Greg Sheridan made an interesting comment on “Insiders” where he told us that if the Voice fails to get up that means that Peter Dutton is not a racist because most people agree with him.

Interesting logic. Does that mean that the American South weren’t racist for excluding African-Americans from certain places because most people there agreed with it? Or that Hitler wasn’t anti-Semitic because most Nazis agreed with him… (No, I’m not comparing Dutton to Hitler before you start invoking Godwin’s Law. That would be unfair. For a start, Hitler managed to successfully seize power, while Dutton couldn’t even get his own party to pick him ahead of Scott Morrison.)

It sort of reminded me of some of the justifications when it was suggested that Gladys Berejiklian’s grants to provide Darryl’s tractor with enough fuel to run over his iPad, as well as several other special favours of a financial nature to his electorate in return for his special favour of letting her be boss while in public. Pork-barrelling isn’t corrupt because both sides do it.

I must say that – as a general rule – it doesn’t hold up to most other areas of your life. “Yes, officer, I am pissed and driving but so are all the other people leaving the party so it’s ok and I’ll just be on my way!” OR “Look, I read that in nearly all relationships women do most of the work around the house you finish the vacuuming and stop complaining because I’m trying to watch this show.”

Anyway, I was intrigued by the basic nature of a couple of things recently. In particular, I saw a heading that BHP would be $3 billion out of pocket with Labor’s “Same job, same pay” laws. This is particularly intriguing because I’m sure that I remember a number of Coalition MPs and business leaders telling us that this would mean that workers would be out of pocket because it’d be impossible for bosses to pay people more for things like greater experience and skill. Now, it may just be me here but I couldn’t see how this is going to lead to an enormous lift in BHP’s wages bill unless they’re going to lift everyone’s wage which sort of contradicts the argument about workers being worse off.

But then there are a lot of things like this:

• The Voice, for example, is just “virtue-signaling” by “inner-city elites” and will lead to no actual changes while simultaneously giving enormous power to First Nations people and enable them to hold up legislation, demand reparations, force a treaty and take over your backyard. The backyard, I should point out, is not a problem because the Mabo legislation led to nobody owning their backyard as it was all taken over by land claims from Indigenous people… Oh wait, that didn’t actually happen, did it?
• Remember how the proposed changes to negative gearing proposed by the Labor Party in the 2019 election campaign was going to drive down housing prices because all the landlords were going to sell. However, this was not going to lead to first home buyers getting a chance to buy because somehow the changes were going to drive UP the price of houses at the same time.
• Governments need to do something to bring down energy prices, but when Dan Andrews announces that no new houses will be allowed to connect to gas after January 1st, 2024, it’s an outrage because people should have the freedom to connect to gas which is – according to some critics of the decision – abundant and cheap. While not disputing the fact that Australia has so much gas that we can export it, the fact remains that we are paying high prices for it and – according to the gas companies – to reduce the price would mean that it wouldn’t be worth their time and money to make a “reasonable profit” as the proposed federal legislation was requiring. No, unless they’re making an unreasonable profit they’d be better off doing nothing. Anyway, this is particularly ironic given that so many Murdoch misanthropes have accused Andrews of “gaslighting” the Victorian public.
• Pre-election, the Coalition told us that Labor can’t manage money and they’ll run up an enormous deficit but when they deliver a surplus, it was easy and anyone could have done it, even though the Liberals didn’t manage it in any of their eight budgets. Of course, now that Labor have a surplus they should be offering relief to people at the same time as reducing their spending and not adding to inflation by giving relief to people.
• Rain “robbed” England of a victory in the 4th Test even though we still had five wickets in hand and the possibility of setting them a target. An Australian victory would have been unlikely but not the most far-fetched scenario to have happened in the history cricket. With Australia at 0/135 when rain stopped play in the 5th Test, can we say that if there’s no play today that rain “robbed” Australia of victory or is the fact that it’s not over till the final ball, something that doesn’t suit the narrative of the English this time? Surely you wouldn’t have double-standards from people who voted for Brexit while expecting to retain all the benefits of being part of the EU…
• Samantha Maiden thought that Kyle Sandilands’ opinion of Dan Andrews was worth a whole article and included quotes like: “That government sucks ass.” How strange that, of all the views you could report on, you think that Sandilands are the most relevant and insightful. So these days political journalists aren’t just writing stories which are nothing but their own opinion, but they’re also writing stories that are nothing but another media personality’s opinion.
• Finally, Elon Musk has recently been accused of ruining Twitter. However, now I think we can definitely say that he has killed Twitter. The recognisable bird has been replaced by an “X” which seems appropriate giving the fact that an ex usually refers to something that’s over like ex-lover or ex-PM.