The Gaffer Tapes

Grumpy Geezer

3 years ago

The great awakening

Morrison’s tenure has been a test of his character – one he has failed abysmally. The election will be a test of Australia’s character but likely one we will pass.

It is not entirely clear to me when Smirko Morrison’s re-election campaign jumped the shark.

Tony Abbott was a national embarrassment, a badly shaved yowie in red-sluggos who bumble-fucked his brief, shambolic term as PM as if he were still in opposition. Morrison runs his as a marketing exercise. Electioneering has been his permanent setting since he and his retinue of Winston Wolfes and limbo champions steam-cleaned Malcolm Turnbull’s blood spatter from the PM’s suite and took up residence. We’ve had >3 years of Smirko the spiv playing dress-ups, 1,300+ days of curries and cock-ups, of crimes and cover-ups, of the game of mates, of drink spikers and staff shaggers, of dullards and sousers in high office – a time when a functionary tabled his seminal work on a minister’s desk and two Tory amuse-douche MPs tea-bagged rent boys in the PH prayer room.

Abbott’s trademark was the man who said ‘no’, manifesting in a chum bucket of idiocies and hyper-partisan destruction. Adrift in a world that had long passed him by, threatened by notions of gender equality, confused by the concept of functioning governance and bewildered by technology he traded on a swaggering, hairy-chested machismo that had the north shore matrons and Toorak ladies-who-lunch swooning onto their fainting couches. Yet signs of dementia pugilistica came daily, culminating in the anointing of Sir Prince Philip – a comical travesty that defined him; it was the tipping point for the Mad Monk.

With Abbott it was idiocy, with Smirko it’s integrity – a surfeit of one and a dearth of the other. Both embraced the Tory manifesto of enriching cronies, trashing standards and running down services. Both are manifestly incompetent – same same but different. Abbott’s character was comically flawed – an emu on roller skates. Smirko is rotten to his blackened soul – loathed by much of his own party, toxic in traditional blue ribbon urban seats, particularly despised in Victoria and WA, recognised by women for his inherent misogyny; by putting himself forward as the solution to crises of his own creation he’s revealed himself as a humbug, a charlatan of disposable principles, transactional loyalties, casual cruelty, habitual mendacity and practiced duplicity who has overseen not just the normalisation of corruption but the institutionalisation of it, throwing pork about like burley and shovelling billions of our dollars into the greedy maw of the Tory chums and party apparatchiks.

But when did it all start to go wrong for Smirko?

“I don’t hold a hose, mate“, “That’s not my job” will be the epitaph for the Shirker from the Shire.

As Smirko the flaccid, dull eyed blaggard lazed on a Waikiki deckchair fingering a slippery nipple he was comforted by the knowledge that the ash-flecked citizens from burning towns across the country would be lied to about his whereabouts. What the cowardly twat didn’t anticipate was an observant Aussie tourist with a smartphone capturing his idyll. This was the loose thread. The start of the unravelling of any notion of ethical, courageous or competent governance.

This was the character defining moment but it falls outside of the formal election campaign and in the midst of an epidemic a distracted population moved on. Smirko reverted to type and bunged on the bogan for the blokey blokes and the irredeemably gullible. More toolie than tradie Smirko’s photo-ops morphed into a fuckwit-at-large montage – creepy uncle fondling a stranger’s head, Wally the cross-eyed welder, work experience guy dangling his loose tie over a high-powered, pneumatic rattle gun, ukulele player (Hawaii…WTAF? Another country member? Yes; yes we do).

There are times when Morrison lets his facile FauxMo cover slip and he reveals his true self in all of his smug glibness and self-satisfied smarm, displaying a personality with the appeal of a bin juice smoothie. The demeanour of the great dissembler is now a barometer of the dawning realisation that his affected schtick and linguistic gymnastics are not working any more. He’s become the trombone player practising behind you on the bus – loud, bellicose, pushy. As the gaslighting, attempted wedges, obfuscation, deflection and projection fail to recover the tanking Tory numbers his volume and tempo increases, his belligerence intensifies. A shouty, gish-galloping Morrison is a desperate Morrison.

The beginning of the end for this kakocracy was not one single thing or one moment – it’s been the Fibonacci accumulation of scandals, grift, incompetence, ecocide, sleaze and cruelty. The most beautiful words that I can anticipate will be counsel assisting a federal ICAC putting to these criminals seated in the stand “Let me see if I can help you with that”.