Author’s Note.. Apparently some people didn’t realise that this was satire, so I’ve been asked to add a a clarification. This is satire. I hope it’s clear enough now. Unfortunately, Donald Trump, Malcolm Roberts and the current federal govenment aren’t, so I guess it’s easy to see how some people could be confused.
Now if there’s one thing that irks me it’s trial by media. Lately a lot of lefties have been getting stuck into people just because someone accuses them of something. And let’s be quite clear here: Everyone is entitled to the presumption of innocence until they’ve had their day in court! Unless, of course, the person is someone like David Hicks, Craig Thomson, Peter Slipper or any Labor MP with a citizenship question about their eligibility. Or someone subject to a police raid because of the alleged planning of a terrorist offence.
In the case of that well-known gardener, Bon Dirk, there have been claims that he behaved inappropriately. However, as he puts it, the claims are totally without foundation. They’re all the result of a few thousand disgruntled ex-employees. Oh, and a few dozen people who appeared on the show. But, hey, he’s famous and famous people sometimes rub people up the wrong way. Or offer to. And there’s no reason to take the word of all those people alleging that he’s a sexist bully. I mean, what boss doesn’t have almost everyone they work for “disgruntled”? After all, have you ever heard of a gruntled employee? No? Exactly.
Personally, I think this is just a distraction from the real issues of the day, such as the protection of religious freedoms. Before changes to the marriage bill go through Parliament, I think that we need to ensure that religious people are protected. When I said this the other day, some idiot asked, “Protected from what?” It was the sort of tricky sophistry I’ve come to expect from the sort of person who voted “Yes”, when they attempted to suggest that marriage equality was simply about the rights of people to marry whomsoever they chose. Of course, I don’t have a simple answer because there’s so much that opponents of same sex marriage need protection from, even though most of these have no obvious link to marriage.
Take Safe Schools, for example. Parents need to have the right to withdraw their children from any class that puts forward such contention ideas as: “Everyone has a right to feel safe, whatever their sexuality.” Now, this doesn’t mean I’m homophobic. I just don’t want my children learning about sexuality until after they’re married. And then there’s the possibility that religious people could be refused service in bakers and florists. We need to ensure that a Christian has the right to walk into a bakery and ensure that their buns were made by a heterosexual person without being called names and kicked out the store. This is before we’ve even looked at the right of people to prevent gay people from working in the same office.
Of course, that’s not the only important thing being overshadowed by all these accusations. I mean, they squeezed out the story about Harry and Megan’s engagement. We have Brexit to thank for this, because clearly the EU would have blocked it if Britain was still beholden to those foreigners in Europe. And we didn’t hear anything about Donald Trump breaking with the Thanksgiving tradition of pardoning a turkey by announcing that it was a Democrat turkey and he was going to “nuke” it unless it agreed that he was the best president ever and that nobody did president-hood like he did. Nor did we give Triple J’s decision to break with centuries of tradition and announce the Hottest 100 on January 27th instead of January 26th the attention it deserves. As one critic put it, the ABC shouldn’t be political so they should have the release on the neutral Australia Day which would offend nobody except people whose opinnion doesn’t count.
And let’s not forget the outrage from some Queensland voters at Pauline being left off the ballot paper in seats where One Nation wasn’t fielding a candidate. Let’s not forget how the media have attempted to destroy PHON’s chances by constantly giving their candidates air time. Ok, they may have failed to get their own prediction of eleven or more seats by a margin of eleven or more, but they still did exceptionally well in polling 14% of the vote, while Labor was a massive failure for only getting a primary vote of over twice that. As Pauline said, “We’re not going anywhere.” And I’d suggest that they’re not going anywhere fast.
Yes, let’s forget all about this #metoo, and get back to the things that matter. Stopping boats, ignoring human rights abuses on Manus Island, complaining about energy prices, blaming Labor or The Greens and believing Malcolm when he says that things are just fine and we’re going to get unspecified tax cuts at an unspecified time by an unspecified new leader of the Liberal Party.
