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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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10 comments

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  1. Kerri L

    A part of me feels sorry for Dutton.
    The man has nothing! The tank is empty. The shelves are bare. The well has run dry. Maybe even the lights are on but no-one is home? Dutton has focused so much of his life on scaring people into opposing …… um? pretty much everything, that now the curtain has been pulled back and Dutton’s dubious commitment to anything even vaguely progressive is plain and clear to the entire public, he is like a broken record. Still going round and round even though people stopped listening years ago.
    There is an old piece of advice for parents and teachers alike. Don’t make a threat you can’t go through with.
    This is Duttons undoing. He keeps making threats that wind up hollow.
    He has no policies and I actually reckon he is incapable of making any form of policy. He has no idea how to make improvements. Everything is a nail to him.
    Myself? I would like to see Dutton remain the top Lib for a very long time. He is doing much to ensure the public know and understand the consequences of voting for hate and fear. Meanwhile let’s just all enjoy Dutton’s absence of grace and shallow presence and his continual tripping over his own “facts”.
    I am hoping the more reasonable members of the current LNP, sorry make that Libs, vote with their hearts and brains.

  2. New England Cocky

    Amy Remeikis has a good explanation of the Boofhead Duddo approach to the Voice:

  3. Terence Mills

    I think you will soon see Simon Birmingham step down from the shadow cabinet. He has proved himself to be a man of principle in the past and I cannot imagine that he will let this nastiness pass him by.

    I heard Julian Leeser speak about his step away from the shadow cabinet : he could be a leader in waiting !

  4. New England Cocky

    Rossleigh, perhaps you could explain your point that Aboriginal Parliamentarians, from Senator Bonner (LIARBRAL) onwards have been effective representatives for regional & remote Aboriginal communities during any of the decades of LIARBRAL government?
    .
    Now what is all this fuss about Aboriginals being put into the Australian Constitution? They have been there since 1901 ….. they can be discovered by reading the document at s25, 51(xxvi). Even so, their inclusion in the Constitution allowed them to be excluded from the Australian population until 1967 ….. now why would that be a concern to any politician of Anglo-Celtic heritage?

    Maybe I am ill-informed by the Warwick Thornton films, that show the worse than slum housing conditions for Aboriginal families in the Northern Territory, where administrivia insures government dollars seldom leave the Darwin or Alice Springs CBD. So, did Tom Kenneally possibly make up the yarn about Jimmy Blacksmith in the early 19th century just to fill his afternoon?
    .
    Re Duddo ”fading away to nothing” ….. While your prophecy is appealing, my reading of 20th century European history suggests that ruthless politicians tend to suck on the public financial teat for as long as possible, especially when they represent an electorate that including many corporative executives holding similar racist views.

  5. Clakka

    Will the Dutton jock strap support his voice?

    He needs more detail, despite inspection by a parliamentary committee
    He needs more detail, despite parliament deciding its composition, functions, powers and procedures
    He says it’s a Canberra voice from the Canberra bubble
    He says those in the bush need a say
    He seeks to see the support of the solicitor general

    Poor Petey, fully exposed, and supporters leaving left, right and centre.

    What to do when you can’t figure your arse from your Albo?

  6. andy56

    looks like Dr No is at it again . He was asked in the Alice, what data he had . He gave the usual non answer cause he had non.
    Every day, he is getting more and more of a hammering. I sense that the media smells blood. You have to ask, where the F&^% the media was hiding the last 8 yrs.

  7. andy56

    GL, they have no credibility when they come out with shit like that. And Ley is proving to be a shrill too, just like ” take away the weekends” cash. Token women with no fucking morals.

  8. B Sullivan

    NEC, ‘’…excluded from the population until 1967…”

    Excluded or exempt from the obligation to fill in the census form?

    The census doesn’t count population it counts households. Homeless people today are still excluded from the population. Anyone who does not spend the night in a household on census night is not counted. In the census before last it was revealed that more than a million households In Australia were un-occupied on census night. Where were all of the people who we would expect to normally live in those homes? I have no idea what the results of the last census showed but the previous count suggests that there was no shortage of houses in Australia, just a glut of multiple property owning speculators.

    Prior to 1967, If aboriginals were staying at your house on census night wouldn’t you be required to include them?

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