“We’re more popular than Jesus now. I don’t know which will go first – rock & roll or Christianity. Jesus was all right, but his disciples were thick and ordinary. It’s them twisting it that ruins it for me.” John Lennon
Now, I try very hard to be fair. I am aware that not everyone will have the same moral code or the same life experience as I do. I try to listen and to accept people, even when they have a different viewpoint.
Yes, yes, I know that some of you are thinking that’s ridiculous and some people just aren’t worth the time and they’re just evil and stupid and…
I do understand and accept that point of view.
However, when I wrote a headline that compared Morrison to Churchill, I found many people attacking it without actually reading beyond the headline. Churchill, I pointed out, only really had one or two good moments in a long political career. Morrison, as far as I’m concerned, is yet to have that many.
So the narrative from some of the media about how he’s made a few mistakes but now he’s really hitting his stride strikes me as a little premature. “FROM DAGGY DAD TO FATHER OF OUR NATION,” read one headline. Now, I didn’t read the article so it seems unfair to condemn it on the basis of the headline, particularly after I’ve just complained about people doing that to me.
But, hey, if there’s one thing you need, to write opinion pieces, it’s hypocrisy in large doses, so let me make the following points to the writer of that article:
- Morrison’s “daggy dad” image was carefully crafted and about as genuine as a Rolex watch that sells for $30 but only if you meet Barry at the pub between five and six o’clock. I mean, take the recent curry making effort. It’s one thing to make a curry for your family, but it’s another to film yourself doing it and put it on social media.
- Giving inconsistent messages for several weeks, followed by a consistent message for a couple of days, does not make one a “father of the nation”. One usually becomes a father by having sex, so in the sense that Morrison has fucked the nation then I am prepared to concede there is some chance of him being the actual father, but I’d want DNA testing before I was sure.
- Some of Morrison’s recent moves have been a good idea, but usually, the ones that are good are the same ones he was condemning just a few weeks ago.
- One swallow does not a summer make…Although Bob Hawke could apparently down a whole yard of beer in one swallow and Morrison sculling a glass and putting it on his head is not really all that impressive when compared to Hawkie.
Yes, while I’m not saying that Morrison has done everything wrong, he certainly hasn’t done everything right. I understand that these are unusual times and how it’d be wrong to be too picky, We all need to be on Team Australia and all that.
However, his messaging on schools just created confusion. I’m still yet to understand how kids can be safe at school and not pass it on to each other, teachers or their parents, but they’re unsafe if they stay at home being looked after by granny, whom they are going to kill by picking up the virus. Apparently, the best medical advice says that only a very small percentage of kids are testing positive. Why? Well, the best medical advice doesn’t have an answer to that but the best medical advice is completely sure that they can go to school and only a very small percentage will catch it and an even smaller number will die from it, so it’s really completely safe.
And while I’m cynical about JobKeeper just being a way of hiding the number of true unemployed so that the statistics don’t look that bad, I can see that it’s potentially a good thing. Yes, Freddy doesn’t have any work to do but he’s still being paid by his employer who’s being paid by the government so he’s not actually unemployed and won’t be counted as such, which should make Freddy feel better because he has a job and the best form of welfare is a job even if it’s one where you’re basically not employed. Unfortunately, like so much that this government does, the reality doesn’t match the announcement. There’ll be employers who don’t apply because it’s too complicated, as well as employers who somehow rort the system leaving their employees to join the JobSeeker queue anyway. Either way, we’ll see unemployment hit unparalleled numbers, leading to a surge of IPA commentators appearing on the ABC complaining that not only does the ABC never put them on, but it’s ridiculous to be in lockdown when all you’re doing is saving the lives of a few people, and there’s no need to do that when we have so many spare people not working.
Over the next few months the cries about government debt will get louder until Scott Morrison abandons the non-ideological persona he’s tried to adopt over the past few weeks and insists that, in spite of the fact that they ran up more debt than all federal governments combined, they’re really, really good economic managers who will have the Budget back to surplus in no time at all and the crisis is over so anyone who doesn’t have a job clearly isn’t trying.
The whole thing about government debt is that it’s different from personal debt. I remember once reading a meme which said that the world was in debt to the tune of umpteen trillion dollars and it demanded to know what planet we owed it to. And that’s sort of the point about government debt. Who do they owe it to? There’s no simple answer but one way of the government has generated it, is through bonds. Who bought the bonds? Some of them have been bought by institutions which you own through your superannuation. So, in other words, some of the money taxpayers owe because of government borrowing, they owe to themselves.
Ok, I’m sure that an economist could explain that in much more detail so that you’d see that I’m guilty of over-simplification, but if we didn’t have people like me doing that, then economists would just keep explaining things with all those words that make you stop listening so that you ignore them and figure the whole thing is just too complicated and the Liberals seem pretty boring so they must know what they’re doing. After all, they keep telling the same sort of thing that your parents did when you didn’t want to listen to them and look how that turned out…
Yes, it’s just a few weeks ago that Josh and Scott were telling us that Labor hadn’t delivered a surplus since last century, but if you want to go back through history, it’s worth remembering that the only Liberal Treasurer to deliver a surplus in the last forty years is Peter Costello, who did it during the mining boom. Let’s not even point out his selling off of assets like our gold reserves for bargain prices.
I’ll just leave you with one final thought as we approach Anzac Day: Conservatives seem to have an obsession with everyone remembering what happened over a century ago, while demanding we all forget what happened last week!
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