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.
