I just realised that the title could be a little ambiguous. It could mean that I’m confused by strange things as well as Peter Dutton. Or it could mean that I’m confused by strange things, of which the main one is Peter Dutton.

Whatever, I suspect that all thinking people will know exactly what I meant and it’s only a certain predictable section who insist on taking the wrong meaning!!

As strange things go, I must confess that one of the strangest lately is the fact that Peter “There’s no detail, so vote No” Dutton has been able to get away with asserting a nuclear policy with absolutely no detail apart from the idea that it’s a policy and they have support it and they’ll release the detail at some future date before the Budget or after it or during the Budget or at some time before the next election, or failing all that, sometime after the next election.

It’s also strange that number seems to be pointing out the obvious flaw in the “Australia’s got plenty of uranium so why not use it for power because we could have a power station up and running in under ten years.”

I’m not talking about the fact that the nuclear plan is being pushed by the same people who couldn’t get Snowy 2.0 up and running in the predicted time frame, or build the carparks they promised or deliver the surplus in their “first year and every year after”.

No, I’m pointing out the very obvious fact that you don’t just dig uranium up and put it in a power station any more than you strike crude oil and stick it in your car. In both case they need to be processed, and we don’t currently have a processing plant to enrich uranium. It could be worth pointing out that we might have had one if Rex Connor had got his way and we’d borrowed all that money from the Arabs back in the days of Whitlam but that would start a whole argument about Labor wasting money building infrastructure when it’s better just to ship our resources overseas and just rely on the taxes that the companies don’t pay, or the jobs they generously provide our workers. Of course, in the colonial days it was customary for the great powers of Europe to enter a country and take their resources without paying taxes and expecting the original occupants of the country to be grateful for being provided with work… Although in those days, it was done under a sort of Centrelink type mutual obligation where the obligation of the workers was to work for food and shelter in return for not being shot by the colonial powers.

So before we start our nuclear plants we need to decide if we’re going to refine our own uranium or simply dig it up and sent it overseas so we can buy it back at an inflated price… which sort of defeats the argument that we’ve got the uranium so therefore nuclear power will be cheaper than other countries.

Of course that’s not the only thing that confuses me. There are a large number of people who are concerned about misinformation and disinformation laws.

On one hand, I can understand their concerns. If we have one body who decides what is true and right and no other points of view can be entered into, it’s rather like a religious dogma or an Andrew Bolt column. However, there many times that a free society needs to walk the tightrope between the alligators on one side and the lions on the other and it’s always worth considering a ban on ridiculous metaphors that make no sense.

On the other hand, if something is clearly false and can be demonstrated as such, it seems strange that that’s the hill that Elon Musk died on in 2017 and he is now being impersonated by a robot developed as part of Tesla’s self-driving car. (This is not true: I’m just trying to show how silly it is if I’m allowed to spread such absurdity without the possibility that someone can shut me down before someone reads and takes it seriously. I know that writing that it’s not true should be enough, but so many people respond to accounts marked “Parody” as though they were real that I feel that even saying Elon Musk is still alive won’t be enough because between the time I wrote the two sentences, it’s obvious that Deep State has got to me and… sh, they’re listening…pretend you didn’t read this!!)

Ok, a certain level of paranoia is healthy. I mean you should suspect the phone call you get about a transaction that wasn’t authorised from a bank account you don’t have; giving your details so that the transaction can’t go ahead would just be the sort of foolishness that enables people to believe that Trump is good, Christian man who has every right to pay a porn star money to forget she ever slept with him… which is surely something most people be prepared to forget for free if they only could.

But there’s a moment when the paranoia is taken too far and you decide that every action by any individual who has a slightly different world view than you have to be viewed through the prism of you being one of the ones who’s taken the red pill in the Matrix… On a side note, how did Neo know that the ones offering the pills were the ones he could trust and not just some dealer offering him drugs with a suggestion about what sort of trip he could go on while under them?

Anyway, there’s heaps more strange things like Tony Abbott being Minister for Women or Peter Dutton having perfect eyesight until he lost his hair but there’s a limit to how much strangeness you can have in a day… It’s true: the communist Albanese government has imposed it and I read it on X!

Ok, some of you may have noticed that I’ve been on holiday…

Just in case that seems a little egocentric, I’m sorry. It’s just that someone commented about one of my recent contributions that they’d been waiting to see what I made of it and it sort of made me think that there were people out there who wait to see what I make of the world… Of course I do have to balance that against the fact that most people didn’t notice when our PM, Scott Morrison, disappeared for days…

Whatever, every time I checked the Australian news I thought that I should write about what was happening, but as I was in Malaysia I couldn’t access a number of sites including this one, so by the time I’d made a few notes and had a few paragraphs, there’s usually be a whole new development in Australian politics that made everything I’d written seem like yesterday’s news, and the only thing staler than yesterday’s news is a policy announcement from Tony Abbott. After all, if you look at the policies that he took to both elections, you’d find that even he doesn’t pretend that he ever believed in them. Most politicians have the decency to at least pretend that they meant what they said and that it was the circumstances that changed. Not dear old Tony. Nah, for Tony it was: “Climate change is crap!!” morphing into “I never said that… and anyway, people are taking what I didn’t say out of context, so it’s not fair to judge me on that you need to look at the policies we’ll be releasing closer to the election…” morphing into, “Now I’m no longer in Parliament I can tell you that I never believed half the things I said and that I only said them because I had to keep people happy, particularly Rupert because without him I wouldn’t have this great job now!” 

But enough about the past. I spent a large part of Monday thinking about the Bruce Lehrmann verdict…

There were a number of people on social media who were attempting to undermine Judge Lee’s conclusion on the grounds that sex took place and how do we know it wasn’t consensual. My reaction to that was to try to put myself in Bruce’s shoes and if I’d managed to to that, I certainly wouldn’t have gone back for my hat…

Before I make the obvious point that if you swear under oath that sex did not take place then it’s pretty hard to go back and say, “All right, it did, but trust me, it was something that we both agreed to and she’s just changed her mind and you can’t trust someone who changes their mind… apart from me, who has now just admitted to perjury…” This point is general in nature and doesn’t refer to anyone in case anybody gets an idea that I may be the one holding their hat.

Anyway, before I make that obvious point… oh wait, I just made it…

The other strange takeaway from the Lee ruling was some media outlets were asking that a rather strange question about whether Brittany Higgins would have to repay the money after the judge ruled that there was no evidence of a coverup. This is strange because my understanding was that the payout was to do with her workplace causing issues. If we remember that a certain other female Liberal staffer was granted $600,000 without much investigation because the investigation may have named someone who harassed her and who wasn’t Alan Tudge which could have been more embarrassing for the government than merely handing over money to make her go away.

Apart from all the terrorist and non-terrorist attacks, there’s been a bit of chatter about the introduction of disinformation and misinformation laws. The concern has been that media companies and politicians are concerned that there’s a lot of incorrect stuff being posted on social media, and they feel that it’s their job to spread misinformation. Like when social media named the wrong person as the Bondi attacker and Channel 7 just assumed that it was correct and went with it. It was social media to blame and not Channel 7 who can’t be expected to have the resources to do a simple check when so much of their resourcing goes to getting important stories which cost a lot in terms of Thai massages and steak dinners…

Ok, I did consider giving this the heading: “Anyone who confuses correlation and causation will die!”

