Ok, I’m sure that there are always people who receive honours and you ask how on earth did they get the nod, whereas others you can look at say, “Even though I personally find them an odious reptile, I can see that they have done some things that a rather warped person would see as truly great.”
For example, while many of you wouldn’t like Campbell Newman, it’s worth noting that his award was for services to the Queensland Parliament and I can certainly see that. Newman was elected in the biggest landslide in Queensland’s history and then governed so badly that he lost the next election, which most people surely see as a great service to the Parliament and the people of Queensland.
But Bettina Arndt? I mean, really?? Clearly she only got the nod because she’s a woman. After all, plenty of men have been going around justifying their own bad behaviour and nobody ever nominates Chooka for explaining why he and his mates have every right to comment on the way women dress and how it’s their own fault if anything happens to them.
As for Amanda, I’ll leave it, “Is it just me?”, the way she did when commenting on Yassmin Abdel-Magied’s grant to complete her book. That way I can’t be accused of all the implicit dog-whistles…
Oh, that’s right. A metaphoric dog-whistle is meant to be something that only racists can hear. Big fail there, Mandy.
Anyway, given the fact that most people won’t be happy with the current Australia Day Honours for all sorts of reasons… The fact that it’s not being called Invasion Day, for one. Or the fact that nobody even thought of nominating you is another. And, of course, the fact that the list contains all sorts of people who have simply done what they were paid to do and, in some cases, they didn’t even do that well…
Given people’s unhappiness, I thought I’d give you my own list.
- Bridget McKenzie an OD (Order of Distraction) for her services in deflecting attention away from the Government’s inability to come up with any sort of sensible response to climate change.
- Paul Kennedy OND (Order of Non-Distraction) for interviewing a couple of politicians and actually not allowing them to simply regurgitate their talking points.
- Michael McWotsisname (Order of Miraculous Achievement) for rising to role of Deputy PM with no discernible talents or abilities. In spite of being born without a personality, he hasn’t let this stop him and he remains an inspiration to all those ordinary people who refuse to accept their lack of a qualification prevents them from having an opinion on such topics as climate change or monetary policy.
- Malcolm Turnbull OI (Order of Irrelevance) for coming out and saying the sort of things that make us feel that he would have made a great PM if only he’d made the long trip with Dorothy and discovered that he could actually have courage without waiting for the Wizard to give it to him.
- Twiggy Forrest OO (Order of Obfuscation) for announcing that he was giving $70 million to bushfire relief, only to clarify that $50 million was going into his own charity which will conclude that it’s all the fault of letting trees grow and nothing to do with fossil fuels.
- Peter Dutton OOC (Order of Outright Contradiction) for doing what some people would consider lying. Apart from the comment about not listening to the “Twitter crazies” (how does he know they’re crazy if he don’t listen to them?), when asked if he’d ever heard of Matt Kean, Dutton told listeners, “Never!” He then added that he doubted that anyone outside a three kilometre radius of inner Sydney had… Perhaps it was just a lucky guess, but most of us wouldn’t be able to pinpoint the location of someone we’d never heard of.
- Anyone keeping up with politics and still being optimistic that good sense will one day triumph petty point scoring should be given an OWWD (Order of Wow, Well Done!) Yes, it’s a hard job but if nobody does it, we’ll all just end up in a foetal position on the floor and that won’t help anyone.
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