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Tag Archives: #timwilson #liberals #lnp #coalition #hillsong #auspol

There’s No Need For A Target Until You Have A Plan For How You’ll Reach The Thing You’re Not Aiming At!

A basketball story

“You missed,” says my opponent.

“No, I was actually aiming at the backboard, not the ring.”

“You’re meant to be trying to get the ball through the ring. It’s not enough to simply hit the backboard.”

“Maybe not for you, but there’s no point in having a target unless you’ve got a clear plan for how to get there and I had a clear plan for how I was going to hit the backboard.”

“Well, that’s all good, but you don’t get points for simply hitting what you’re aiming for. Besides, you missed the backboard as well.

With all this talk about whether the people who put the coal in Coalition will put the Scott in Scotland, whether the Nationals will agree to a net zero by 2050, whether weather is being affected by the amount of hot air coming out of the federal government’s mouth and whether Dave Hughes used to be funny before he tried to make serious comments, it’s hard to know what’s going on.

However, one thing is crystal clear to me.

Over the past few years, in education circles, learning intentions have become quite popular. This means that teachers are expected to write the learning intention of the lesson on the whiteboard so that there’s a clear understanding of what the lesson is trying to achieve…

Ok, I know this seems obvious but what if I suggested that there’s no way a teacher could agree to what the learning intention is unless he or she has a clear plan of how to get there? Or what if I told you that the teacher had one, but he couldn’t put it on the board until the boy sitting in the back row and the one hanging round the door threatening to go home agreed to it? Of course, they’d need to see the plan of what they needed to do to achieve it, and they certainly wouldn’t be signing up to anything that involved a change in anything that they or any of their friends were planning to do in the next fifty minutes.

Now, I know that some of you are thinking that it’s the teacher’s job to actually know what they want the kids to learn and it’s up to them to set the agenda, but what if they were using our PM as a role model?

Ok, ok. You’re right. We can all hear Scotty saying: “It’s not up to me to be a role model – that’s the state premier’s job.”

 

Photo from 7news.com.au (Photo credit: AAP Image/Dean Lewins)

 

But it does strike me as faintly absurd to suggest that we can’t actually commit to something unless we’re sure how we’ll get there. That’s like saying that a gun club can’t put up targets until they’re sure which Coalition MP will offer them a bribe, so just go out there and shoot, and whatever you hit will be a great result.

Still this week has been full of absurdities like the growing attacks on ICAC for daring to investigate Gladys Berijiklian. Now, I could suggest that there’s an element of hypocrisy for people who were responsible for launching a Royal Commission to find out how Julia Gillard paid for her home renovations in the previous century complaining that an independent body should launch its own investigation. That isn’t the absurd thing.

The absurd thing isn’t even that Gladys resigned before the investigation took place.

No, the absurdity is the argument that some are using which is best explained if we use a body that’s not ICAC. Take the police. Generally, if there’s a complaint, the police launch an investigation. Sometimes this could even be a politician, unless we’re talking about NSW police because they already know better than to do that.

Let’s imagine a hypothetical person who I’ll call Vladimir because I’m less likely to get sued by some guy who happens to have the same name and recognises himself by the crime I’m alleging.

One of the neighbours rings the police to say that the person sharing Vladimir’s house hasn’t been seen in several days and there was a lot of noise and shouting one night. The police knock on the door and ask Vladimir if they can speak to his housemate. Vlad asks them if they have a search warrant and they say no, so he says go away. The police then say that they’re pretty sure they’ll be able to get one.

At this point, Vlad goes public telling Sky News that he’s going to leave Australia on the first plane because we’ve reached a point where unelected bodies like the police can just get search warrants and dig up your whole back yard even though they have no evidence and you haven’t been convicted of anything and as such you’re entitled to the presume of innocence, so that means you’re an innocent man… And all right, his housemate was involved with some shady characters and he hasn’t seen him either but there’s no evidence of wrongdoing so it’s completely terrible that the police would question an innocent bystander who doesn’t know what’s in the cellar because he didn’t ask what they were doing and he’s just the victim here.

May I humbly suggest that it’s a brave Sky News person who’d say that this is an outrageous abuse of power by the police and that the more reasonable question is: Why exactly are you leaving the country and why didn’t you let the police look in your cellar if you’ve done nothing wrong?

Ok, Gladys isn’t in quite the same boat as Vlad. But neither can argue that they’ve behaved with absolute integrity.

I heard a newsreader say that there was a growing belief that there’d be an agreement between the Coalition partners to commit to net zero by 2050. I think that it’s a real shame that it’ll take another 29 years for them to reach agreement.

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Hope Is The Thing With Feathers And That Makes Scotty Glad!

One of Emily Dickinson’s poems was “Hope Is The Things With Feathers” and my first thought was that she must have meant that hope enabled us to fly. In fact, her poem talks about hope lifting us up with its song… which is what Gladys and Scotty are trying to do. They are trying to lift us with their warbling.

“Don’t worry about the depressing numbers look at the beautiful numbers like the ones that show that we still have a majority in parliament. They’re the sort of numbers that we find really inspiring and so what if there’s a few more cases today. Case numbers aren’t important unless you’re in a Labor state and then they’re an indication of how badly the government is doing.”

