Ok, let’s skip ahead to next year, Josh Frydenberg is delivering the Budget:
“As you are all aware , this year’s projected surplus will now be a small deficit. There are many reasons for this but chiefly, it’s down to Labor. Not only did they block many of our savings measures but they irresponsibly waved through our tax cuts, leaving a big hole on the revenue side of things. As we’ve always said, Labor just cannot live within its means. The five percent cut in company tax has also been a de facto retirement tax because it, in fact, reduces franking refunds by five percent…”
We cut to commentary:
“How do you think this will be received in the wider community, Tony?”
“Well, I think it’s another nail in the coffin for Labor. This just shows why the public found them unelectable at the previous election.”
“What about the argument that the government had a mandate?
“The government had a mandate to return the Budget to surplus and now, thanks to Labor, it won’t return until after the next election!’
Yes, it sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it!
Well, that’s how the current discussions about Labor are sounding to me. Taking the AFP raids as a great example, we now have the media talking about how the Labor Party must take responsibility for the way they waved them through. I don’t mean to suggest that Labor aren’t blameless, but it seems that the media are forgetting that people who live in stone houses shouldn’t throw glasses. Ok, that’s usually the other way around but it works my way too and the media is anything but you can see through a glass house and the media has been anything but transparent lately…
Labor can’t say anything because they did write and ask for an investigation, we’re told. Asking for an investigation doesn’t automatically mean that one wants the AFP to spend several hours trawling through everything in a journalist’s computer. I mean, if I asked for an investigation into that thing that I can’t mention because a certain minister is extremely trigger happy when it comes to threatening legal action, it doesn’t mean that I want to see the said minister publicly strip-searched and interrogated for hours on end until he breaks down and…
Actually wrong example.
Just because I ask for something to be investigated doesn’t make me wholly responsible for any overkill on the part of the investigator.
I don’t want to sound like I’m just defending Labor because I’m a rusted-on leftie. I used to be considered a conservative when I was a student. Within a few years, I was middle of the road. Now, I seem to be a radical. This is strange because my views haven’t really changed all that much, but when arguing that a strong economy isn’t worth much if it comes at the expense of being able to breathe, makes you a soul brother with Che Guevara, there’s something very, very wrong.
I’d much rather be writing and criticising Labor for over-reacting to their loss. Albanese seems almost to be saying, “See, I told you I should be leader because all our policies were wrong and let’s change them”, completely ignoring the fact that it was the thumping in Queensland, combined with Labor not having the landslide expected in other states led to a narrow loss.
If I can flashback to 2004 and Latham’s loss, we were given various different reasons. It was the handshake AND it was the hitlist to private schools AND it was a whole range of things. Of course, this overlooks the problem that when people vote only one party becomes the government… Ok, sometimes it’s a coalition of parties, but the point still stands that it doesn’t mean that the losers were wrong on everything. It’s easy to push your own agenda and suggest, for example, that people didn’t like cutting funds to the wealthiest private schools. One only has to stop and think about that for a nanosecond to realise that almost nobody who isn’t connected to one of the wealthiest private schools would even consider not voting for someone for that reason, particularly if they liked all the other policies that the party was putting forward.
Yes, I’d much rather that Labor had taken a pause and said that they need to re-think all their policies in light of their election defeat and then say nothing for the next six months. In fact, it might be a better tactic to say nothing for the next three years and go in with the simple slogan. “We run positive campaigns, not like those bastards who just call people names and haven’t delivered all the jobs they promised”.
At the very least they could work out which policies people actually liked, which policies they didn’t understand (franking credits) and which policies lost them the election before doing their mea culpa and begging Queensland and big business for forgiveness.
As for Adani, they should simply point out that the price of coal is tanking and producing massive amounts of coal will only depress the price even further, making all our coal mines less viable but Adani is a private company and if it wants to waste its money providing a hundred jobs or so, great, but they’d rather do the following to reduce unemployment in Queensland…
No, thanks to the media’s inability to take any responsibility for the total lack of scrutiny they applied to so much of the legislation that was enacted to protect us from terrorism, I’m defending Labor at a time when I should be telling them to get their act together and rid us of this incompetent bunch of clowns.
As I’ve written before, I accept terrorism is a problem in today’s world, but if one looks at history, many, many more people have been harmed or killed by governments with too much power than by terrorists. We should tread carefully and not simply accept it when governments tell us that technically that’s what the legislation would allow, but hey, we’d never use it like that. Trust us, this is Australia.
And, how good is Australia!
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