expecting business to back them because big business has become a little too woke…

And when they tell us that there was nothing wrong with anything they did. And inquiries into Robodebt and Scotty the MegaMinister and just about anything is just a witch hunt…

And when they say that our policies are just fine because we like them and we don’t need our time in opposition to let everyone forget exactly how bad we were by not making the same mistakes…

I don’t think that they’re going to getting the lead role any time soon.

 

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Aston(ishing) Result…

Ok, a few weeks ago I wrote about how the idea that Labor was a strong chance to win the Aston by-election was ignoring history…

Of course, I was also aware of Black Swan events. These are the events that we think are impossible until they happen and then we re-write history as though they were inevitable and it’s quite remarkable that some people didn’t see them before they happened. For example, the ubiquitous nature of the internet or the GFC.

My point here is that I thought it extremely difficult for Labor to win but I wanted to point that out because – at the time – people were talking as though it was a 50/50 thing.

Let’s be clear here: This is not unprecedented, but the only people who can remember the last time the government won a seat off the opposition in a by-election probably can’t, because they’d be over 103… And that’s assuming that they can remember something that happened a few weeks after their birth…

So why did Labor win?… assuming that they do win because at the time of writing Antony Green is only suggesting that it’s a 99.99999% probability.

I think there are a few factors:

  • Dutton keeps trying to make a big thing about broken election promises. People expect politicians to break promises; they only care about the ones that affect them personally. As I’ve said many times, there aren’t a lot of Labor voters with $3 million in super.
  • Dutton tells the public things that are demonstrably untrue. This is different from broken election promises because it’s treating you like an even bigger fool. It’s one thing to break your promise because you can always argue that you meant to keep it but things have changed since you made it, but it’s another thing to say that the sky is purple and you need to pay me for the unicorn you just bought. When Dutts tries to tell us that Mary Doyle, who campaigned for the seat just ten months ago, isn’t a local but Roshena Campbell is. because she’s managed to rent a property that she plans to move into if she wins, not only do people think it sounds dodgy, but a number of people trying to find a rental property in the area probably think that if she loses, that gives them another possible home.
  • John Howard wrote a letter that was sent to the voters in Aston. There are two things wrong with this. 1) A large number of voters are too young to remember Howard and 2) the Liberals seem to forget that he lost the last election he fought and that even some of those who remember him think of him as a man whose time had come.
  • Anthony Albanese isn’t Scotty Morrison. He’s not perfect and there are quite a few things where Labor needs to improve but this is going to be a big tick for him until people start saying, “Scott Who?”
  • Anthony Albanese isn’t Peter Dutton either.

There are probably more factors but if I try to list them all, there’s a real possibility that the bit of Antony Green’s probability which gives the Liberals the win will have reared its head and I’ll feel silly for trusting him.

Whatever, I’m looking forward to Peter Dutton’s appearance on “Insiders” tomorrow… unless his cold gets worse/he has a meeting that he forgot about/he’s staging a protest against the bias of the ABC and he, unfortunately, has had to cancel.

Sussan is counting the numbers and the numbers tell her that the extra “s” in her name has led her to this moment and if she can just an extra zero to those who support her then she’ll be leader before the week is out.

 

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The Voice: Remember When The Liberals Were Still Deciding Whether To Invade Iraq?

At the moment we’re witnessing the Liberal Party at their absurd best. Julian Leeser asked if the Reserve Bank would need to consult the Voice before it altered interest rates.

Now, Leeser is allegedly one of the Liberals who supports the Voice but that didn’t stop him asking the sort of question that is clearly designed to make people a little nervous about the scope of the Voice. Either Mr Leeser is clearly going along with Peter Dutton’s wrecking game or he’s a complete idiot… Of course, the two things aren’t mutually exclusive and it could even be suggested that the latter is merely a subset of the former.

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting that people don’t have the right to question the Voice or even to oppose it. I’m just suggesting that when you ask if a body like the Reserve Bank – who doesn’t even have to consult government before making a decision – would suddenly need to consult a body that’s no more than a… well, it’s no more than a Voice, after all, isn’t it? The Reserve Bank doesn’t need to listen to the government, the government doesn’t need to listen to the Voice and nobody needs to listen to Julian Leeser if he’s just going to ask questions like that.

I remember when good ole Johnny Boy Howard was contemplating whether he should invade Iraq along with his other two amigos, George and Tony. No decision had been made. Ok, ok, our troops were gathering in the Middle East but no decision had been made. And ok, our special forces had popped across the border but just to see what it was like as a tourist destination. Then, a couple of days later, they discovered that it wasn’t a very good one because the Coalition of the Swilling was on its way.

I do remember at the time wondering why our troops weren’t being prepared for the mass casualties after Saddam released his Weapons of Mass Destruction. I remember wondering why weren’t being warned that it was more likely that we’d be the subject of some terrible attack here at home from those WMDs, how while we all needed to take extra care, the government was on the case and there were extra resources on standby in the case of biological or chemical attacks. And, I remember being a bit of a cynic, and wondering if that was because the leaders were well aware that there were none.

Of course, when none were found, some bright commentator explained that we’d given Iraq too much warning and that they were able to hide their weapons. Yeah, right, because that’s what you do when you’re about to be attacked: you hide your weapons so that the other guys win in a few days.

Anyway, I can’t help but think Peter Dutton’s calls for details on the Voice and the questions about whether the Voice will have the power to tell you that you can only have Pizza on Saturdays and that you can’t switch on the television on January 26th without an acknowledgment of it being Invasion Day, are nothing more than a way of leading up to a declaration that the Liberals tried to be bipartisan but Albanese kept answering their questions with answers that meant that if Indigenous people were given a voice it might lead to them actually expressing an opinion.

 

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