By Andrew Chambers
Dear Barney,
You have my sympathy. An ordinary bloke should be able to navigate the complexities of the heart and the trousers in privacy and with respect, for this is one man’s business, one man’s life to lead as he sees fit. But Barney, you’re no ordinary bloke. You’re the Deputy Prime Minister and Leader of the National Party. You are paid, handsomely, to lead by brilliant example with shining moral rectitude, sacrifice (as we all do) and demonstrate some intellectual prowess when it comes to matters of the portfolios.
Instead we are witness to a plot more befitting a daytime soap opera than the leadership story of our nation. We have enough high drama already in our well-developed TV and movie industry where, ironically, the presidents are more like we’d hope they’d be.
As Leader of the National Party, representing the interests of the agricultural sector of Australia, shouldn’t you and the team be focused on the continuing pressures that are driving a younger generation from the land while the older generation battle on? Battle it is, with too many suicides, chronic physical and mental illnesses. and incapacitation going untreated. (Some policy other than selling off all that “cheap” bankrupted land to foreign interests to aggregate into vast broad acre operations with maximum mechanisation and minimal men and loads of chemicals).
As a nation we stand with the farmers in choosing to lock the gates and seriously reconsider the destruction of agricultural land for open cut coal and fracked gas in the face of a rapidly evolving shift in climate. This is not a contentious fact to ignore; the global community of scientists is unanimous in their support of climate change as a present, clear and dangerous threat to all life on this planet. The US Navy factors it as a threat, but not the COALition Government.
If I were a cynical man I’d see this whole gaudy vaudeville of parliament with its quaint customs, postures and posings, the endless scandals of state and peccadillo, as some side show snaring the nation’s attention away from the steady grind of legislation that does get through. The stuff that makes a super security minister out of Peter Dutton, orders ever more military hardware and has us paying to hawk our wares in the markets of death and destruction. Or the new legislation seeking to exclude and prosecute sites like these for simple transmitting a sometimes-hurtful splash of reality, something party politics doesn’t do well.
The needs of the nation seem to be at diametric odds with the policy of this party-led state and that’s a bigger problem for us all. Your ongoing poor examples of both personal and political leadership have a consequence; you’re not fit for duty and you’ve done the office of leadership a disservice. There’s no reward in that, just the grim reality you quite literally fucked it all up.
I hope for you, your partner, new child-to-be and your former wife and 4 kids, that it never comes to Centrelink, then you’ll know what purgatory is.
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This opinion piece was written by Andrew Chambers who believes we don’t live in a democracy, but we can, by a simple choice. Democracy Earth
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