However, that would have mean that the joke was so clearly telegraphed that only Donald Rump supporters would have missed it…

Anyway, I’ve been reading a lot lately and I’ve come to the simple conclusion that Mark Twain was right…

Of course when I say that Mark Twain was right, I’m presuming that he actually said – or wrote – what’s been attributed to him:

“There are three types of lies: Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics.”

Then again, I’ve learned not to place too much store in what people assert when they write. For example, I read somewhere that Tom Hawkins was likely to kick 800 goals this season… which would be an impressive effort in any AFL season. However, I presume what they meant to say was that he’d kick his 800th goal this season…

Whether Tom does or doesn’t manage to achieve that impressive feat, I’d just like to suggest that there’s something wrong with the world when people who are being paid to produce intelligent commentary… or at the very least non-ambiguous sentences… come up with stuff like that!!

Yeah, all right, I’ve made the odd mistake myself, but that’s not the point as anyone who works for Sky News will tell you… We’re here to hold others to account and that means others so when it comes to our mistakes, how dare you?

Anyway, I have been concerned about how little people understand about correlation and causation and statistics generally. For example, when I point out that certain one of the clear indicators of academic success has to do with what postcodes students come from, so the simplest way of improving academic performance would be to change the postcodes of poorly performing students, there’s a real chance that some politicians will want me to take over as head of education…

Which brings me to the whole opinion poll thing!!

Now, it’s always hard to ignore polls but the one thing that polls should teach you is that they are about as reliable as trying to pick the result of a horse race or sporting contest by looking at who’s leading at the moment. I mean, sure, it’s better to be in the lead than so far back that we can wonder if you’re even there, but it’s no indicator that you’ll stay there.

Looking at the opinion polls over the past two years, I’d say that there are a number of things that should concern Labor. For a start, they’re regarded as just like the Liberals by a lot of lefty voters. Of course, that means that they’re regarded as just like Liberals by a lot of middle of the road voters and when I say that I mean that they’re like the Liberals only with a Budget surplus and a more competent front bench…

Having said that, I must say that nobody in the media seems to be pointing out that it’s rather unusual that a government hasn’t actually lost a poll in two party preferred terms this far into their term… Maybe there was one that I missed and, yes, there were a couple that had them 50/50 but the point remains.

Of course polls are one thing. In a sense they’re a bit like someone complaining about their partner. They may tell you that their partner is incredibly frustrating but it doesn’t mean that they’ll leave them anytime soon… What counts is when they start packing their bags and working out where they’ll stay… Reality is more important than what people say they’d like to do…

And when it comes to the reality, we need to look at actual elections:

• Labor won Aston. Almost unprecedented.
• Labor held Dunkley with a swing against them. Surely, surely given how bad they are, Dutton’s Duds should have picked at that one.
• The Tasmanian Liberals suffered a 12% swing against them on the primary vote.
• In South Australia, the Labor Government picked up a Liberal seat in a BY-ELECTION!

Yes, in the upcoming state elections, Labor will lose Queensland and the Liberals will pick up one of the biggest percentage increases in terms of seats held ever… They hold two so going to ten would be a 500% gain.

But in reality, the next election is slightly more likely to see Dutton as PM than Clive Palmer… but only slightly more likely!

Now I’m not one who believes in violence as a solution to problems. Generally it only makes things worse, whether we’re talking on a personal or on a global scale.

When I once suggested that a better way of conducting wars would be to have each country bomb its own areas, people looked at me as though I was insane, but it’s not only cheaper, it would be good for the climate because we’d reduce all those greenhouse gases involved in sending planes to another country. Simply, Country X who’s at war with Country Y would send a message saying that Country Y should bomb such and such an area, which Country Y would do, but in retaliation it would send a message back to Country X saying that it had to bomb an area of its own. After Country Y has bombed its own munitions factory, Country X bombs its own museum. Or whatever. Similarly, troops could vote on which of their comrades were shot by their own army after the other country asks for a number of soldiers to be shot. The public could be involved in a Big Brother type vote where they vote on which innocent civilians would need to be at the proposed site when it was bombed.

Someone told me that it was a ridiculous and insane idea, to which I replied that it made a lot more sense than all the time and effort and logistics involved in moving your defence forces all the way to another country. I mean how much did it cost the USA to move all those troops and equipment to Iraq? How much cheaper would it be if countries just agreed to bomb themselves?

Anyway, I do accept that the idea won’t be universally accepted and I do accept that most of my brilliant ideas are misunderstood… I guess I’m like the early years of the Abbott government where they told us that it wasn’t their policies that were making them unpopular, it was the fact that they weren’t communicating them well enough for the stupid public to understand how good they were!

Like when I suggest that the trouble with social media is that nobody gets punched in the face.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that I like violence.

To explain what I mean, let’s consider the football. If I’m at the MCG, I can scream at the opposition ruckman a variety of insults and, even if he hears them and gets offended, he’s not likely to work out where they’re coming from, much less jump the fence and grab me by the collar for insulting his parentage. On the other hand, if I see him later that night at the pub, I’m unlikely to go up and say the same thing to him. Even if I was silly enough to do so, I would get the sense that I’d made a big mistake when he towered over me and asked me to repeat myself.

On social media, however, there are few consequences for abuse, particularly if one isn’t using one’s real name…

I was rather amused by some calling themselves “Stable Genius” who complained that someone else was a coward because they’d turned off comments on their post… mainly because all the Stable Geniuses were writing misogynist insults. I considered pointing out that it was easy to be brave when using a pseudonym but I was worried that they’d write back that they weren’t – they were using their iPhone…

Anyway, in real life, most people – even stable geniuses – get concerned when they see that someone is getting angry. It doesn’t always mean that they back off, but generally, people work out that there’s no point in continuing to argue if you’re no longer listening to each other or if someone looks like they’re going to turn nasty. On social media there seem to be large numbers of people who actively try to upset people.

While this isn’t confined to RWNJs, I did have trouble with a post from someone who argued that Albanese and Labor were pursuing the Marxist agenda of taking money from the middle classes and giving it to the rich the way Marxists do… I mean, was the person really that lacking in understanding of Marxism or was he just trying to upset Labor voters… Without going into the whole history of political thought, I would just suggest that they’d be very few Marxists in the current Federal government, and there’d be even less Marxists who’d be voting for Labor at the moment.

Whatever, it does strike me as strange the many of the people who referred to Twitter (sorry X) as a sewer were often guilty of the sort of abuse that they were calling out. “It’s not safe for us on this platform because of the vitriol coming from those feral, layabout dole-bludging greenie socialist inbred scum who haven’t worked a day in their lives!”

Like I said, I don’t condone violence. However when I first heard the German word, “backpfeifengesicht” meaning a face that needs to be slapped, the face of several politicians and commentators came to mind.

Now I could start this evening’s meal by telling my wife that I’m leaving her for Kate Middleton but I’m not going to do that for a number of reasons:

• My wife would find it annoying.
• Kate Middleton is far too young for me.
• I don’t know if I’d like her.
• Even if I did meet up with her, I couldn’t be sure it was really her and not some body double.
• No matter how much time my wife and I spent discussing it, it’s not remotely likely to happen and we’d be better off discussing plans for things that might actually happen rather than wasting our time having a pointless discussion about something that’s not going to happen.

