It’s kind of disheartening when the people who make our laws and have complete control of our common wealth admit that their only goal is to get rid of the other side.
When The Sun-Herald and The Sunday Age invited federal MPs to attend a one-hour Zoom demonstration of what an empathy training course entails, five agreed – and their responses demonstrate exactly why we must change, not only our government, but our whole system of governance.
Liberal Senator Hollie Hughes, described as a “passionate advocate for rural and regional NSW” despite living on Sydney’s North Shore, had no qualms in setting us straight about our expectations of a constructive, respectful workplace in Parliament.
“Parliament and politics by its nature is actually not about compromise,” Hughes said. “This isn’t necessarily an outcome-oriented workplace. It’s a political workplace that has quite an adversarial nature at times.”
Not about compromise? Not outcome-oriented?
It seems our politicians have never grown up from their university debating days.
Barnaby Joyce seems to be channelling his rugby school days when adding his insight into what his job entails.
“[B]y its very nature, Parliament has the objective that one side has to get rid of the other, and vice versa. It’s a hostile crazy boarding school out in the country.”
Barnaby also had a bit to say on the idea that morality was a “core competency” for empathy.
“The morals of someone at Nimbin are going to be entirely different to the morals of someone at St Mary’s Cathedral, but neither of them would think they are personally doing something immoral.”
Is he equating smoking pot with institutionalised child sex abuse? Is he saying Catholic churchgoers like him are automatically of high moral standing?
Craig Kelly said he was too old to learn anything.
“You might be able to train someone as a teenager. When you’re 40 or 50 or 60 years old, it’s very hard to change your perspective of life.”
No wonder he thinks science is bullshit.
These are the people entrusted with the responsibility to make the decisions that determine our future.
It’s time we demanded better.
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well, at least that got that right…
no outcomes that is
BARNABY JOYCE: ”Barnaby also had a bit to say on the idea that morality was a “core competency” for empathy.
“The morals of someone at Nimbin are going to be entirely different to the morals of someone at St Mary’s Cathedral, but neither of them would think they are personally doing something immoral.”
Is he equating smoking pot with institutionalised child sex abuse? Is he saying Catholic churchgoers like him are automatically of high moral standing?”
interesting ….. so Barnaby, how does leaving your wife and four daughters for a bit of fluff you got pregnant in an adulterous relationship add up to ‘high moral standing’?
Oh silly me!! It must be OK because Tamworth women support adultery by supporting Barnaby.
Lazy relativism and indifference to suffering and cruelty
This proves too that religion does not a decent human make… quite the contrary
Why is it generally that the stupider and nastier the human generally male the more offspring he spawns ?
If taking Kelly at his word, should parliamentarians retire after they reach 40 years of age? Kelly suggests they cannot learn any more from age 40. A sign he is wasting a space in Parliament. A further irony is that the LNP appears to have been utilizing modern monetary theory to overcome the pandemic, now they are back tracking. They seem to have learnt something from the ALP approach to the Financial Crisis managed by Wayne Swan; though success is embarrassing for them I suppose, and they are reverting back to usual practices.
Glug, glug, glug, glug, glug, slug, gargle… Boooooom!
Yup him too except it’s a guided beer to stimulate the chronic dead brain tissue and follicular purple headed morality, not a missile. Would that be the nearest bar for the House of Reprobates he homed in on?
Re:
Not about compromise? Really? And that’s from a Liberal Senator in a coalition with the National Party. Otto von Bismarck would disagree.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/424187-politics-is-the-art-of-the-possible-the-attainable
Otto’s insight is something Labor should take note of when dealing with The Greens. Putting it another way:
‘It’s kind of disheartening when the people who make our laws and have complete control of our common wealth admit that their only goal is to get rid of the other side.’
It is more than disheartening when an incompetent government can still be believed when it tells lies about the Opposition.
Having been involved in many NFPs, I know they require a vision.
Perhaps we need to demand that our political parties ALL have to state their vision – and point to how they are achieving it!
For a major percentage of people being a politician means that once they get their snouts in the public funded pig trough they will do and say anything to stay there come hell or high water.
Meanwhile:”Grant King, a former Origin Energy executive and president of the Business Council,has been appointed chair of the Climate Change Authority” Today’s Guardian.Who said Snotty doesn’t take climate change seriously?
Grant King
Career
prior to 1994 General Manager, AGL Gas Companies
1994-2000 Managing Director, Boral Energy
2000-2016 Managing Director, Origin Energy
2004–present Chairman of Contact Energy
2016–present President of Business Council of Australia (BCA)
King has also held roles as councillor of the Australian Petroleum Production and Exploration Association, director of Envestra and chairman of the Energy Supply Association of Australia.
