Picking On Peter Or The White Man’s Burden!
Gee, it’s got so that it’s not safe for a bloke to open his mouth in Australia without people attacking him.
Take poor Peter Dutton. All he does is make the point that Malcolm Fraser made mistakes by taking “certain groups” and Labor try to portray him as racist just because, when asked, he named the “Lebanese” as the people he meant. I mean Lebanese isn’t a race, is it? Well, if it is, who’s winning and when is it all over?
Anyway, Peter Dutton did go on to make the point that the vast majority of Lebanese are all right by him, and to suggest that he was attacking them all by pointing out that Malcolm should have anticipated that a number of the grandchildren of the ones he let in would be responsible for terrorist acts… Well, not so much “responsible” as arrested before they could actually do anything, but still… I mean, it should have been possible to predict something like that. Whatever, just because he suggested that none of them should be let in, the law-abiding ones seemed to take it personally when he suggested that the actions of a handful meant that it was a mistake to let any of them in!
Pete, unlike Malcolm, isn’t taking any chances. He thinks that nobody should be allowed into Australian unless it’s on a 457 visa.
Meanwhile, Pauline and partners do a version of the old joke where a defendant tells the court that even though the prosecution has produced four witnesses who saw them do the crime, he can produce billions of people who didn’t. Ignoring the overwhelming evidence of coral bleaching of the Great Barrier Reef, they choose not to argue that it’s not being caused by climate change because that might get them having to debate academics which might give them a headache; they choose to take journalists to a place where there’s no coral bleaching and say, “Look, no problem!” Which is the equivalent of taking someone to a fancy restaurant in one of those countries that our parents used to encourage us to eat our vegetables and announcing that there’s clearly no starvation problem in this country…
Come to think of it, one could do that in the USA…
Come to think of it, many, in fact, do that!
But I guess that it’s Tony Abbott’s attempt to become PM again that made me wonder if there is really any hope for me. I mean, I, too, am white. Is there any hope for us. Are we all as stupid and inconsistent as Donald Trump? Are we all as shiftless as Christopher Skase? Are we all as egocentric as George Brandis? Are we all as lacking substance as Malcolm Turnbull? Are we all as dumb as…
God, there were so many people in the current government that I could have finished that sentence with that I paused so long that I lost my train of thought…
Anyway, Tony’s glad that we’re not talking about “innovation” anymore because people don’t understand it, while simultaneously arguing that we should go back to introducing the things in the 2014 Budget that nobody understood.
Ah, Tony! At least your wife understands you…
I’m an old, middle-class white male. God, it’s embarrassing.
Although I’ve never had to put up with racism, sexism and a host of other things, so I guess that complaining about it being embarrassing sounds a bit pathetic…
Maybe I should complain about political correctness instead. That way, at least I’d get a whole host of people telling me it’s got to the point where you can’t join the Nazi Party without someone calling you racist.
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Greg
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lefturnahead
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David1
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MichaelW
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Annie B
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wam
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Sir ScotchMistery
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helvityni
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jim
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Sir ScotchMistery
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crypt0
Return to home pageRossleigh ; “at least Abbott’s wife understands him” …how do you know?
Margy might be just being “politically correct”!
Great article,well done.
Good read
Pretty sad when the right wing nut jobs stop blaming labor then turn on their own. Seem to be running out of excuses for their total incompetence.
A good read. An across-the-board summary there.
You, Rossleigh – really MUST have a go at political correctness, or is that political corretEDness ?. Would love to see your take on that. ( seriously ). .. If you have already written on it, and I have missed it – my apologies.
More than acceptable that you incorporate many other ‘names’ in your article. Abbott stands out – he is one and the same type of ‘character’ as his front bench colleague (?) – one P. Dutton.
Birds of a feather …. ??
They should both be turfed out – but it ain’t gonna happen. … no ‘man’ power at the top, to do it. 😉
of course she understands him he gives up sex for lent?
Why has he got so few kids?
I found 486 R U able to explain how such a devout mick has so few kids??? No answer.
Another effervescent outpouring from the lovely and talented Rossleigh.