I know that most of you will have read that last point and gone, “Well, of course, you stupid old fool, I don’t know how your wife puts up with you. Why would you even bring up something as ridiculous as this?”

To which I would simply say that I’m considering going into politics and one thing I’ve learned over the past few years is that the most important thing in politics is to ensure that people are talking about something completely irrelevant so they don’t start talking about the things that matter or the things that we can actually do something about.

Take the recent “nuclear debate”. At the 2019 election the suggestion that the Coalition was interested in nuclear power was denied by Scott Morrison who dismissed it as a “scare campaign” but now it’s apparently not scary at all and a great solution to rising energy prices and “the only way to achieve net zero”. Leaving aside everything else, the debate now centres on how long they’d take to build and the Party that found it too difficult to build all their promised car parks in three years and who promised to have Snowy Hydro 2.0 up and running by 2024, assure us that they could do it in ten. Again, leaving aside the fact that we don’t have any way of processing our raw uranium yet and leaving aside we don’t have a workforce trained to build such a power station, I can only suggest that the new LNP policy must be for immigrants to come here to do the job, which is at odds with the whole we have too many immigrants stance.

So let’s be quite clear here: Whatever the merits or otherwise of nuclear power, the simple fact remains that it’s not going to reduce anyone’s power bills in the near future and, if anything, the cost of building such plants is more likely to increase them, even though David Littleproud seemed to think that they didn’t need power lines because he asserted that the trouble with renewables was that the power lines sometimes blew over with strong winds.

So we spend time talking about something that is only slightly more plausible than my relationship with Princess Catherine, instead of things that are actually happening such as the Liberals removing a woman, Ann Ruston, from the top of their Senate ticket only to replace her with Alex Antic. While Ruston retains the number two spot and is still likely to be elected, the symbolism of replacing a woman with an anti-abortion, anti-vaccination, anti-woke Anti-Antic does tend to suggest that the South Australian Liberals see their woman problem as not knowing their place, which is apparently behind a man.

There are so many things that we could be discussing instead of nuclear power. If I were to compile a list of such things that we have managed to avoid talking about I would include:

1. Is it time to for a Universal Basic Income and to remove all the time-wasting that goes with mutual obligation and unemployment benefits?
2. Would a HECs style scheme where the government paid the up-front costs of roof top solar and batteries, only to have the cost repaid through the power fed back into the system or when the house was sold?
3. Should The Greens be condemned for threatening to hold up the reduced vehicle emissions legislation or applauded for making their support conditional on Labor ditching their fast-tracking of gas approvals?
4. Why is nobody pointing out that, apart from opposing just about everything, Dutton’s duds have declared they oppose any action on misinformation, as well as opposing an Indigenous truth telling? Do they just have an aversion to the truth?
5. Power prices have just come down slightly. While the Coalition will make a big point of the fact that they haven’t come down by the $275 promised by Labor – or even the $500 promised by Tony Abbott – in the current inflationary times, the fact that they haven’t risen is significant.
6. While Labor’s changes to the Stage 3 tax cuts have been generally well-received, there seems to be a focus on the fact that those on $150k will get a smaller tax cut than originally proposed. Why is nobody pointing out that they’re still getting a cut of over $100 a fortnight which is much more than someone on $60k so they’re still getting the best of the deal?

There are a great many other things that could be on the list but no, let’s discuss whether it’s really the Princess of Wales in the video or Coalition thought bubbles, rather than anything that’s actually happening.

As I often remind everyone, the trouble with conspiracy theories is that they start from two central truths of life:

1. You can’t trust people in authority.
2. Always look carefully at the evidence.
3. The Illuminati is controlling everything.

Now my more astute readers will have noticed that I listed three things when I said that there were two truths. I could tell you which of the two are true but I’ll leave it work it out for yourself but please, for the safety of both of us don’t write in the comments that it’s number three!

Anyway, I must confess that I wasn’t taken too much notice of all the conspiracy theories surrounding the Princess of Wales. I mean, whatever you think of the Royal Family, it is pretty far-fetched to believe that she’d turned into a zombie and was eating their brains, even if there are less and less of them appearing in public. After all, a lack of brains never stopped them in previous generations so why should they go all sensitive about that now…

Yes, it was only in the last few hours that I felt the need to put my sharp investigative skills into the strange case of Kate’s photo. I call it strange for a number of reasons that haven’t been canvassed yet:

• Media organisations decided that it was digitally altered and didn’t publish it. This is only strange because many of the same media organisations have been publishing digitally altered photos for years.
• Prince Will wasn’t in the photo which would lead one to presume that he took the photo.
• Kate admitted to digitally altering the photo… Of course, when I say that Kate has admitted to doing that I simply mean that she tweeted that she’d done it after several media outlets said that it was altered. Of course, she explained that she’s an amateur photography who takes photos of herself and her children which makes one wonder where Willie was if he wasn’t the one taking the photo… And when I say that she explained what I mean is that there was a tweet from the account of The Prince and Princess of Wales which one presumes is from her because it ended with a capital “C” because her name is Catherine and William doesn’t use the “C” word at the end of his tweets. Although when I think about it the “C” could stand for a lot of things, including “Counterfeit”, “Contrived” and … anyway, let’s move on!

Speaking of Peter Dutton, I’d have to say that his nuclear policy is one of those times when I’m totally onboard with the conspiracy concept. What’s the Coalition being doing for the past ten years? Delaying the rollout of renewables and extending the life of fossil fuels. What would introducing nuclear do? Delay the rollout renewables and extend the life of fossil fuels!

It’s not hard to put two and two together and actually get four this time. Let’s take the policy seriously for a moment and presume that it’s a damn good idea. The first thing that’s wrong with it I’ll explain with this apocryphal story.

Imagine my wife and I want to go on a holiday at the end of the year. She decides that she’d like to go to France and I say that it’s too far away and they don’t speak English. She counters with the idea that we can learn enough French to get by and use Google translate for the rest and I counter with: “What about when the Internet doesn’t work at night!” and she replies that I’m an idiot and we get nowhere. However because it would be good to go on a holiday I propose that we go on space flight instead, but instead of discussing this with her and trying to reach consensus, I announce at a dinner party in front of friends that my wife has this silly idea of going to France and that she totally rejects the idea of a space flight because she doesn’t accept that the technology is completely safe and she thinks that it would cost more than France but if you people will just vote for me, I’ll have the space flight thing all organised sometime in the next decade.

Apart from anything else, you can probably presume that our end of year holiday won’t be happening.

So, in terms of Dutton, if he were really serious about nuclear energy then surely it would be good to be working on a consensus with the government rather than; “We’ll make this an election issue because power prices are too high and nuclear will help with that sometime in the very near future because it should only take 3-5 years to build a small nuclear reactor on every corner. Look at our success with the NBN rollout where we used the existing copper wires and we can do the same with nuclear reactors by putting them on the sites of defunct coal-fired power stations.”

