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“Fairness, Opportunity, Security” – Is The Last One About Malcolm’s Job?

Those who actually watched last night’s Budget speech couldn’t help but be impressed with how Scott pronounced most of the words correctly, even if he did refer to “Fartisuiticles” at one point. One presumes he meant “pharmaceutical”, but you can’t be sure.

The other impressive thing was projecting the surplus until well after the next election, so that if Labor get elected they can be blamed for it not happening or else, the Liberals will take the credit if it does. “This is thanks to the work we started in 2017,” Scott will tell us. They’ll have a problem if they do get re-elected, but just about everybody on the front bench seems to be working hard to ensure that doesn’t happen.

Yep, as I predicted last week, various media outlets are printing a “Winners and Losers” Table. To me, this has always seemed a rather strange exercise and not just because surely we’re all winners out of such a great Budget… No, it’s because it’s only a matter of time before you see something like cancer sufferers in the winners column with people buying a car worth more than $200,000 in the losers.

I was particularly impressed with Malcolm and Scott’s repetition of the words, “Fairness, Opportunity, Security”. I thought if they added, “Sincerity, Industry, Leadership” then they’d have the acronym FOSSIL, which not only pays homage to the coal industry#, but also the ideas of many of their members.

Of course, words by themselves have no meaning. When Malcolm talks of security is he talking about protecting us from terrorism, making our borders STRONG or job security? In particular, his own. And opportunity? Opportunity to discover what it’s like to be homeless is still an opportunity, prison is an opportunity to turn your life around and staying in your wife’s flat while claiming a parliamentary travel allowance is an opportunity to double-dip at the taxpayers’ expense. As for fairness, well Hitler was a great advocate of fairness, except he was using it in the sense of blonde haired, blue-eyed Germans who would become the master race.

And speaking of the master race, did you see the Labor Party’s great own goal – their ad about protecting Australian jobs? It’s being widely criticised because of the lack of diversity in the actors’ ethnicity. I’d consider this fair enough except when you’re making an ad to appeal to potential One Nation voters, you can’t get too carried away with foreign looking people who may not support ANZAC Day and Australia values. Surely it was enough to have a few women in there as well as someone who looked vaguely Asian.

However, I do take the point that many people made about the group so lacking in diversity that if they were going to be so unrepresentative of a typical street in Australia, they might as well have asked the Coalition’s front bench to star in the ad.

Here’s Tony Abbott complaining to the IPA about the lack of diversity in the Labor ad:

Ok, that’s a lie. He’s just at the IPA wishing them a happy 75th birthday. You can tell how excited they are to have him speak by the looks on their faces.

But speaking of terrible videos, did you happen to catch this one of Turnbull?

Malcolm Congratulates The Boys

(Unfortunately, I can’t directly link the video just Malcolm’s Facebook page, but it’s about three down, where he talks about the Budget)

While I particularly like the shot of Barnaby Joyce looking like he’d rather be anywhere else and the fact that it all seemed so staged, I just couldn’t help love the way it was all meant to be so candid, as though the camera just happened to be turned on as things were winding up.

Yep, as Groucho Marx said, “To succeed in this business, you need sincerity. Once you’ve learned to fake that, you’ve got it made!”

I think Turnbull may need some more lessons in faking it.

# Speaking of the coal industry, how are the Liberals going to respond to the report that Adani would seriously lead to a drop in prices and therefore production in the Hunter Valley where the quality of coal is much better (dare I say cleaner?). Ok, I know they could just do what they usually do with reports and either tell us they’ll get back to it later or attack the source of the report, but in this case it’s the coal industry itself that did the modelling.

9 comments

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  1. Alistair

    RIP ‘Jobs and growth’, The funeral will be held later in the week.No flowers please.

  2. jim

    Early 2007;,JOHN HOWARD: The President and I this morning witnessed the signing of an agreement for the supply of LNG by an Australian consortium to China worth $35-billion.

