Autocorrect changed “Albo” into “Also”, which I hope isn’t some harbinger of things to come.
Let’s recap:
Why are you only asking Labor the hard questions in this election campaign? the media gets asked.
“They’re likely to be the next government of Australia and their policies need to be examined.”
Scott Morrison wins the election and makes the extraordinary declaration that he believes in miracles. This doesn’t get commented on by the media. After all, as I pointed out before, me winning Wimbledon this year would be a miracle, Ash Barty, not so much. When an incumbent PM tells you that their victory was a miracle, rather than a mild surprise, that surely tells you something about how bad his government actually is.
So now that Scomo has had his miraculous victory, the attention, of course, turns to… Labor. How did they lose? Why did they lose? What’s wrong with the pollsters? How did the betting markets get it so wrong? Hey, those of you criticising the media are just sore losers. Don’t you understand, Scomo was brilliant! The way he dodged and weaved past all those tricky questions like “Why are you so popular?” and “Do you have any good curry recipes?”
Anyway, the media has done its in-depth analysis of Labor’s failure to win support for its controversial policies such as free cancer treatment, ensuring that people paying no tax don’t get a refund cheque from the government for the tax they haven’t paid and their climate change policy. Apparently, saying that a coal mine has to stack up commercially and that Labor wouldn’t be giving away taxpayer money to support it was too green for the people of Queensland, but too unclear for all those inner city latte-sippers who don’t understand unless we have a healthy economy there’s no point in having a planet to put it on.
The Coalition’s first item of business is the tax cuts. Good things, tax cuts. Don’t we all want money in our pockets? This is not like when those lefties try and give you money for nothing by funding schools and hospitals. No this is giving more of your own money back to you, so you can afford to go to the doctor so long as you don’t do it too often. Besides, the economy is “facing headwinds” in spite of being brought back to excellent health by the current team in the six months they’d been there so a little stimulus is a good thing, right?
Yes, six years ago the Liberals went into the 2013 election telling us that they had a plan for jobs and growth. Now, it seems to me that I could similarly stand for election by saying that I had a plan for the drought. Just as the Liberals said we need growth to promote jobs, I could say that we need rain to break the drought. “That’s my plan,” I’d say, “making sure that the fundamentals are right and then rain will occur.” It seemed to be working for the Liberals because just like the inevitability of a drought being broken eventually, so too, after the GFC was growth likely to return. Unfortunately, it seems to have deserted us lately, but that’s surely not their fault, any more than the lack of rain is mine.
Of course, we now have a Budget surplus so we can afford these tax cuts in spite of the “headwinds”. Except these headwinds may put the surplus at risk, so we need the tax cuts to stimulate the economy. And they will. Stage 1 will start appearing once people have done their tax. But it does seem hard to argue that Stage 2 and 3 will encourage growth in the current fiscal year given they don’t come into play until after the next election.
The government refused to spit the Bill as Labor wanted, so the media’s attention turned to whether or not Labor would buckle. Or whether they’d be pig-headed. They were the two choices for Labor. And let’s be real here. We need to talk about what Labor’s going to do, at this point. We don’t need to talk about how intractable the government is when it refuses to split the various stages. We don’t need to discuss the massive change to the progressive nature of the income tax system. We don’t even need to point out that the changes benefit the people voting for them. No, we need to concentrate on Labor and what it will do.
Even after Senator Lambie agrees to a handshake deal and forgets to count her fingers afterwards and the government has the numbers to pass it whatever Labor votes, we need to talk about Labor.
We need to get very, very angry that they didn’t understand that because they’d lost the election they must acquiesce to the government’s mandate. Or, if you think that governments don’t really have a mandate to dictate policy on tax two elections into the future, we should get really angry with Labor for capitulating and not making a principled stand.
Ah well, I guess that Labor have worked out that if they just go along with everything the government does, eventually some of the criticism must eventually be levelled at the Coalition. Although, surely Albo must have been around long enough to notice that strategy has never worked in the past. I mean, you only have to go back to the AFP raids on the media a few weeks ago to notice that people were criticising the Labor party for supporting the legislation in about equal measure with horror at the raids themselves. Very few people seemed to be actually suggesting that the government had failed to put adequate safeguards in the legislation.
Yep, maybe the autocorrect was onto something. Maybe it’s not Scomo and Albo. Maybe it’s going to be Scomo and Also.
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