Naturally there are some little holes in his plan. That is, if you presume that his plan is really to build them and not to merely keep Gina happy. Let’s look at the best case scenario for nuclear:

• Dutton wins election
• Dutton announces task force to draw up plan for SMR
• Task force investigates for six months and hands report to Dutton for consideration
• Dutton holds press conference to announce his intention to draw up a plan
• Press reports on rumoured location of SMRs
• Dutton tells media that no decisions have been made
• Coalition announces that they’ve contracted out the investigation of potential sites to a company which nobody has heard of but has an office in a shack on Kangaroo Island.
• Directors of said company go overseas to research the countries with SMRs operating.
• Directors return and announce that as there were no such countries we need to develop our own.
• New contract is drawn up giving Liberal donors lots and lots of money to build SMRs just as soon as they’re viable.
• Dutton is defeated in a spill and the new PM announces that he (this is the Liberal party, after all, so no need for a he/she there) will be getting nuclear back on track.

Like I said, the trouble with conspiracy theories is that they start with something perfectly reasonable. However, as someone once observed, when you have a choice between a conspiracy and a stuff-up, pick the latter. You’ll usually be right!

Peter Dutton has a vision for our energy future. Personally, I think that’s great. One should have a vision particularly if one is a political leader…

Like Jeff Kennett. Being a Victorian, I clearly remember how Jeff shared his vision of a privatised energy market where choice and the market would bring down prices and lead to the sort of efficiencies that would mean that we could be confident that power prices would be lower but unfortunately it didn’t work out like that. Still, one shouldn’t hold it against him that his vision didn’t work out quite as he described it; one should only get stuck into Labor leaders when they promise that electricity prices will come down by $275 by 2025 even if we’re still in 2024… Or in the case of Tony “Marty McFly” Abbott stuck in the 1950s!

Pete was very clear. The sun doesn’t shine at night, wind turbines at sea are likely to interfere with nature and he’s always been keen on nature, and batteries haven’t been invented yet. Yes, he actually said words to that effect. On the other hand, we can put a small, modular nuclear reactor in lots and lots of places just as soon as someone invents one and we find the several billion dollars to pay for it…

Don’t get me wrong, I think that it’s good that Dutton is thinking long term! Far too often leaders only worry about the short term and I sort of find it inspiring that Peter is so optimistic about the future when any reasonable analysis of the Dunkley by-election would have the party changing leaders before anybody had time to count the numbers.

“Let’s elect the new guy from Cook.”

“Simon Kennedy?”
“Yeah. He has to be better and the public don’t know him yet!” 

I should point out that the Liberal candidate for Cook hasn’t actually been elected yet, but that didn’t stop News.com.au from declaring him the winner. I mean, I know there’s pressure on to be the first media outlet to declare an election win, but I’m old-fashioned enough to think that we should wait until after the electorate have voted. Still, he did win in spite of the fact that the moderate faction wanted a woman, as did John Howard, but that’s a whole other story. Anyway, he’s a winner because he managed to defeat the moderate faction which shows he should fit in quite nicely in the Canberra party room. And he also defeated John Howard which is pretty easy to do, given he’s the only living PM to lose his seat in a general election.

Of course, Peter Dutton’s new clear fission… sorry nuclear vision… has a few hurdles to get over.

The first is that someone is bound to ask for more detail. Naturally, he can say that we’re just outlining the general idea and we can work out the detail later. This should be enough because, after all, it’s not like the Voice to Parliament because it’s his idea so surely we shouldn’t ask for any more than the broad strokes.

The second is that once he starts to become specific about where to locate the plants, then we’ll undoubtedly see the NIMBYs coming out, and while Dutton supports farmers who don’t want powerlines in their back yard, this is different. It’s sort of like fracking where people should just suck it up… Not the gas. That wouldn’t be good. This problem might be solved by only putting reactor in Labor electorates, but then it makes it hard to win government because they have more electorates than he does.

The third is that, while it’s good to have the vision thing, it doesn’t actually solve the immediate problem. After all, if you’re sleeping in your car, you don’t appreciate being told that the solution to this is a new government initiative where you’ll be trained in building and given a low-cost loan, tools and a free block of land to build your own home, even if it would potentially solve your long term accomodation problem. Similarly, while my solar panels have made me ok with my electricity consumption, I find my gas bill annoyingly high and I’m not going to say, “Nuclear in ten years time. Wow, thanks Pete, I’ll just have cold showers till then, but I hear that’s likely to extend my life… at the very least, it’ll seem longer.”

So let’s have three cheers for Peter:

1. One for having a longterm vision
2. Two for his optimism in thinking that he’ll be leader by the time the next election comes around. (I’m presuming that News.com.au is right and we already have the winner of Cook. I’m also presuming he lasts that long, so one cheer for me here too!)
3. And, finally, for actually being the first Opposition Liberal leader to announce a policy.

All right number 3 may be a little unfair because Tony did have two policies: The first was to undo everything that Labor had done and the second was a rolled, gold paid parental leave scheme.

Whatever. Here we go: Three cheers, hip, hip…

Oh, that’s not very nice. You should be ashamed of yourself.

Last week Senator Cash tweeted the…

Is it still correct to say “tweet”? I mean now that it’s X, should it be “Senator Cash Xed…”?

Whatever, Senator Cash put out the following message on the social media platform that was once Twitter but is now X:

“Australians should be able to choose what car they need for their family and their work – not the Prime Minister.”

So Australians should able to choose what car they need but they shouldn’t be able to choose the Prime Minister? That’s outrageous!

Yes, of course, that’s not what she meant; it’s just what she said. And yes, she was just trying to make a point about the government trying to impose more efficient vehicles on people when they want to waste money on less fuel efficient ones.

The Opposition have seized on this to complain about how this will make some vehicles more expensive while ignoring that a large number will actually be cheaper. I guess it doesn’t make a good scare campaign to suggest that most of you will be better off but those who want to waste money on a fuel guzzler may be given the opportunity to waste money up front by having to pay more for their car.

Still, the scare campaign has apparently worked a treat in the Dunkley by-election where the Liberal candidate achieved a magnificent swing of approximately 3.75%. The Liberals were overjoyed with this because if this was repeated in the general election then they’d repeat the result of losing Dunkley by less than they lost it at the previous election.

Personally, I couldn’t quite understand how they could be so happy with the result when they had so much going for them:

1. Peta Murphy had a significant personal vote which would go a long way to explain why Labor’s primary vote was lower. Unfortunately for the Liberals it wasn’t. The fact that the primary vote held up should be the signal for a lot of soul searching in the Liberal Party, and if they actually find someone with a soul, then it’d be a great start!
2. Scott Morrison was no longer leader and there was supposed to be a Morrison factor that went against the Liberals in the 2022 election… Mind you, in 2018, Morrison’s colleagues decided that they preferred him to Dutton, so the change in leadership may not be actually be the plus that commentators think!
3. Anthony Albanese had just recently become the first Prime Minister to break an election promise and we can’t trust him… All right, he may not have been the first one to break a promise given Abbott’s paid parental leave and no cuts promises, John Howard’s “Never ever GST!”, Morrison’s Integrity Commission that he couldn’t introduce because Labor disagreed, but Albanese was the first one to admit that he was breaking one and that he was sorry.
4. Australia has the highest rate of inflation of all the countries in a list of countries that excludes all the ones with higher inflation. The increased prices and the interest rate rises have caused a cost of living crisis because we only have crises when Labor is in power. When the Liberals are in power we have problems or difficulties or concerns.
5. Similarly there is a housing crisis which is all Labor’s fault because when people couldn’t afford a house under a Liberal government, they just need to follow Joe Hockey’s advice and get a better paying job.
6. Immigration is too high. Dan Tehan told us all on “Insiders” that it was too high but wouldn’t be drawn on what figure would be about right. No matter how many times David Spears asked, Mr Tehan couldn’t be tricked into revealing a Liberal policy because that’s against their strategy. Of course, he insisted that they have plenty of policies but none that can be released until closer to the election… In the past  they’ve often waited till very close to the election date and by very close I mean a few days after they’ve been elected.
7. In a by-election which won’t change the government, there’s an opportunity for a protest vote to let the government know that they better get their act together.

