A wolf in sheep’s clothing
Asthe dust settles from Tuesday night’s wrecking ball budget, I have been
thinking about how this happened. How is it possible that Australia was
conned into voting for Abbott and his fellow Liberal and National psychopaths?
There’s a fairly obvious answer to this, and two clear culprits. First
of all, Abbott and his LNP colleagues lied to the electorate about what
their real plans for Australia were. And second, the mainstream media
let the people of Australia down by refusing to pre-warn them about
Abbott’s real plans.
Abbott knows as well as I do that the Liberals would never win an
election if they were truthful with voters. So they lied. Lying has
become natural to them, because without lies they have no chance of
power. But let’s make something very clear right now. Anyone who didn’t
see this budget coming, wasn’t looking. When I say they weren’t looking,
I mean they were either too uninformed to understand who Abbott really
was, they were looking right at Abbott and wouldn’t admit to what they
were really seeing, or they were looking elsewhere and ignoring what was
right in front of them. And when I say anyone, I mean all Australian
voters. But much of the responsibility for keeping these voters informed
falls on the journalists who were responsible for this important
democratic function. And there’s absolutely no doubt that Australian
journalists did this important job atrociously.
When you take into account that the mainstream political press in
this country have been obsessing for the last six years over the Labor
Party, it’s quite easy to see why journalists either wilfully refused to
scrutinise Abbott, or why they were wearing their Labor-bashing
blinkers and whacking so hard with their Labor-bashing sticks, they had
little energy for any Abbott coverage. And by coverage, I don’t mean
following Abbott’s safety-vest-banana-stacking-three-word-slogan circus
blindly around the country. I mean truthful, objective analysis. Not a
big ask, but apparently too big an ask for Australian journalists. If
even half the time that journalists spent covering Labor leadership
tensions over the last six years were instead devoted to even a cursory
analysis of Abbott’s values and ideology, the lies from the Abbott
government would have been obvious well before it was too late for the
voting public to defend themselves from the sucker-punch budget we’ve
just had rammed down our throats by Foghorn Leghorn Hockey.
Another favourite topic that mainstream journalists obsessed over was
Labor’s narrative. Did Labor have one or not? If they did have one, was
it the right one? If it was the right one, why were Rudd and Gillard
having such trouble communicating their narrative? And on, and on, and on, and on this analysis went. But, I have the same question as some of the commenters on Andrew Elder’s post about the Guardian’s Katharine Murphy’s failure to properly inform her readers about Abbott. Why do journalists never write about Liberal narrative?
I’ve got a really simple explanation for this; it’s because the
Liberal narrative is a wolf dressed up as a lamb, in an entirely
unconvincing costume that leaves the wolf looking exactly like a wolf to
anyone who has their eyes open and is looking straight at the wolf.
Yet, when this wolf tells people it’s a lamb, journalists tell everyone
the wolf is a lamb. And voters vote for this lamb, and even think this
lamb is a better than the Labor alternative. But as we all found for
ourselves on Tuesday night, the wolf is a wolf! And all the journalists
are now acting surprised, as if they had never seen this wolf before.
But I would suggest that either these journalists are lying or stupid.
And either way their inability to expose the wolf makes them unqualified
to be journalists.
The new trick for many of these journalists, having discovered that
Australians have seen the wolf for themselves, and are now rightly quite
afraid that this wolf is running the country, is to say ‘Labor is a
wolf too. You can’t trust any of them. They’re all as bad as each
other’. You get this same attitude from some lefties who, for reasons
only apparent to themselves, have decided to perpetuate this myth of
Labor and Liberal being just as bad as each other. This myth works like a
charm for the Liberals because it allows them to get away with being a
wolf when they need to be. I often wonder if these lefties are aware of
the damage they’re doing to their own cause. And I ask them to think
about why, if Labor and Liberal are apparently just the same as each
other, the Abbott budget has ripped the heart out of Labor’s Australia,
and left it bleeding and unable to breathe in the gutter on the side of
the road? It doesn’t look like they’re just the same at all now does it?
So back to this wolf. Since Australian journalists are unwilling to
discuss the Liberal narrative, and are obviously incapable of
understanding Labor’s narrative, which is right in front of their eyes
in the same way as the wolf in sheep’s clothing is, I thought it might
be helpful to explain the values of both parties really clearly, here in
digital ink for them to find whenever they need them to accompany a
discussion of complex policy debates and budget analysis (so in other
words, never).
Labor’s values
We are all in this together. Where this means a community
where everyone works towards the health and security of the whole
community. The collective wealth of the economy serves this community.
Not the other way around.
Liberal’s values
We are all in this together. Where this means a free-market
economy where a person’s wealth determines their status, and in turn
their status determines their privilege and their privilege determines
their access to health and security. If someone can’t access health and
security, this is their own fault and it’s not the free-market economy’s
role to help them. So in fact, we’re not all in anything together.
We’re all on our own.
These values can be found in the true narratives of both parties,
intertwined in every policy they produce, and every statement they make.
To find them, you don’t have to look very hard. In fact, you don’t have
to look for them at all. All you have to do is open your eyes.
Australian voters have had our eyes opened for us. But I just hope that
those who feel most let down, the ones who are suffering in silence now
because they were the dopes who voted for Abbott, I hope they save some
of their resentment for the mainstream media for so blatantly letting
them down by feeding them to the wolves.
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