Well, it’s very clear that this government isn’t going to listen to anyone who’s partisan. I mean, that was clearly the problem with Gillian Triggs’ report. It was clearly partisan, even though it also criticised the Labor Party.
Now, for those of you who are having trouble following the Liberal logic here. I’ll put it in the form of a few simple steps.
- All people have the right to a point of view.
- Private institutions and media outlets have the right to be biased.
- People who receive any form of government funding do not have the right to bias and should never be partisan.
- We can tell we they are being partisan, because they criticise us, which they have no right to do because they’re meant to hold no views at all. Unless those views are critical of the Labor Party or The Greens because that’s an objective reading of the facts.
- We know this because those private institutions and media outlets agree with us and that shows that anyone critical is obviously partisan.
You see it’s not the substance of the report that matters. It’s the person delivering the report who needs to be questioned. If a total stranger called out, “Fire” would you ring emergency services or try to establish the person’s credentials? Personally, I wouldn’t do anything until the person produced a comprehensive resume and a credit check, even if the smoke was making it hard to read either, because it’s the person making the report and whether they can be trusted, that’s the central issue.
So, of course, Gillian Triggs criticism can be just dismissed, because when you have someone producing reports like that, well, they’re clearly not the sort of unbiased reports that justify the things we want to do. Maurice Newman, now there’s a man who gives a good unbiased report. And Dicky Warburton, he’s another. But just so you don’t think we don’t take any notice of women, and try to play that sexist card, don’t forget that we got Amanda Vanstone to give us a report on all the ways in which we could stop spending money on people and start making savings. And her audit committee only cost almost twice as much as we budgeted for, but let me say that it was money well spent, because they handed down a total non-partisan finding that told us that we needed to cut as much spending as possible to those in the worst position to fight back.
Whoops, did I say “fight back”? That’s nearly as big a no-no as saying “Workchoices” in Liberal ranks!
Now, while I’m right behind the Liberals all the way, as most regular readers of my blog will know, there’s just one thing that concerns me.
They’re on record as admitting two things:
- They lost confidence in Gillian Triggs.
- They suggest that they’d give her another job if she resigned.
Which strikes me as a very bad principle. Surely they wouldn’t throw away taxpayers’ money by giving a job to someone that they didn’t have confidence in! Surely, they should only be giving jobs to people in whom they have full confidence like Amanda Vanstone or Sophie Mirabella.
Because offering a job to a statutory officer like that could be misconstrued by wicked people who’d suggest that it was an “inducement”, which, of course, is another word for bribe. And, while we accept the notion of bribing electorates, bribing the Human Rights Commissioner is actually illegal. So there’s no way that the Attorney General would be behind such a thing, because surely the Attorney General understands the law.
Surely.
