Sunday, February 15, 2015

The government you have when you don’t have a government - The AIM Network

The government you have when you don’t have a government - The AIM Network



THE CLAYTON GOVERNMENT

The government you have when you don’t have a government














Is anybody still listening to Tony Abbott? Jennifer Wilson doubts it very much, and with good reason.


I woke up this morning thinking that I don’t feel as if we actually have a real government, or a real Prime Minster.


Tony Abbott seems to be increasingly decompensating under the stress
of discovering he’s so unpopular with his party he had to face the
prospect of a spill motion without even a challenger for his leadership,
and that must be a rare political event just about anywhere.



(Decompensation, psychology: the inability to maintain defense
mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance
or psychological imbalance).



After the acute trauma of the spill motion passed, everyone involved
needed a little time to collect themselves, pass around the talking
stick, and begin the process of healing. Instead, Abbott went right out and sacked Philip Ruddock as his Chief Government Whip, on the grounds that Ruddock had not adequately warned him of growing backbench discontent.



This is amazing. The rest of us knew all about it, but the PM’s office didn’t?


I’ve had doubts about the efficiency of this office for quite some
time, after all, they’re supposed to be there for Tony yet every day
since he took office things for him have traveled increasingly south. At
first blush, it appears the PM’s staff are incompetent on a Monty
Python scale.



Perhaps their secret agenda is to ruin him, or I have been watching too much In the thick of it. Either way he should sack somebody in that office and hire Malcolm Tucker, but instead he went after Ruddock.


I don’t care much what happens to Ruddock: I will never forget his
days as Immigration Minister in the Howard government during which he
instigated a powerfully successful campaign to demonise and criminalise
asylum seekers arriving by boat, largely through the use of language he
adopted from Nazi anti semitic propaganda of the 1930’s. Without Ruddock
we would have no Morrison. He might look like a hurt old man, but I’m
not fooled.



Then there were Abbott’s belligerent attacks
on President of the Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs,
after the Commission’s report on children in detention was tabled in
Parliament on Wednesday. In a typical conservative shoot the messenger
and make so much noise that everybody will forget the message tactic,
Abbott railed long and hard about Professor Triggs, while entirely
disregarding the appalling findings of her report.



With the stubborn determination of the utterly cloth-eared stupid,
Abbott keeps the three-word slogans hiccoughing off his far too evident,
lizard-like tongue: boats, mining tax, carbon tax, boats, carbon tax,
mining tax; we are open for business but not for boats, carbon tax,
mining tax. I wonder to myself, does he or anyone in his office really
think there are still people out here even listening to this drivel?



It is a measure of the collective desperation of Abbott and his staff
that they continue to cling to this cringe-worthy robotic recitation:
they have totally failed to come up with anything new, for all the
millions of tax payer dollars we’ve spent on them.



The zeitgeist as far as I can tell is one of trembling, panicked
uncertainty: what will their leader say next, how much longer can this
go on, how can they make it better without looking like the ALP. This
latter possibility seems to be the very worst thing they fear could
happen to them.



It isn’t, though. Worse things are happening every time their leader
opens his mouth and puts both feet in it. But hey, it’s good for the
ALP.



There’s been a cute white rabbit appearing in our garden for the last
few days, and like Alice in the wonderland, I’m thinking of drinking
the potion to make me oh so tiny, then I can follow White Rabbit down
his hole.



But wait! I’m already there!


The final straw is the sudden wheeling out of Margie. You know he’s a dead man walking when he rolls out the wife.


Tony & Margie Abbott
Tony and Margie (image from noplaceforsheep.com)
 This article was first published on Jennifer’s blog No Place For Sheep.












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