Before you wish congratulations to Anthony and Jodie on their engagement, let me alert you to the fact that it’s only a distraction!
I know this because I’ve been reading people’s comments on social media. Apparently a number of people who were concerned about taxpayers being charged for Jodie Haydon’s travel on the grounds that she wasn’t the PM’s wife, are now sure that he only did it to distract from the fact that Labor released over a hundred criminals because the High Court ordered them to.
Some people are attempting to argue that the reason they were released was because they’d served a sentence and – with no prospect of deporting them – it was inconsistent to hold them indefinitely when other people who’ve committed crimes are set free once their sentence was served. This overlooks that these offenders belong to a class of people that the Coalition objects to: foreigners! Let’s be clear here criminals fall into categories as far as the Liberal Party is concerned those who should be locked up forever and those who we can enter into contracts with. (I’m presuming you heard about criminal connections linked to some immigration detention contracts.)
Anyway, I’m sure that any fair-minded person would understand that there was no reason for Albo to propose on Valentine’s Day apart from the need to distract people from all the problems associated with his government at the moment. For example, unemployment has just ticked over 4% which nobody apart from the Reserve Bank wants. The RBA argued that unemployment would have to go higher before interest rates could start falling but what would they know?
And, of course, in Victoria we had that terrible problem with renewable energy after a spell of nasty weather. Matt Canavan referred to it as a “renewables blackout” because the coal-fired power station was off-line after the wind blew over the transmission towers. All right, I was a bit confused about how it’s renewables that are unreliable when it was the coal-fired power station that was offline but then someone explained that a large number of houses were without power because trees had blown over and knocked out power lines and trees are part of the renewable greenie agenda and if we didn’t have trees then there’d be nothing to blow over… apart from powerlines, of course.
Then we have the problem of Labor reneging on their promise to keep the Stage 3 tax cuts exactly as they were when they were legislated by the Morrison government five years ago. Reneging on a promise is a terrible thing and the fact that most people think that the new arrangement is preferable to the previous one shouldn’t make any difference. The Liberals have never broken a promise in spite of what Mr Macron thinks about submarines. That, I should point out, wasn’t a promise – it was a contract and a contract is different from a promise because Scott Morrison told us that he made it clear to the French President that the contract wasn’t worth the paper it was written on because we’d changed our mind.
I’m still intrigued by the assertion by the Liberals that the government promised on “hundreds” of occasions that they weren’t going to change Stage 3. Saying that you have no intention of doing something is not the same as a promise that you won’t do it. For example, I have no intention of having lunch with Taylor Swift this weekend, but if you see a selfie of us at a restaurant somewhere I don’t think anybody will be accusing me of breaking a promise.
A few days ago, the Grattan Institute gave us the breaking news that one third of Australian students didn’t read as well as the other two thirds and that this was costing the economy billions of dollars. They had a report from which the media took various quotes and told us that the Grattan Institute report had the solution which was structured phonics lessons in all schools.
Now don’t get me wrong here. There are definitely students who need help with their reading. And teaching students phonics in their early years is a good thing. Both of these ideas are worthy of more time than I can devote in a few paragraphs… just like the media who manage to present the problem and the solution in a few paragraphs during one bulletin. Without getting bogged down here I would like to point out a few points that the news item didn’t think worthy of mentioning:
- The figures were based on NAPLAN results so it wasn’t a new discovery.
- When a report says that X number of people are “below expected level”, it’s always worth asking how far below the expected level they are. For example, there’s a big difference between having a below average wage and not being paid at all.
- The idea that “all schools” should be delivering structured lessons on phonics made me want to ask if it included all students in secondary schools.
- The report was compiled by someone who studied economics. I have nothing against economists but I wouldn’t want one to be diagnosing my illness and writing my prescriptions or performing surgery.
Whatever, it seems that Labor is having so many problems that Albo felt it necessary to propose and increase his chances in the Dunkley by-election because I’m sure that’s the sort of thing that’ll be foremost in people’s mind when they enter the polling booth.
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