Ima guessing that emissions reduction is another one of those outcome thingys that the government doesn’t care about. Protecting and prolonging fossil fuel use, however, is something they seem determined to achieve.
Gas is our future? But only if we can afford it?
Talk about a scandal.
Politicians or whatever stripe are always good for a serve if deserved, and the incumbent prime monster is no exception. I note that on more than one occasion he’s been accused of having a tin ear and certainly sensitivity to climatic issues isn’t high on his list of certifiable strengths, in fact his elevation of a rusted-on fossil fuel fossil is more evidence of his obduracy in the face of those who would seek to educate him in the benefits of choosing a more wise course of action. I doubt that he’s entirely unaware of the significance of his public flagging and finger up at the electorate and planet by extension, his ‘fuck youse all’ simply more evidence of the idiot brain at work, the immaturity of the machiavellian who can’t see further than the daily struggle to be a winner at all costs, whatever the costs, and even if he’s losing. Women in their place, check. Climate change denial, check. Stomp down on the underprivileged, check. Look after the mates, check. Porkbarrel shamelessly, check. Indulge in religious fantasies, check. Refer to Jen & mom & the kids fifty times a week as his leading advisors in life, check. Sequester and protect persons patently unfit for public office, check. Fiddle while Rome burns, check. Exercise as many varieties of ‘fuck you’ to the electorate at large, check.
I yearn for the day the workshop’s finished with his wings and Icarus-like he can take off for the sun, to soar asplendent and joyous in ecstatic fervour until the wax melts and he plummets, as he eventually must, earthward. Hubris. Was ever such a legacy so eagerly waited for?
Interesting. Why did you only include selected extracts from the conservative side? And even then only elements that cast them in a poor light?
Clearly, you are not interested in balanced reporting – you just want to be the flip side of the Murdoch coin. Selective exclusion of facts to fit your agenda.
I shared classe wth the defective, egofixated, vacuuminous, scheming Jack Howard and never thought we could get lower, yet here we are with a Pigge-Mannered, Poxed Moron, Pustular Misfit, the dedicated and chronic Liar from some mythical shire…
Dagney,
I linked to the article if you want to read the complete responses. Aside from the three people I mentioned, the other two were independent Zali Steggall and Labor’s Stephen Jones.
The reason I did not include their responses was because this article was not about empathy training. It was about how Conservatives, by their own admission, couldn’t give the slightest shit about achieving anything other than winning and the way they do that is not by better policy outcomes – it’s by attacking everything anyone else suggests. Electric vehicles being a prime example. Or they attack people’s character. Gillian Triggs for example. Julia Gillard for a better example.
For the record, Steggall said “One of the things that’s wrong with our politics is the concept that it has to be so polarised and focused on the purpose of winning as opposed to the purpose of good.”
New England Cocky – hardcore religious nutters believe that they have a monopoly on morals.
No doubt they victim blame the kids their ‘heroes’ have ‘fiddled’ as they publicly victim blame sexually assaulted females.
My ‘believer’ wife reckons that I, as an atheist, have far superior morals to some she encounters at her religious gatherings.
Feel free to pass that spliff around.
Ah, the MP that supported and promoted lecture tours through the bush by the late Bob Carter, espousing the evils of climate science and environmentalists. As an MP he had full access to the best available science on climate – could even call on the Chief Scientist or the head of the CSIRO to explain the bits he has trouble with and they would almost certainly help, but no. Can’t have facts getting in the way of support for fossil fuels.
The MP that was gifted a trip overseas to a private function on a luxury private jet of a mining magnate with fortunes tied to the climate and energy policies of the government – and called that “saving the taxpayers money”. Most mainstream journalists and news editors apparently thought that was… amusing. Which may say as much about journalists and news editors as about Barnaby Joyce.
The MP that claims nuclear is the best climate solution – but has never proposed or supported nuclear energy as an actual Nationals climate policy, just complained that The Greens haven’t. Why the sincere proponents of nuclear for climate think he – and The Nationals and other conservatives like him – are sincere supporters of nuclear climate solutions beats me, but hey, nuke spruikers hate greenies and coal and gas spruikers hate greenies too. Makes them natural allies, right?
Too bad for Mr Joyce that it is scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs (capitalist ones) – people apart from Environmentalists who take the climate and clean energy challenges seriously – that are making renewables into the success they are turning out to be; that nuke spruikers and coal and gas fans are united in hatred of what they IMAGINE climate activists to be says they don’t care about the reality, just the appearance – like the article above says, it is about winning and staying in office, not policy outcomes. Pointing at greenies as their own lack of actual support scuttles any chance of nuclear being an LNP climate policy still assures votes though – the ones who went to Bob Carter’s lectures in the past, the ones that get their news and view from WIN in the present.