Malcolm Turnbull recently did an interview for The Guardian.
Now for those of you who don’t keep up with politics, Mr Turnbull is our current Prime Minister and if the name seems familiar, he’s the same Malcolm Turnbull who was once part of the republican movement. For those of you who are thinking that he’s not the same Malcolm Turnbull, let me just remind you that as leader of the republican movement, Turnbull took an issue for which there was majority support and still failed to achieve the result that most people wanted, ensuring that it wouldn’t happen for many, many years. See! He did for marriage equality what he did for the repbulic. He’s still same old Malcolm.
Although to be fair, while there are similarites, Turnbull was hamstrung on the plebiscite because of the five conditions he agreed to when he took over from Tony Abbott:
1. Maintain the Abbott position on the plebiscite.
2. Maintain the Abbott position on climate change.
3. Maintain the Abbott position on cuts to welfare.
4. Maintain the missionary position during Cabinet meetings.
5. Ask himself what would Tony do, before making any pronouncements, and should he get it wrong, quickly reverse his position.
Malcolm Turnbull – or as I like to call him, “MT” (that’s in reference to his initials, not his promises) – did an interview with The Guardian, and he talked about the recent poor growth in GDP. Actually when I say “poor” I mean, none at all, because the economy contracted in the last quarter. Now many would have thought that a government whose mantra is “jobs and growth” would have been a wee bit apologetic when one half of their economic plan was found to be negative. You know, a bit like ordering fish and chips and only getting the fish when you paid for both. Or possibly more like only getting the chips and a fishing line and being told that it’s not their fault that you live an hour from the nearest fishing spot.
No, Empty… sorry, MT, bloody autocorrect. Anyway, MT saw it as a wake-up call. To quote the man directly:
“GDP was a real wake-up call, a reminder – it was a wake-up call for those, particularly in the opposition, who seem to think you can talk about economic growth and have literally no policies that would support it whatsoever.”
Now one could speculate that by “the opposition” he wasn’t referring to the Labor Party and that he meant his front bench. Unfortunately, the rest of the interview made it clear that he still seemed to believe that a company tax cut would boost investment and lead to an improvement in the Budget bottom line. I was hoping that he’d be asked about this, as well as how cutting the tax on a business that was profitable would help those that weren’t – which apparently is not just those struggling to attract customers, but also some of those multinationals with billion dollar turnovers. However, it seems that it must be a condition of interviews that our PM is never asked about anything he can’t mansplain. Like when he talked about how immoral and wrong Labor was in talking about privatising Medicare when the Liberals had no intention of doing such a thing and had decided against it when they weren’t discussing it earlier in the year, nobody asked him whether that was even more immoral than when he used a fake email in the Utegate affair a few years ago. Of course, Mr Turnbull’s defence would obviously be that he didn’t know it was fake and he just assumed it was true because a person like Godwin Grech, who was prepared to regularly leak information to the Liberal Party, was clearly trustworthy and there was no need to check the email’s authenticity.
Instead he was asked about his priorities for the coming year. Malcolm informed the paper: “Continued delivery of our economic plan…”
Mm, so the reduction in GDP must have been a successful part of the plan, if he’s suggesting that his intention is continued delivery.
He then added: “We have our business tax cuts to deliver, obviously continuing to roll out our big programs, the NDIS most notably, the big infrastructure projects including the NBN.”
Yep, that’s the trouble with Labor. They don’t have any policies to support economic growth. Not like “our big programs” the NDIS and the NBN. Gee, why didn’t Labor come up with things like that when they were in office?
Oh, what do you mean? How could Malcolm be calling them “our” when Labor actually commenced them?
Wouldn’t that be dishonest?