Yet for all this, the swing was merely consistent with what you’d expect in a by-election. In sporting terms, it’d be like saying that our team was expected to lose by 37 points and we did, so isn’t that a great result?

It’s interesting how quickly things change!

I mean wasn’t it just yesterday when Morrison and his fellow Liberals were telling us that people were innocent until proven guilty and, if anyone hadn’t been convicted, then they were innocent. Of course, this legal concept doesn’t apply to people who have been charged with a crime because we now keep hearing that criminals shouldn’t be out on bail while awaiting trial because we all know that they’re guilty.

And just last year, Anthony Albanese was being attacked for holding the Voice Referendum by the Coalition. Even though it was an election promise, he never should have proceeded with it unless he had bipartisan support. This year, he’s a liar for not keeping his promise on the Stage 3 tax cuts even though the changes have bipartisan support.

When it comes to the tax cuts the Liberal position is quite clear: “Albanese never should have changed them but now he has we’re voting for them because people need help but they need help now and the tax cuts that should have stayed the way he promised don’t come in until July and that’s far too late for something that we argue shouldn’t have happened at all!”

Anyway, if someone didn’t support the Voice that didn’t make them a racist. I know this because we were told over and over again that this it wasn’t fair to label someone a racist just because they didn’t want the Voice enshrined in the Constitution.

Of course, some people didn’t get the memo because they now argue that 70% of Australians voted against a Welcome to Country, having any sort of Indigenous body advising Parliament, changing the date, a Treaty, Closing The Gap, Linda Burney and truth telling.

Perhaps it’s just me but when someone gets outraged about truth telling, it does make me wonder exactly what they’re suggesting: “We don’t want any of that ‘truth telling’ round here! Lies were good enough for my parents and my grandparents and I’m sick of these people trying to wreck our traditions.”

Speaking of ‘lies’, it’s interesting that a broken election promise is somehow more worthy of examination than politicians lying on a daily basis. For example, when Dutton said that our interest rates were higher than all the G7 countries, this would be an easily verifiable fact were it not for the minor problem that it just isn’t one. Only Japan had lower interest rates at the time he made the statement, so either he was making it up, speaking off the top of his head or unable to read a simple table and work out that certain numbers were higher than others. All things that I would have thought worthy of examination by the media.

Similarly, the so-called tax on SUVs, utes and tanks has been a source of outrage from the Coalition of the Dulling. Inflation seems have grown worse here than our current rate of 4.1% because “Labor’s carbon tax” on new vehicles went from $10k one day to $15k a few days later to the $25k where it now sits until we learn that by the year 2087 it will cost over a million dollars to buy a jet thanks to Labor’s new tax.

Ok, some of you may be trying to defend the proposed emission standards by pointing out that it’s not a tax or by pointing out that we’re one of the only developed nations that doesn’t have one or by asking what’s wrong with emitting less noxious gases when we all know that the amendments to the American Constitution give all drivers the right to poison others by driving the vehicle emitting the most toxic fumes. However, you’re missing the logical flaw in the line of attack: Surely nobody can afford a new car under Labor!

It seems to me that there are a number of areas where Labor can be criticised, such as not increasing payments for the unemployed by more, inadequate support for the homeless, more urgent action on climate change and others. But when Angus Taylor attacked Labor for “spending too much” the other day, it sounds rather silly when they’ve produced the first surplus in fifteen years. It was even sillier when Gussie Taylor told us that Labor “spent an extra $209 MILLION dollars since they came to power. That’s $20,000 for every Australian household.” Mm, by my calculations that means there are only 2090 households in Australia… No wonder the Liberal Party couldn’t deliver a surplus!!

Ok, he clearly meant billion but it’s easy to get your billions mixed up with your millions when you have no idea what you’re talking about… Like when Josh got his sums out by a mere $66 billion but it was in our favour, so what’s carelessness matter?

While some criticisms of Labor by Dutton and his band of merry misfits are just not true, most of the others aren’t likely to make much of an impact on the swinging voter. For example, when the Coalition failed to support the motion on Julian Assange it argued that Australia shouldn’t be interfering in the legal processes of another country which is strange considering that I don’t remember that same argument being raised when China prosecutes our citizens. Whatever, I can’t see that being a position that’s liable to appeal to anyone who doesn’t already intend to vote for Voldemort…

Yes, I know people tell me that I shouldn’t call Dutton by that name. It has been pointed it’s upsetting and cheap and commenting on a physical resemblance that he can’t help is not fair. However, I simply reply by reminding people that Voldemort is a fictional character and therefore won’t actually be upset by the comparison…

If you look at the position Dutton takes on just about any issue, it’s worth asking who is actually going to be swayed into voting for him based on what he’s said.

Gloria Sty, bud Iyam riting this coz I wanna mayk sum poynts bowt reeding and fonnix…

You probably read that first sentence more slowly than usual and some of you will have just ignored it, but your probably able to read it, if you read it allowed.

Of course, you probably read that second sentence much more quickly and only some of you will notice that it used the wrong homonym. It should have read: You’re probably able to read that just fine if you read it aloud.

More importantly, you were able to read the first sentence because you were able to use phonics to decode the sentence. For most people that made it much, much slower than the way they read most things.

To use an imperfect analogy, think of reading like learning to drive: It’s very important to learn how to use the brakes. And the steering wheel and the accelerator. Once you’ve learned where all those things are, then it’s time to start concentrating on where you’re going and what’s around you. You may still be a poor driver and have no sense of direction, but only a small number will need a refresher course on where the brakes are. In this analogy, think of knowing how to use letters to sound out a word as the breaks and knowledge as the accelerator. Sometimes you’ll neither be able to use either of those things to make meaning, so you might swerve around them with the steering wheel and continue in the hope that what you avoided isn’t a problem later.

Ok, it’s an imperfect analogy. I admitted as much myself. Of course, just like with driving, it’s a lot more than knowing where the brakes, accelerator and steering wheel are. You have to know where you’re going and – even though you’ve been driven to Grandma’s house hundreds of times – when you’re driving you may suddenly become aware that you don’t actually know which road to turn down and you need someone to direct you, or else you need to put on the brakes and look up the route… (Yes, I’m ignoring the possibility of using a GPS because it doesn’t fit the analogy…) 

Reading is not simply a matter of decoding words with phonics any more than driving is a matter of knowing where the brakes are. In both cases, if you have to use them every few seconds, you’ll never get anywhere. Reading requires knowledge which Daniel Wllingham explains rather succinctly in this article: “School time, knowledge and reading comprehension”.

