Scott Morrison And His Strange Relationship With Children (No, Not About The National Party)

Rossleigh

5 years ago

“To a hammer, everything is a nail.”

MY wife hit her head yesterday and she decided that she wanted to go to an emergency department to check it out. Without going through all the ins and outs of the experience, she’s fine and, after triage, we sat in some less than comfortable chairs for the next hour, until my wife complained about her head and she was given pain-killers and sent to sit outside the “fast track” for the next couple of hours.

This was the point at which I started to wonder what “fast track” actually meant and I decided that it was just a way of making those complaining feel better. Naturally, this made me think of Scott Morrison. Sitting there, I wondered if we’d be there till the next day and, at such a point, were I to complain would the conversation go something like this:

“Excuse me, but these chairs are impossible to sleep in.”

“Well, the chairs are only temporary and people aren’t meant to sleep in them.”

“But it’s been all night and I haven’t managed to get any proper sleep.”

“Look, the best form of care is a hospital bed.”

“But we haven’t been given a hospital bed. If my wife was in a hospital bed, I could go home and…”

“We have put more people in hospital beds than the hospital down the road, so you should just think about all the people who are in bed and remember that the chairs aren’t meant to be a long term thing!”

Ok, that’s a ridiculous conversation, so why can the government get away with talking that way about raising Newstart! I mean it’s not like unemployment is going down. Generally speaking, when a government starts talking about the number of jobs that they’ve created, it’s because they have no idea how to reduce the number of unemployed. There are always jobs being created; the issue is whether more are being lost.

But that the thing about this government. It’s all about the marketing rather than the substance. Granted, some marketing is necessary or nobody knows what great things you’ve done, but when you try it without actually doing anything, the message eventually wears a little thin. Take the drought. While it sounds like the government is doing something when they talk about the billions they’re spending drought-proofing Australia sometime in the life of the next Parliament, this is only going to impress those not directly affected. It’s like turning up at an accident scene and instead of calling an ambulance or administering first aid, the politician makes an announcement about increasing the spending to remove dangerous intersections. Worth doing, but the bleeding guy with the broken leg would probably rather be in the hospital emergency room, even if the fast track is only an illusion…

Anyway, while I was waiting I came across the following tweet from Mr Morrison.

I love getting letters from kids. They say the greatest things and this letter from Jude, aged 5, is a cracker. He wants me to cancel all school holidays because he loves school so much. Good on ya Jude. pic.twitter.com/ekWFJG4qeh

— Scott Morrison (@ScoMo30) October 23, 2019

Now, if you watch it, you’ll notice that not only does Jude have a wonderful grasp of sentence structure for a prep student, but he also has some of the best fine motor skills that I’ve seen in a five-year-old.

But leaving aside the veracity of the letter and the appropriateness of a middle-aged man telling us that he wants to encourage kids to write to him, it does seem that the message we’re meant to take away isn’t very clear.

Forget the fact that it’s a kid and we’re left with the following: A constituent writes to the PM, he reads out the letter, laughs about the request and says that he’s not going to do anything about it.

Is that really the message that the PM wants to send? Or was he virtue signalling that it’s great that this kid has a similar work ethic to the one he has. Scott is a very hard worker, after all. If he’s not playing tennis, praying for rain or running water for the rugby team, then he’s telling us that we need more love and shouting at the Labor Party because they don’t show enough for his policies… Although since the election…

Anyway, I was wondering if we were likely to hear more letters from children, you know things like:

Dear Mr PM,

My name is Charlotte and I am six, I am really pleased with your request to let kids be kids. My classmates don’t like that Greta Thunberg and not just because she’s different. It’s her views on anthropomorphic climate change, which she asserts without the benefit of peer review.

Thanks and keep up the good work.

Dear Mr Morrison,

Thank you from protecting us from all the boogy men. I used to be scared but now that Peter Dutton is keeping us safe, I don’t need Mummy to leave the night-light on.

Love,

Andy, 6 and a half.

P.S. Good on you for telling those silly UN people where to put their negative globalism

.

Dear ScoMo,

I am starting school next week and thanks to your hard work with the budget, there will be more money for my education and healthcare. Good on you for ignoring those troglodyte Keynesians who don’t understand that there’s no such thing as a free lunch and refusing to jeopardise the surplus with a stimulus package.

Regards, Timmy aged 4 and 3 quarters.

Dear Mr Morrison,

Can I please go for a ride in the submarines when they are built?

Best Wishes, Christopher Pyne.