As Coalition politicians face the reality of the election results, they are all looking for someone to blame.
It was the Mediscare lie.
It was the lawless union thugs that control the Labor Party.
It was the gays distracting everybody with their trendy self-indulgence.
It was Malcolm’s fault for knifing Tony.
Malcolm should have focused on national security and border protection.
Malcolm shouldn’t have messed with superannuation.
The excuses are endless but what you won’t hear them saying is that they have heard the message delivered by the people that they don’t trust the Coalition and they don’t like their policies.
Is it any wonder that the privatise medicare campaign was successful?
Since coming to office in 2013, the Coalition has undermined public confidence in a public, universal healthcare system with talk about budget unsustainability and the overuse of Medicare services. A surreptitious shift from public to private is occurring via increased co-payments, the abolition of bulk-billing incentives, the freezing of Medicare fees to doctors, and other measures. Out-of-pocket costs are the fastest-rising part of the healthcare budget.
Both the 2014 National Commission of Audit and the Harper Competition Policy Review advocated an expanded role and less regulation for the private health insurance sector and, in November last year, the government initiated a Productivity Commission review of how competition principles can be applied to the human services sector.
They also formed a $5 million taskforce which called for expressions of interest in privatising the payments system and gave Telstra a $220 million contract to take over the Australian National Cancer Screening Register.
Add to that the hasty sale of Medibank Private and Tony Abbott’s blatant lies about not cutting funding for health and not closing medicare locals – the Coalition lost any right to ask us to trust them. Perhaps if they looked at eliminating the $6.5 billion we pay for the Private Health Insurance Rebate we could take this talk of “living within our means” a bit more seriously.
Turnbull assures us that he called the election because he had to restore the rule of law to the construction industry. He cites the fact that there are charges against 100 union officials before the courts – which to any rational person would indicate that there are already laws in place that are being enforced.
To date, several high-profile cases resulting from the TURC have been thrown out of court. The unions themselves have done a far more effective job of prosecuting and sacking officials who have done the wrong thing.
Cory Bernardi insists that marriage equality is a “fringe” issue. He thinks that having legal and financial rights should be sufficient and that marriage should remain an exclusive institution.
What he and the other homophobes in the Coalition fail to realise is that it is about so much more than getting a marriage certificate. Until we accept the LGBTQI community as “normal” they will continue to be subjected to bullying, discrimination and vilification as was so clearly shown by the hysterical campaign led by Christensen and others against the Safe Schools program.
Right wingers are clamouring for Tony to be brought back, completely ignoring that his utter incompetence had made him a laughingstock internationally and a figure of derision domestically. His first budget killed any goodwill the public may have had towards his government, yet they persist with measures that have been soundly rejected by both the Senate and the people. The whole nation breathed a sigh of relief, albeit briefly, when Malcolm turfed him.
The right wingers also wanted to see another “Stop the terrorists coming on boats” campaign (and they have the hide to complain about scare campaigns). Their deliberate fomenting of hatred and fear has backfired, resulting in the nation having to endure Pauline Hanson again.
And as for superannuation, Malcolm’s one attempt at reining in the excessive tax concessions was handled very poorly. He did not take it to the party room for their approval and, unlike Labor’s changes to negative gearing and capital gains, some of the changes were, in a sense, retrospective (though it could be argued that most changes to taxation law are retrospective to a degree).
Regardless of the poor sell, it is apparent that the financial institutions and the wealthy benefactors of the Liberal Party will not tolerate any attempt to curb the overly generous concessions they enjoy, but there were not sufficient people affected for this to have been a significant factor in the election outcome.
Cutting down on welfare, health and education spending while giving tax cuts to the wealthy and spending hundreds of billions on strike force defence materiel was never going to go over well.
Instead of this petulant blame game, the Coalition should be doing some serious reappraisal of their devotion to “trickle down” economics. Talk of entrepreneurs and venture capitalists might be exciting in the Turnbulls’ lounge room but it does not resonate with the general public who have seen their standard of living going backwards under this government.
“The sun rises every morning and sheds light, vanquishing the night’s darkness. The rooster also rises every morning only, unlike the sun, he simply makes noise. But the darkness of the night is dispelled by sunshine, not by the rooster’s crowing. The world can use more light and less noise. More solvers and fewer blamers. More folks showing a better way and fewer folks complaining about how much better things used to be. More folks offering help and fewer folks wringing their hands about the problems. More hope bringers and fewer hope killers.” (Steve Goodier).
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