When I say knowledge, I’d don’t just mean a knowledge of vocabulary. While a rich vocabulary is extremely important in understanding what one reads, one needs a wide general knowledge to pick up the inferences in what one reads.

A sentence such as: “Albanese took the wind out of Dutton’s sails by agreeing with him!” requires not just a knowledge of Australian politics to appreciate the implications of the sentence, but unless one is familiar with the phrase “wind out his sails” then one might be left confused. Similarly the following paragraph needs the reader to make a number of inferences that aren’t present in a literal reading:

She thanked David for the lift and asked him if I’d like to come in for a coffee. “Won’t your husband mind if we wake him up?” he asked. “No,” she replied, “he’s away at the moment, so we really don’t have to worry about him at all!” 

A literal reading would have the reader believing that David was concerned about the sleep patterns of the husband, whereas most people would suspect that there was a subtext to the question as well as the answer.

When the Grattan Institute’s report was publicised last week, I couldn’t help but notice that the media used the failure to success anecdote by talking about an individual school who had made a dramatic improvement after adopting the recommended strategy. The trouble with the failure to success model is that it doesn’t tell you what’s going on elsewhere and, in this case, I’d suggest that most primary schools do have a structured approach to teaching kids how to sound out words. There may be room for improvement but when you are talking about the failure to success model, you aren’t looking at what’s happening in most places.

To explain what I mean as simply as I can, I’ll move away from education and use healthcare to illustrate by way of a fictional example:

Jonestown Hospital had one of the worst fatality rates in the state, then a new chief of staff, Dr Smith, instituted a policy of sterilisation. Dr Smith insisted that instruments were sterilised after each use and mandated the washing of hands between surgical procedures. “Surgeons had been instructed to save soap and water by only washing their hands at the start of the day but once we washed before every operation, the infection rate went down dramatically!”

If only other hospitals were to adopt these simple measures then we may be able to reduce fatalities to zero.

Yes, the reason that Jonestown hospital was able to improve was that it wasn’t doing what nearly every other hospital does. That’s why it had such a high fatality rate.

Now to drag that back to education, it’s obvious that if one poorly performing school isn’t doing something that most other schools are doing and they start doing it, then they’ll likely improve but that’s not an indication that all the schools who were doing better than the previously poorly performing school has something to teach them. In fact, it may be the opposite.

Every time the media report on education they have a tendency to report on the failures within the system and present some solution as though it’s the panacea for everything, while overlooking the fact that some of the reasons for poor performance are known to everyone and ignored. For example, why does NAPLAN compare like schools? Well, everyone knows if we compared all schools with all schools and didn’t take into account socio-economic factors, we’d find that socio-economic factors were the biggest element in the difference in ranking.

Before you wish congratulations to Anthony and Jodie on their engagement, let me alert you to the fact that it’s only a distraction!

I know this because I’ve been reading people’s comments on social media. Apparently a number of people who were concerned about taxpayers being charged for Jodie Haydon’s travel on the grounds that she wasn’t the PM’s wife, are now sure that he only did it to distract from the fact that Labor released over a hundred criminals because the High Court ordered them to.

Some people are attempting to argue that the reason they were released was because they’d served a sentence and – with no prospect of deporting them – it was inconsistent to hold them indefinitely when other people who’ve committed crimes are set free once their sentence was served. This overlooks that these offenders belong to a class of people that the Coalition objects to: foreigners! Let’s be clear here criminals fall into categories as far as the Liberal Party is concerned those who should be locked up forever and those who we can enter into contracts with. (I’m presuming you heard about criminal connections linked to some immigration detention contracts.)

Anyway, I’m sure that any fair-minded person would understand that there was no reason for Albo to propose on Valentine’s Day apart from the need to distract people from all the problems associated with his government at the moment. For example, unemployment has just ticked over 4% which nobody apart from the Reserve Bank wants. The RBA argued that unemployment would have to go higher before interest rates could start falling but what would they know?

And, of course, in Victoria we had that terrible problem with renewable energy after a spell of nasty weather. Matt Canavan referred to it as a “renewables blackout” because the coal-fired power station was off-line after the wind blew over the transmission towers. All right, I was a bit confused about how it’s renewables that are unreliable when it was the coal-fired power station that was offline but then someone explained that a large number of houses were without power because trees had blown over and knocked out power lines and trees are part of the renewable greenie agenda and if we didn’t have trees then there’d be nothing to blow over… apart from powerlines, of course.

Then we have the problem of Labor reneging on their promise to keep the Stage 3 tax cuts exactly as they were when they were legislated by the Morrison government five years ago. Reneging on a promise is a terrible thing and the fact that most people think that the new arrangement is preferable to the previous one shouldn’t make any difference. The Liberals have never broken a promise in spite of what Mr Macron thinks about submarines. That, I should point out, wasn’t a promise – it was a contract and a contract is different from a promise because Scott Morrison told us that he made it clear to the French President that the contract wasn’t worth the paper it was written on because we’d changed our mind.

I’m still intrigued by the assertion by the Liberals that the government promised on “hundreds” of occasions that they weren’t going to change Stage 3. Saying that you have no intention of doing something is not the same as a promise that you won’t do it. For example, I have no intention of having lunch with Taylor Swift this weekend, but if you see a selfie of us at a restaurant somewhere I don’t think anybody will be accusing me of breaking a promise.

A few days ago, the Grattan Institute gave us the breaking news that one third of Australian students didn’t read as well as the other two thirds and that this was costing the economy billions of dollars. They had a report from which the media took various quotes and told us that the Grattan Institute report had the solution which was structured phonics lessons in all schools.

Now don’t get me wrong here. There are definitely students who need help with their reading. And teaching students phonics in their early years is a good thing. Both of these ideas are worthy of more time than I can devote in a few paragraphs… just like the media who manage to present the problem and the solution in a few paragraphs during one bulletin. Without getting bogged down here I would like to point out a few points that the news item didn’t think worthy of mentioning:

1. The figures were based on NAPLAN results so it wasn’t a new discovery.
2. When a report says that X number of people are “below expected level”, it’s always worth asking how far below the expected level they are. For example, there’s a big difference between having a below average wage and not being paid at all.
3. The idea that “all schools” should be delivering structured lessons on phonics made me want to ask if it included all students in secondary schools.
4. The report was compiled by someone who studied economics. I have nothing against economists but I wouldn’t want one to be diagnosing my illness and writing my prescriptions or performing surgery.

Whatever, it seems that Labor is having so many problems that Albo felt it necessary to propose and increase his chances in the Dunkley by-election because I’m sure that’s the sort of thing that’ll be foremost in people’s mind when they enter the polling booth.

Ok, you’ve all seen the photos/video of the ex-Deputy Prime Minister demonstrating his skill in answering a phone while prostrate… It’s not as easy as it looks.

There have been comparisons to Sir Les Paterson by some, while others are using the cheap joke that this is unfair on poor Sir Les who managed to remain upright.

