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Lives Matter! But Some Lives Are Expendable…

I saw a post on social media which said: “Blue Lives Matter!” Now, I presumed that they weren’t making a plea for blankets for the cold; I presumed that they were suggesting that we should support the police… Ok, the police no longer dress in blue in my state, but old habits die hard.

Anyway, taking a leaf from the book of the people. who aren’t-racist-but, I responded to it with the conciliatory, “All Lives Matter!” Strangely, this did not go down well. Apparently the people who think that all lives matter think that if you write “All lives matter!” when they’ve just said that blue lives matter then you’re suggesting that blue lives aren’t important but when you write “All Lives Matter” on a BLM post you’re doing it to specifically show how non-racist you are…

Yes, I’m confused too. This is even more confusing than Morrison’s decision to keep Parliament closed after telling us that we couldn’t hide under the doona forever. At least that was simple enough to understand. That was like when your boss tells you that he has special privileges. “You can’t hide under the doona,” he tells you, “but I can, because I’m the one making up the rules.” Ok, once upon a time it was Parliament which voted on the rules, but we don’t have time for that. I mean, that’s far too risky these days. Things might not get through the Senate…

And it was even more confusing to try to understand Albanese’s response, which was basically that Labor would agree to shut down Parliament, even though they don’t like the idea, however,  they won’t oppose it because they want to be a constructive Opposition and not one that behaves like Tony Abbott. This is only confusing because it seems to be what Labor keeps saying this to every proposal that the Liberals make, and I’m confused as to why they haven’t noticed that Kim Beasley tried the same approach and lost both times, but Abbott went close in one election and actually won the other.

It was even more confusing than the government giving Murdoch $10,000,000 to promote sports that are being ignored by the ABC who stopped broadcasting them because they had their budget cut. Or rather, when they didn’t have their budget cut because they only didn’t get as much money as they were supposed to, which isn’t a cut because they didn’t get less money. They just didn’t get the increases that would have enabled them to continue with the services. Using this logic, it seems that the proposed tax cuts aren’t tax cuts… Anyway, it’s confusing that you give funding to the place where the audience will be limited to subscribers if you want to promote these sports.

It was even more confusing than finding out that Phil Gaetjens only interviewed Bridget McKenzie and the head of Sports Australia in the far-reaching probe into the sports rorts ordered by Scotty Morrison. Sort of reminded me of good old Alex Downer’s response when the AWB scandal became public which went something like, “Well, we’d heard the rumours, but we went and asked them were they doing anything wrong and they said that they weren’t so we left it at that!”

It was even more confusing than when I realised that Quidditch makes no mention of Trainers, so where did Morrison get the JobTrainer idea from? For those of you unfamiliar with Harry Potter, Quidditch is played between opposing teams of seven players. There are three Chasers, two Beaters, the Keeper and the Seeker. I was expecting JobChaser or JobBeater, but where did he get the idea for JobTrainer. Furthermore, the Chaser’s role is to keep the Bludgers away from their team members who are trying to score with the Quaffle… No, the Quaffle is a type of ball not what you hear at Scotty’s press conferences.

But the most confusing thing of all is that – unlike when Labor propose anything about tackling climate change – the Coalition have created the biggest deficit in history and massively increased government debt, but all that anybody seems to be saying is that it’ll take years to pay off completely overlooking the fact that a large chunk of government debt is bonds which are expected to take years before they’re due to be cashed…

Speaking of cash, I was particularly annoyed about Morrison’s comment that the public understands that we can’t keep burning cash on JobSeeker, JobKeeper and JobBludger. Ok, he didn’t say the last one but it was implied.

For a start, it is NOT cash. It may seem like a picky point, but cash is limited whereas government money isn’t. I’m not going to get into an argument about Modern Monetary Theory here because it’s nearly the end of my piece and there’s only a limited number of words that I can write because that’s the way writing works. I can’t just keep burning up words because they’ll cause debt and…

Yes, that makes no sense. But that’s exactly the way the government talks about money. Probably the best analogy I could give is to think of government money like sex. Yes, there probably are limits to the amount of sex that people can have, but most people are nowhere near finding out what they are…

However, it wasn’t just the economic illiteracy of Morrison’s comment; it was the idea that helping people survive and eat and put a roof over their head was “burning cash” which suggests that it’s being wasted. I sort of picture Scotty standing over a relative’s hospital bed and suggesting that we can’t keep throwing money away when we don’t know how long they’ll need on life-support.

Whatever, it’s been quite a week.

 

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5 comments

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  1. Kerri

    I now understand that there are people who respond differently when the vet says “it’s going to cost umpty umpt to fix Mr Tibbles” and you mumble of course it is go ahead Mr Tibbles is important.
    During the week some referred to Scottyfrommarketing as “Job Shirker”
    5 star comment that!

  2. wam

    A beaut read rossleigh:
    Taking labor and Albo out of the system of government is easy as the opposition prefers to support scummo and wants not to rock the boat, hoping for some access to the media to make a suggestion to a rampant mob of ditherers.
    However, it would be naive and foolish to rely on trust alone,” Prof Williams wrote in The Australian.
    “Taking parliament out of the equation is unwise when governments are exercising authoritarian powers. There is a lot that can go wrong.” spot on prof but debt is labor so nothing pinned on the government
    ps
    “It may seem like a picky point, but cash is limited whereas government money isn’t.”
    Well it was limited when the rabbott won government in Sept 2013 and with a few weeks milne was persuaded to support the doubling of the limit but something intervened and the lppmies abolished the debt limit all together, I assume there must have been a principle involved rather than a thankyou card with a present/.
    Whatever the loonies got for their vote, the result kept the rabbott and his joey well heeled for unlimited cash.
    Fortunately for scummo, boobby slithered out of retirement and delivered two nth qld seats to the LNP to settle the election in favour of the ruling party and QED another 3;6 years of bullshit and trauma.

  3. leefe

    Your best yet, Rossleigh. Which is saying something.
    It’s even more confusing than trying too get my laptop running again.

  4. totaram

    tony magrathea: Respect! Sadly, (only for the purposes of this petition) I have never lived in Queensland.

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