“Thanks to my great management,” says Gladys, “in just a few weeks you’ll be able to go on a picnic providing you can demonstrate that you’ve been vaccinated.”

Now one of the problems with vaccinations is that some people don’t want to get one. Well, it’s a free country and if that’s your choice, fair enough. What I find strange is the people who argue that they should be free to not get one, but then want to convince everyone else how dangerous vaccines are and want to ban people who do get the jab.

So, take Craig Kelly…

I’m tempted to say, please. Somebody has to… But that’s a very old joke and without him to laugh at, you might notice how much politics resembles an episode of Would I Lie To You?

(Would I Lie To You? is a British comedic panel show where guests are given the chance events to describe, some of which are lies and other unlikely ones true. It’s quite impressive the way that some of them can convince the other side that the most outrageous things are true. Mind you, this is just a game and we can be impressed with their capacity to seem convincing. I suspect that something similar happens when someone has been a journalist in Canberra for too long and they become more impressed with a politician’s capacity to convince people that they’re not responsible for the deaths of hundreds of people instead of being appalled by the fact that they actually are.)

So, if any of you are tempted to take Craig Kelly’s advice about vaccination, just ask yourself three questions:

  1. Would you accept his advice about your need for brain surgery?
  2. Would you allow him to perform brain surgery on you?
  3. If you answered no to the first two questions, I think the point has been made but if you answered yes, then wouldn’t you rather send me ten dollars and I can send you an alternative which I can’t disclose for fear of Big Pharma shutting me down but Donald Trump gave me a secret personal endorsement and for just an extra two thousand dollars I can get you an autographed photo of the time Donald, Clive, Craig and I all met and discussed how to.. sorry, what question was I asking? Oh, yes, I can send you Hydroinvermyasinagainsthumanity but only if you promise never to reveal who sold it to you because the drug companies are trying to shut it down owing to the fact that nobody has trialled it…

Anyway, Emily Dickinson was wrong. The thing with feathers turned out to be Gladys and she flew away before things got so bad that she’d have trouble with the misdirection of “That’s not the number that matters; this is the number that matters!”

Yes, Scotty doesn’t hold a hose, but Gladys doesn’t hold a press conference!

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Tim Wilson – modern liberal or con man?

When George Brandis created a very high-paying job as a human rights commissioner to gift to Tim Wilson without any selection process, it raised many eyebrows, not least because Wilson, in his role at the IPA, had been calling for the abolition of the very organisation he was now to join.

But that conundrum pales into insignificance in comparison to freedom boy’s new found embrace of action on climate change – a change of heart that followed the shock loss in the Wentworth byelection.

Tim has now joined the Parliamentary Friends of Climate Action group and is hitting the airwaves to tell us all about it.

“Some of us want sensible, sustainable policy that confronts Australia’s emissions challenge, focuses on technology and economic growth and doesn’t leave Australians behind,” he said.

Well, that’s terrific Tim, except, having a memory slightly longer than a goldfish, I recall what you said when you were Director of Climate Change Policy at the IPA.

Here is Tim in 2012 arguing for us to get out of Kyoto.

When covering the Copenhagen climate change talks in 2009, Tim was at his witty worst.

“for the first time in the ten year history of the Awards, the “Ray of the Day” Award was given out to Tuvalu for arguing for a binding, international treaty to cut global carbon dioxide emissions. If the event weren’t such a farce, it’d almost be funny.”

Or this enlightened appraisal…

“…there was a much greater presence of anti-capitalist sentiment amongst protestors today with placards and posters decrying “toxic capitalism” and “change the system, not the climate”.

But opposition to capitalism clearly only went so far with a little coffee stall where you could get a “green bean” coffee.

I presume the protestors turned a blind eye to the fact that beans were imported from the other side of the world by a carbon emitting shipping line and traded on globalised international markets.

But considering how cold it is in Copenhagen I can understand putting ideology to one side especially when the objective is to warm up. Oh, except when it is the climate.”

For Tim, it’s all about the money.

“For developed countries, the negotiations are about how much they have to give to that adaptation financing pool, and how much they’ll have to harm their economies and their competitive advantage against developing countries through emissions reduction as well.”

But if you think our economy is his major concern, you would be wrong. Tim is singularly focused on his own economy and there is not a principle he wouldn’t ditch in order to feather his own nest.

In a revealing interview in the SMH in 2014, Wilson explains his tactics.

He became heavily involved with student politics, eventually becoming president of the Student Union in 2001, thanks in part to his talent for favour-trading – plying opponents with “a whole bunch of delegateships” in return for their support. He also had “this really clever little trick”, using a digital camera, “which very few people had back then”, to take photos of himself at university club functions, several of which he would attend in a single night. He would then send the photos to the club magazines the next morning. “They didn’t have any photos, certainly not that immediately. So they’d run them, and of course, I was in half of them, and it made me look as if I was the centre of everything.”

The only thing that qualifies this dilettante to be a leader in our country is his overweening self-confidence, his shameless self-promotion, and his ability to brazenly claim that there is nothing inconsistent in his weathervane flip-flopping.

 

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