Can I please answer the rhetorical question with the hanging end? In case the answer is “yes”, then the answer to the question asked, “are we, as a nation, as dumb as dogshit?” is also a resounding yes.
Sir Scotch Mistery,
I don’t know about dumb, but there’s definitely something very rotten about this country, Australia, I just finished reading the upsetting story (GUARDIAN) about the Iranian asylum seeker Hamid Kehazaei’s delayed treatment on Manus……he died.
Then another , equally upsetting item on ABC News about our celebrated paedophile artist, Donald Friend….why was he not in jail?
What are our values, where’s our humanity…
Right-wing governments ‘increase suicide rates’
By Andy Coghlan ….Note;….Australia’s suicide rate has gone up by 45% in 2015
Right-wing governments may sap some people’s will to live and result in more suicides, conclude studies in Britain and Australia.
The researchers speculate that losers are more likely to kill themselves in the individualistic, “winner-takes-all” societies favoured by right wing governments, because they are left to fend for themselves. Wide disparities in wealth also sharpen any sense of hopelessness, the researchers argue.
“If you fail under that ideology, it would accentuate your feelings of failure,” says Mary Shaw, whose team at the University of Bristol analysed suicide trends in England and Wales over the past century.
Left wing governments tend to be more “inclusive” and community based, she says, decreasing the isolation felt by people down on their luck. Shaw’s team calculates that over the past century, 35,000 extra suicides occurred when the Tories were in power.
“That’s equivalent to one suicide for every day of the 20th Century, or two for every day that the Conservatives ruled,” the team write in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health.
Britain’s Conservative Party declined to comment on the findings.
Double trouble
Shaw and her colleagues found that on average, suicide rates were 17 per cent higher when the Conservatives were in power, compared to the annual average of 103 suicides per million population when opposition parties held office.
Richard Taylor and his team in the School of Public Health at the University of Sydney found similar trends over the past century in New South Wales. When Right-wing governments were in power, men were 17 per cent more likely and women 40 per cent more likely to commit suicide.
They report that rates were highest whenever Right wing governments held power both at federal and state levels.
Both studies reached their conclusions after taking into account other factors that affect suicide rates, such as economic slumps, wartime, and even a surge of suicides among women in the 1960s when sedatives became widely available.
“You’ve never had it so good”
But the same trend always emerged, even at times of economic boom such as the “you’ve-never-had-it-so-good” years when Harold MacMillan led the UK’s Tory government between 1957 and 1963.
During that time, annual suicides peaked at 137 per million population. Shaw points out that rates were almost as high in the 1930s (135 per million) when Labour’s Ramsay McDonald headed a coalition, but she believes the primary reason then was the century’s worst economic slump.
The lowest rate was 85 per million, during the Liberal government of David Lloyd George between 1916 and 1920. Now, under Tony Blair, it is back to the non-Conservative average of 103, down from 121 during Margaret Thatcher’s first term in the early 1980s.
Shaw admits that attempts to connect the differences to ideologies are pure speculation. “But I’d be very interested to see if suicide rates are higher wherever there’s a Right-wing government,” she says. “I’d be particularly interested to see if the relationship holds in the US.”
A study published in July 2001 found that US Republicans are almost three times more likely to have nightmares than Democrats. But a Republican spokesman told New Scientist at the time: “If we are, it’s because we’re left cleaning up the mess left by eight years of Bill Clinton. We sleep better now Bush is in the White House.”
Journal reference: Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. (vol 56, p 723, p 766)https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn2817-right-wing-governments-increase-suicide-rates/
@Helvitnyi – we’re rotten in terms of our capacity to think. Our thinking membranes have been ruptured by self-interest and the support of hedonistic nonsense from members of parliament.
Friend wasn’t in jail because no one cared, and the only reason they care now is so they can hold their communal hands up and say “see, we tried our best”.
Where the hell is Pell if you are going to push that barrow? Answer – protected by the catholics who are currently screwing our parliament.
Nope – just plain dumb as dog shit.
Take poor Peter Dutton.
I just wish someone would …
Manus Island, Nauru … North Korea, Iraq, Syria ..,.
ANYBODY …