*Pic: ABC of Malcolm Turnbull and Scott Morrison
So it’s becoming increasingly clear what actually happened with that leadership change. The Party Shovers and Makers came up to Turnbull and said something like, “Hey. People out there are beginning to catch on that the loonies are running the asylum. We need somebody to cover up for us. We will just go and hide under the desks with our friends from the Australian Christian Lobby and you can tell anyone who comes by that we’re not here. Oh and just one last little thing. About that little device we had implanted next to your heart that we told you was a pacemaker …”
I was one of the huge majority of Australians to heave a huge sigh of relief when Abbott was dumped. Most of the country felt and hoped that we had seen the back of, not only Abbott, but his whole gang, and that they would all retire to Broken Hill or somewhere and become surf lifesavers or maybe form an Antarctic cycling team.
And the omens at first looked promising. Almost all of the foaming-at-the mouth types were dumped from Cabinet, leaving only Scott Morrison and George Brandis trying to rebadge themselves as moderates.
After all, isn’t the ever-litigious Brandis a member of Melbourne’s elite and secretive Savage Club, which is supposed to be for progressives? Which seems to mean that they discuss among themselves over brandy whether to give more gruel to the children in workhouses?
Scott Morrison would very obviously react to any sign of recession by retrenchment and just those 1920’s measures which would send the economy into a terminal tailspin, but as time went on it was plain that Turnbull never told him anything, Australia’sTreasurer now being an unimportant member of the Outer Cabinet, where there shall be wailing and cashing of feet.
Cory Bernardi, livid over the total encouragement of Perverse Sex and Bestiality, maybe even seceding and starting his own party (Heaven be praised!) Turnbull reversed the scrapping of the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
Australia, admittedly under huge pressure from the other 195 countries in the world, finally admitting that just possibly, Climate Change might be a Thing, Turnbull bravely standing up against the entire Right of his party who were enraged that he even knew such a place as Paris existed, except for suits and handbags.
Actual retreat from the Liberal idea that bullying in schools is character-building – after all, we did the bullying in Our private schools and it didn’t do Us any harm. And most fabulous of all, Turnbull talked about ’30 minute cities’. It looked like the unthinkable … the Liberals (maybe prompted by the total collapse of the Australian auto industry) finally abandoning their crazed commitment to cars and actually supporting Public Transport Infrastructure! Yay! A new, sensible, moderate Liberal Party that might actually spend a few days in Australia a year!
I was fooled. I was wrong. I was hoaxed, just like everybody except for a few Hardened Political Cynics who thought that just maybe, the right-wingers might not be telling the truth.
Last week Turnbull announced just how much of the $1.5 billion that had formerly been earmarked for Melbourne’s moronic East/West link project would go to public transport. $10 million – and that was to go to consultants to find if buying houses was a good idea. It won’t get us so much as one single extra train carriage. This allows us to calculate a very precise and accurate figure on how different the Turnbull government is to the Abbott government. That is, 0.6%.
Moreover, the Climate Change policy turned out to be a continuation of Abbott’s Direct Action policy which, so far as I can work out what it means at all, seems to involve filling in holes the Coal Industry has left behind and planting trees that the Coal Industry should have paid for.
A Carbon Price – internationally shown to be the most effective solution – was not on the agenda. The $1 billion to help Pacific Island States threatened by sea-level rise was to come out of the money for their hospitals and schools. Meanwhile, hospitals and schools in Australia were to be paid for by State Premiers busking outside their parliaments 1. The Australian Renewable Energy Agency was to be replaced with a new “Clean Energy Innovation Fund’, which I think we can decipher as meaning ‘research on new ways to sell coal’. The Safe Schools program was gutted. 1
“It’s often difficult inside a closed system to see the boundaries that surround you. Sometimes you think you can see the whole of the universe. This is how closed systems like it: their inhabitants looking out through a distorted curvature that gives shape to space that is not there.” – Joshua Topolsky 1
So it’s becoming increasingly clear what actually happened with that leadership change. The Party shovers and makers came up to Turnbull and said something like, “Hey. People out there are beginning to catch on that the loonies are running the asylum. We need somebody to cover up for us. We will just go and hide under the desks with our friends from the Australian Christian Lobby and you can tell anyone who comes by that we’re not here. Oh and just one last little thing. About that little device we had implanted next to your heart that we told you was a pacemaker…”
And Now! (Drum Roll) Yay! An Austerity Budget! Just what we needed! Just what we knew that economic half-wit Scott Morrison would come up with!. And ‘However, he [Turnbull] confirmed his first budget would contain “changes to our tax system” designed to promote investment, innovation and enterprise’ 1, which we all now know is code for ‘we will cut taxes for the coal and oil industries to promote new mines’. An d ‘freeing up the economy’ means ‘reducing corporate taxes’.
