What a week, eh?
In response to drug deaths at music festivals, Gladys Berejiklian expressed her sorrow and told her audience that she was prepared to try anything. Pill testing? No, because we have no evidence that it will work. Perhaps we should give it a try and see if it provides some evidence. No, because that would send the “wrong signal”.
Yes, that would send a signal that we actually want to try to do something about drug deaths instead of crying crocodile tears. Imagine if, instead of introducing random breath tests for motorists, we’d just said, “No, that would send a signal that drinking was ok. Instead, we’re just going to tell motorists not to drink and drive, and if they kill themselves or anyone, that will teach them a valuable lesson.”
But credit where credit is due. At least, Gladys was talking about the problem of drug deaths. Scott Morrison’s solution seems to be to insist on local councils holding citizenship ceremonies on Australia Day. Australia has had a long tradition of celebrating the national day going all the way back to when I was in my early thirties, so it’s only right that an Australian government should dictate to local councils that even though citizenship ceremonies are held throughout the year, that there needs to be one on the anniversary of the Rum Rebellion, where a leader was removed after a revolt by his subordinates, thus beginning the most honoured tradition in Australian politics.
Morrison didn’t mention that these must be called Australia Day Citizenship Ceremonies, so I’m presuming that if a council wants to advertise it as “Invasion Day – You Too Can Be One Of The Many Immigrants Who Ignores The Wishes Of Indigenous People”, there’ll be no problem as long as it’s held on January 26th.
Of course, Scott can’t have a position on everything. Although he did tell us that all those dead fish were the result of drought and not because we were draining the lakes too often to help irrigators. Suggestions that Barnaby had treated the river system as though it was a member of his staff were just wrong. Scott’s solution? We need a dress code for the citizenship ceremonies.
Surprisingly, this dress code bans thongs and board shorts, rather than making them compulsory. There was no mention of whether akubras would also be banned, or whether everyone swearing an oath of allegiance would need to wear a baseball cap with the most recent donor to the Liberal Party plastered all over it.
SloMo assured us that he was the “prime minister for standards”. He didn’t list which PMs were against standards. My experience has been that everyone thinks we should have standards; the only disagreement is what they should be. The word ‘standard” is also another name for a flag… When it comes to being the PM for flags, you only have to remember all those Australian ones that grew in number in inverse proportion to Abbott’s standing in the polls, to realise that Tony has him beat on that one.
As for the refugee who “chose” Canada over us, just because we sometimes take several years to process applications and she didn’t fancy spending her youth in a Thai airport, Scottie hasn’t been considering it an “on-water” matter and therefore not something to comment on.
Ah yes, remember when Promo was Immigration Minister and he announced that he wouldn’t be doing a running commentary on “operational matters”. He was going to do a weekly update, where he specificially didn’t comment on what was happening. The weekly briefings soon stopped, but nobody seemed to notice.
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