Let’s be clear here, we shouldn’t be making jokes about someone who’s so pissed that they can’t stand up. Alcohol is a serious problem. We need to acknowledge that. As Barnaby himself said:

“You have to be honest about the source. About 40 to 50 per cent of the problem is alcohol. If you don’t want to call it that then I don’t know what you want to say. It’s fairies at the bottom of the garden, it’s the alignment of the planet. No, it’s people chasing grog…”

Well, he was talking about Alice Springs but I think he does make some very valid points.

Just like when he called himself a “dead f@cking c#nt” while talking to his wife on the phone. I’m adding the symbols because I’m quoting directly from a couple of the papers and I don’t want to be accused of misquoting the man. Anyway, according to his partner, Vikki Campion, he “likes to self-flaggelate”… which goes a long way toward explaining his presence in Parliament when he asserts that he’d rather that government just get out of our lives.

She was also quoted as saying: “I’ve been with Barnaby when we have found a man in the same state on the street and rather than take a video and sell it to the media, he picked the guy up and took him home.”

Now, while I have no wish to disparage the couple’s Good Samaritan act, I don’t know that a federal politician and their partner filming someone lying in the street and trying to sell it to the media is the sort of thing that’s liable to lead to favourable media coverage, so it’s not really an option.

Just for clarity, I should explain that Barnaby’s predicament was caused by a simple accident where he wasn’t concentrating and walked into something he didn’t see: the ground. Once there, he decided that it was better to continue to talk on the phone rather than get up because, as anyone with a degree in Psychology knows, multitasking is a myth.

Now there have been a number of reactions from his colleagues but basically they’re saying that it’s a reflection on modern society that the person filmed it because whenever they find Barnaby self-flagellating on the ground their first reaction is not to reach for their phone and film it; their first reaction is to offer assistance… I presume that’s assistance in standing up and not in the flagellating department…

This whole incident just shows how unfair society is. Anyone else would have probably been given free accommodation in a police cell while poor Mr Joyce was left to fend for himself in the cold Canberra night.

We need to remember that Barnaby is “one of the best retail politicians” in the country so I’m sure he can be forgiven for a misdemeanour like this and I’m sure that he’ll be back to campaigning in no time…

Not in Dunkley, obviously because the Nationals won’t be standing a candidate there, and so the Coalition will have to do without the unique skills of Mr Joyce who recently called wind farms “filth” asserting that they’re not farms but factories, prompting most people to wonder if he considers coal-fired power stations farms or factories.

Even without Mr Joyce, the Liberals are still a good chance of being able to spin the result in Dunkley favourably. After all, after a week of Dutton and his cohorts telling everyone that Albanese’s broken promise would finish him, Simon Benson managed to write an article about how Newspoll had stayed the same and the tax cuts hadn’t given Labor a bounce in the polls.

Similarly with Dunkley, at this moment in the electoral cycle with the cost of living issues, the lack of rate relief from the RBA, the loss of a personal vote for Peta Murphy after her death and the broken promise attacks, you’d have to think that anything less than a win would be bad news. However, I suspect that any swing away from the government will suddenly be perceived as a massive plus for Dutton and we’ll hear something like one of the following from Bridget McKenzie’s partner:

“Excellent result, Dutton managed to get something like the average swing for a by-election and that’s hard when you have by-election caused by a tragedy like this.”

Or, in the unlikely event that Labor increase their majority, we’d get:

“Great result under the circumstances when you have a government throwing money at the public! They’ve obviously been blinded by the bribe of tax cuts and it’ll take a while for the government’s dishonesty to bite in the suburbs.” 

Whatever, in three weeks’ time we’ll have Samantha Maiden and/or Phil Coorey on “Insiders” telling us that Labor’s refusal to announce any plans on negative gearing is enabling the Coalition to frighten people with a scare campaign about Labor’s plans for negative gearing and so they’d better say something that we can say that people won’t believe them so they’d be better saying nothing rather than giving Dutton ammunition by saying something!

Apparently, we should all be shocked: There is a liar in the Lodge!

Now, I know that some of you are thinking that – after the years from Abbott to Morrison – it’d be a much bigger shock to find that there wasn’t a liar in the Lodge, but that’s not what I’m finding so perplexing about the latest attempt by the Coalition to gain some political traction.

It’s the fact that they want us to be so shocked about it when they’ve just spent the past couple of years telling us that we couldn’t trust Labor and that Anthony Albanese lied to the Australian people because he told us 295 times that power bills would come down by $97… Or was it the other way around.

And, of course, there was the broken promise not to touch superannuation and then Labor increased the tax on superannuation accounts worth more than $3,000,000, making it harder than ever for those on the minimum wage to pay their fair share of tax.

Not to mention all the other broken promises…

And yet, now we’re supposed to be shocked. It’s almost as if the Coalition weren’t serious about all the other times they said that Albanese was lying.

Of course we all know that there are times when it’s ok to break an election promise. Here are some examples:

• Tony Abbott’s no cuts to the ABC, Health or Education
• Tony Abbott’s maternity leave scheme was completely affordable in Opposition but too expensive in government
• Scott Morrison’s promise that the Budget was back in surplus next year
• John Howard’s non-core promises
• Abandoning the net zero commitment would have been just fine and some Coalition MPs have been urging the government to do that
• Similar, it was a terrible mistake for Albanese to hold the Voice Referendum even though that too was an election promise.

The list is potentially much larger but you get the idea.

Anyway now that the government has abandoned the Stage 3 tax cuts we’re discovering some remarkable things. For example, while it was wrong to change them, the changes are terrible because they don’t come into effect until July 1 and people need help now. This is like saying we didn’t think that you should call an ambulance for Jerry but now that the ambulance is on its way, aren’t you concerned that he’ll have to wait in the emergency room and shouldn’t you have fixed the hospital system first!

We’re also told by Peter Dutton that the changes are “bad policy” but he’s going to support them because the Coalition “won’t stand in the way of families doing it tough”, even if it’s “bad policy”. And they won’t be reversing the changes in government but they’re not “absolutely not” walking away from the “principles of Stage 3”. So to paraphrase, we’re completely committed to something that we’re not going to do in government and not going to oppose in opposition. For some reason this makes me wonder why I never watch “Married At First Sight”…

He told us: “We had stage 3 there, which was fully funded … they have taken the money from the stage 3 tax cuts and they have applied it to their own policy.” Their own policy being giving more of it to people earning less than $150k. How dare they!

I’m still unsure about what “fully funded” means when one is talking about tax cuts. I mean if you’re talking about a plan for something like nearly a billion dollars for a rail upgrade in a seat facing a by-election, fully funded means we’ve put aside money from the budget to pay for it. And the revenue from the budget comes from taxes. But when you fully fund a tax cut, does that mean you’ve put aside the money that you were going to spend on something like say Health or Education?

And if there’s any serious criticism that can be mounted about the changes it’s that they don’t go far enough with the redistribution. People earning less than $100k probably need more assistance than they’re getting, and even some up to $150k may be finding it harder than a year ago, but that’s not a criticism that you can make while being “committed” to the principles of Stage 3, which was politicians like us earning more than $200k a year should get a whopping pay cut and bugger anyone not paying enough that they can donate to our re-election fund.