    –In this example of critically counter-productive management, the first iteration occurred in the 1990s when Victorian Coalition Premier Jeff Kennett and Treasurer Alan Stockdale decided that looking after the State Electricity Commission of Victoria (SECV) and the Gas and Fuel Corporation (G&FC) was too hard for them. So they sold off these productive public-owned utilities.

    Note that Victoria’s brown coal power stations had been acknowledged since the early 1970s as the most polluting and inefficient power generators in the developed world.
    Concurrent with the sell-off of the SECV, Kennett and Co deemed it necessary to sell the Gas and Fuel Corporation. Natural gas discoveries in Bass Strait in the 1960s were welcomed as a source of cheap clean gas estimated to last for more than 400 years. This was a good thing for Australians. It represented a guarantee of an essential resource, a “common wealth” for the whole population.

    But a few years after Jeff Kennett and Alan Stockdale contrived this sell-off, Coalition Prime Minister John Howard stepped in and locked us into an open-ended …(No end date)..contract to supply our gas to China at the unconscionably low rate of $US3.80 per MMBtu (AUD 0.176 cents per litre), coupled with the stunningly naive omission to specify NO renegotiation of the price in the future.
    So…We were selling our resource to a foreign power at a permanently fixed – and much lower – price to what domestic consumers pay. And now, little more than a decade later, we are being warned that domestic gas supply cannot be guaranteed and we may pursue the highly contentious practice of “fracking” to exploit coal seam gas, taking us full circle to the dirty days of brown coal .

    Furthermore on “gold plating ” our poles and wires……..The incentive to spend $45 Billion on our poles and wires was supercharged in 2006 by state governments: they wrote the rules for the regulator to enforce, thanks to a deal with former prime minister Johnny Howard, who gave them rulemaking authority in exchange for their blessing to replace state-based regulators with one new federal body all run by LNP of course.

    As Australia becomes a leader in solar and battery power, our electricity bills will continue to skyrocket thanks to a massive over-investment in the network that we didn’t ask for and will never need, writes Jess Hill.
    Tony abbott saw investment in solar power drop by 88% and he calls himself a genius I kid you not.
    This is good budget surely there must be an election coming.

    .

  3. helvityni

    Maybe Shorten wanted to make friends with Pauline; in Queensland you can use only Anglos in your ads; you couldn’t put Yassmin on any of their billboards; I remember those three happy little girls, giggling with each other on the Oz Day billboard; they were very naughty, they wore headscarfs…
    You can’t wear scarfs on ANZAC or Oz Day, you might lose your job if you happen to have one…and Bill is always a bit worried coz people might like Albanese or Bowen more..

  4. Terry2

    What I noticed with Morrison, both last night and this morning is that his heart is no longer in it, he’s got no passion, the vindictiveness has gone and he’s looking for a Hockey style parachute, possibly London.

    He’ll be gone soon with Cormann taking over, just you wait and see.

  5. Marion June Poke

    @Terry2.. he may have to fight brandis for the London posting.. another one who needs to get out.. but still live well. :'(

  6. diannaart

    Hilarious, because it’s true. In fine form Rossleigh.

  7. Kronomex

    Oh wow! Malky and Scottie got rid of the deficit levy and replaced it with the bank tax so we all get to pay for the banks levy because they certainly aren’t going to pay it without finding some way to recoup their “losses”. Way to go Pepe Le Pew and Foghorn Leghorn.

    When they get the boot, we can only hope, at the next election the entire LNP will suffer selective amnesia and it will all become Labor’s fault.

  8. Freetasman

    Well, a well known ex Labor politician believe that the budget is unfair: Anna Bligh is not happy.
    She has slammed the policy, saying that every Australian will have to pay for the levy on the big banks.

  9. wam

    wow what a great read after my session in the pool. The budget will have the much needed malcomised boost in the polls for trumble and the son of a small car.
    Although even a casual look would show the poor and PAYE having all the lifter roles in the play with the rich and the banks swanning around in the alas poor yorick monologue roles getting all the stage and accolades.
    beauty jim. Little johnnie was profligate with his selling.
    The gov should bite the bullet and buy the gas from the chinese at 0,2 cents per litre a tidy profit plus.

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