We must all tighten our belts and give more $$$$ to the rich so a bit of it can trickle back down to us down their pants legs, because otherwise If we don’t give the rich more money, they won’t be able to get $50 million yachts made in Sweden and hire a Vietnamese crew and sip French champagne while wearing Armani suits and Gucci shoes made in sweatshops in China 1 and there will be no extra jobs for Australians at all!
The insanity of introducing a budget that all Australians will immediately recognise as a noxious fraud during an election year at least gives us hope that these losers will be boosted out on their Arses.
But it allows us to understand just how hopelessly out of touch with anything like the Australian People the Liberal Party has become. They have moved so far right that Turnbull with his new far-to-the-right of Ted Cruz policies actually believes he is a left-winger.
People like Senator Bernardi and Senator Concetta-Wells (who, let’s face it, would never ever ever stand any chance of being elected by an actual Electorate) are so right-wing that they will very soon stretch right around the block and find their noses inserted in their own fundamental apertures.
Which is what we can only hope happens to this whole cozening, meretricious, shyster government.
Refs …
1 Which failed plan is now being touted as a masterpiece of strategy.
1 http://reneweconomy.com.au/2016/turnbulls-sleight-of-hand-on-clean-energy-investment-63202
1 http://www.newyorker.com/business/currency/facebook-live-now-you-can-never-leave
1 The term ‘frugal’ is used, so that we don’t get mixed up with the U.K. where David Cameron is now being asked to resign.
1 http://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/09/malcolm-turnbull-budget-victoria-damien-mantach
1 I don’t mean to imply here that Gucci and Armani are made in sweatshops in China. I don’t know which country’s sweatshops they are made in.
*Tom Kent is a composer and retired journalist who doesn’t think too much of Labor either.
Robin Charles Halton
April 9, 2016 at 14:06
Pity the Liberals have reduced Richard Colbeck to No 5 on the Senate ticket and given priority to ultra conservative anti Turnbull supporter Eric Abetz.
In my view it spells disaster for the Liberals in Tasmania unless voters really know how to vote, of cause the main species of voters in this State are of donkey status and only turn up on polling day to tick boxes, blindfolded!
Colbeck is by far the best of the bunch of Federal Liberals representing our State in Canberra, to denegate his current political standing to one of a lowly politics which fails to make common sense for Liberal followers.
Mike Bolan
April 9, 2016 at 15:00
Take note folks…Australia’s progressive democracy is a club…and ordinary Australians aren’t in it!
Dan Glazebrook has described very well how the wealthy families of the UK used the dissolution of the Empire to create multiple tax havens for themselves and favoured others, and created a so-called ‘Commonwealth’ in which the countries of the Empire took over their own costs but continued to enrich Britain’s upper crust.
The pervasive growth of social media and search engines is slowly revealing that the ‘democracy’ in which we live is a fantasy. (Check out Tasmanian liberals ‘new look’ Senate ticket for clues to this)
It is gradually becoming clearer that aldermen, politicians, bureaucrats and institutions are all a part of the residues of Empire, and will protect their money and power at all costs (e.g. TT article about Council’s attitude to its ratepayers in Dorset)
Further indications are in John Hayward’s excellent ‘wake in fright’ articles about Tasmania’s legal system:
http://oldtt.pixelkey.biz/index.php?/article/waking-in-fright-in-the-tasmanian-justice-system/
Those among us with our eyes open can realise that the entire country is similarly compromised (e.g. fed right wing policies written by I.P.A).
How long it will actually take us to realise that grandma is a wolf, remains to be seen.