Dutton went on to remind us that when someone is a one-hit wonder that pretty much means that no public appearance can finish without them trying an encore of that hit. He suggested that, even though the Referendum on The Voice was last October, the detail that Albanese had promised was still not forthcoming… Now maybe it’s just me, but I would have seriously doubted the Prime Minister’s sanity if he’d stood up and said, “Here’s the detail of the legislation that we’re not proposing owing to the Voice being defeated. We’d like you to examine this before we don’t vote on it in Parliament. There are several pages outlining who won’t be eligible to part of the Voice which are now irrelevant because, owing to its defeat, nobody is eligible to be part of the non-existent body, but please read this anyway as we’ve spent quite a lot of time and energy working on it so it’s a shame if people just ignore it.”

Whatever, the tax cuts are going to be waved through because the Liberal Party are the party of lower taxes and they have to vote for this broken promise because if they don’t then Labor would be the party of lower taxes but now that they’re voting for the Labor change, then the Liberals are still the party of lower taxes… Not sure where this puts the National Party.

I’ve been thinking about empathy lately.

You know, empathy. That capacity to put yourself in someone else’s shoes and wonder how they can possibly walk with heels that high.

I’ve decided that there’s a distinct lack of empathy from some politicians and it’s this lack from the Coalition that’s one of the possible reasons why – in spite of all the criticism they’ve copped – that Labor are still in front in most polls.

Yes, I know that you’ve probably read many articles about how they’re slipping in the polls and, if I were a political adviser, I’d be suggesting that they do something to try and arrest the slide. I mean, they can’t rely on media outlets giving them a boost by interviewing members of the Coalition front bench. When people start to wonder why they voted Labor up pops Peter Dutton/Angus Taylor/Sussan Ley/Jane Hume and most people go: “Ah, now I remember!”

Of course, if you were one of the few people who managed to sit through the first episode of “Nemesis”, you’d have been reminded about how Abbott lost 30 opinion polls before being replaced by Turnbull. You’d have also been reminded that when a spill was first called by Abbott, nobody stood against him so his opponent was an “empty chair”. Now, I don’t want to make it sound like the chair was unimpressive in its attempt to lead the Liberal Party, but I take the fact that it received over thirty votes, to be more a reflection on how the party felt about Credlin’s leadership than anything that the chair did.

When the time came for Turnbull, he managed to turn that around and win a few polls before people realised that he had managed to convince certain factions that he wouldn’t be doing the sort of things that Tony did. In fact, he’d be happy just having the title PM and an office window where he could stare out and wonder whether if this is how dogs chasing cars feel if they ever catch one. It didn’t take long before Turnbull had the government behind in the polls and, after scraping back in 2016 thanks to a shock result in Chisholm, there was a general expectation that he’d lose the 2019 election. Peter Dutton put his hand up, telling people that if anyone was going to lose the 2019 election it’d be him and, after successfully causing Turnbull to take his bat and ball and go home, Peter opened the door for Scott Morrison.

I bring all this up to remind everyone that, in the end, people are reluctant to change the government. When it’s polling day, they’re much more likely to go, “Mm, things aren’t really that bad, maybe I shouldn’t risk the other mob because who knows what they’ll do?”

Which is why the Liberals are running so hard on the idea of a broken promise and the idea that you can’t trust Labor. If you think back to the last time that the Coalition won government from Opposition their strategy was similar: Labor lied about the carbon tax, Labor have us in a budget crisis, and we’ll stop the boats and bring a stronger economy thanks to Jobsandgrowth. Their main positive policy was the paid maternity leave which they scrapped without it being broken promise because, well, we just couldn’t afford it and that’s not a broken promise because… Look, no boats!

However, as Heraclitus said: No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it’s not the same river and he’s not the same man.

The essential problem with trying to jump into the same river for the Liberals – apart from Peter Dutton looking even worse in speedos than Abbott did – is related to their lack of empathy for anyone but the fortunate few.

Abbott managed to create a lot of concern about a “carbon tax” which was “great big tax on everything”. While anyone with an understanding of the issue understood that not only was it not on everything, it wasn’t even a tax, the fact that this broken promise might make things more expensive was a concern to people. However, I suspect it’s going to be much harder to get most people worked up by telling them that they’re getting a tax cut thanks to Labor changing their mind on Stage 3. Similarly when Keith from Kew complains that he’s only getting $3729 instead of double that, we’re hardly going to have people joining him in street marches or contributing to his GoFundMe campaign to help him manage with school fees.

And lately, the Keystone cops of the shadow cabinet have been demonstrating their empathy for landlords by suggesting that we can’t trust Labor and that negative gearing will next to go, along with franking credits. Why negative gearing and franking credits?

Well, I suspect that in their minds, it played out well in 2019 when Shorten lost the election after proposing changes to these. Of course, the trouble with elections is that when people vote they don’t add something about the reason they voted that way. This enables people to create all sorts of narratives which suit their particular agenda even though nobody has any real idea why Susie from Sunshine and Barry from Berwick voted for a particular party.  I’m sure that if you could capture the thoughts of all the voters at the time of voting as well as the rusted-ons and the carefully considered swinger, there’d be a number who’d be thinking something like:

“I’m not voting for that candidate because they look like my ex.”

“I think I’ll vote for Jim because he got a grant for the footy club to build the clubrooms.”

“Mm, that one wears glasses so he must be intelligent.” 

“I’m not voting for the government because they’re too woke and they want women as candidates.”

“I met our local member at a barbecue and she agreed with me on most things so I expect that’s her party’s policy.”

“Gee, I should have taken one of those how-to-vote things. Is it the highest number for your favourite candidate or should I put a one beside him.”

“My dad said that he hates liberals because they’re commies so I guess I better vote for someone else. Mm, communists are red so I guess I should vote for the Green Party.”

And so on.

As far as 2019 is concerned, I strongly suspect that a number of people didn’t think about negative gearing or franking credits or electric vehicles because these things weren’t part of their immediate concerns. However, those “Back In Black” mugs gave the impression that, even though the Liberals were heartless, cigar-smoking bastards who thought that you weren’t entitled to anything, they at least knew how to manage the economy and all the pain of Abbott, Hockey, Turnbull, Morrison and company was for a purpose and they deserved to be given another term.

So if they try to re-prosecute the 2019 election, the run the very real risk of people going: “Wait a minute, you promised the budget would be back in the black and it wasn’t…”

Not only that, but it’s harder to get renters to empathise for the poor landlord who just put up their rent by more than their promised tax cut, and it’s hard to get someone struggling to buy their first home to be upset that changes to negative gearing may force some poor landlord to sell two or more of their ten properties.

As far as the franking credits go, most voters didn’t really understand what was being proposed… Certainly a large number of Liberals didn’t based on what they said, because if they did, what they said would have been a lie and we all know that it’s not in their DNA to lie… Labor weren’t taking away franking credits; they were simply proposing to close a loophole where if you paid no or very little income tax you could convert the taxed part to a refund. Franking credits were to stop people being taxed twice, but under the change that Howard made, some share income isn’t even taxed once.

It’s not true that the Liberal Party don’t know how to show empathy. The trouble is that they’re giving too much of their empathy to landlords, self-funded retirees and those with incomes over $150,000, rather than the unemployed, the homeless and those struggling who’ll be glad of the Stage 3 changes. Nothing wrong with that, but I suspect it’s no way to win an election.