Robert LePage
April 9, 2016 at 21:32
1# “it spells disaster for the Liberals in Tasmania”
Surely this is an oxymoron?
Liberals in Tasmania are a disaster.
Luigi
April 10, 2016 at 02:17
So Eric has put his former staffer, Duniam, in at number 3. Isn’t that a bit like nominating your butler to be a member of one’s club?
Neil Aitchison
April 10, 2016 at 03:54
…hmmm…writing a beat-up article hardly changes anything. To the contrary, it shows that there are no good reasons to be a “progressive” because it just means you turn into a slanderous, rude person who pushes hedonistic humanism to the detriment of society (not helping your cause at all) – since when is “progress” always a good thi9ng anyhow?
I am HAPPY to have a plebiscite for two reasons – 1. it will show the true support (or lack thereof) of SSM and 2. it will placate the losing side to accept the outcome because indeed, the people have spoken – that’s democracy. This is why the cost of a plebiscite is worth it. The half-billion dollar price tag for the plebiscite is a make-believe number to try a scare people away from the plebiscite, so it is another example of the sly and devious actions of the SSM people. I don’t think there is any where near a majority of Australians supporting SSM and the SSM advocates are trying to “talk” their way into a law change by trying to say that there is a “SSM majority support†by quoting make-believe, dodgy/skewed polls…..and any dishonest, tricky, sly wordsmithing with the plebiscite question will defeat it’s purpose because the losers will continue to cry foul thereby increasing the animosity. If there is ever an issue that needs to be conducted fair and square, this is it. Already, the SSM side have used name-calling, bully tactics by threats of Anti-Discrimination claims, “shove-it-down-our-throats” programs, swamp the media and social networks, herd mentality, misreporting, pretending it won’t affect heterosexuals, ignore millenia-old principles, target naive young children without parental approval or knowledge (like preying on kindergarten and pre-school toddlers and the “unSafe Schools” for pre-teens), sabotage the public service to make incremental law changes to get their way and adopt the “victim mentality”….and yet they still haven’t convinced the majority of Australians that what they are doing is “good, innocent, safe, loving, tolerant, inclusive and healthy” for our society. Reality points to the opposite.
….or you could leave marriage as it is and then the existing married people don’t have to explain their reasons for being married when it is redefined into a pathetic meaningless word…..and can you tell the homosexuals to simply “get guidance counselling” (with a fake sympathetic look on your face) as the sole way to overcome their issues?….oh no….that would have you strung up on the spot. You expect the heterosexuals to cop it in every way possible. This is the problem with SSM advocates – they are being more and more self-centred as the days go by and, of course, they are turning people off their homosexual lifestyle as they do it. If homosexuals are going to act like the SSM advocates, then Australia will be completely in the sewer.
Chris
April 10, 2016 at 13:34
The cry is to put Cole Back, but with what qualifications, will it be via a fishing trawler or a chain saw.
Will Abetz reign free on top of the ticket and continue put his stooges into the Senate, I hope he is an Australian citizen and by depriving Wee Willy of a trusted stooge, which Abetzian will then take his place.
Lets remember that MT has instigated voting reform in the top drawer and we loyal and true Tasmanians may now vote below the line and leave the two Abetz squares blank.
ABA the new slogan, anybody but Abetz.
http://www.inkcinct.com.au/web-pages/cartoons/2016/2016-114P–Senate-preference-voting-today,-election–INKCINCT-CARTOONS.jpg
Robin Charles Halton
April 10, 2016 at 15:59
#3 It should be of great benefit to boost Senator Lambies chances of reelection along with a strong following for Steve Martin.
Anyone that knows how to constructively vote, the down sliding for Senator Colbeck and the provocative wish of the hard right to showcase Abetz sets the scene for a Liberal disaster here in Tasmania.
The Turnbull government is looking shakey, the Opposition is no better so a hung parliament is to be the likely order of the day, face it and be prepared for it and a realistic budget in order to live within our means.
No more free lunches, crunch time has come, GST handouts will be smaller, in Tasmania’s case there is little that can be done other than to tighten the spending as the Federal income drys up.
Thomas Kent
April 10, 2016 at 22:24
Yeah, it was very instructive to hear of this Eric Abetz thing just after I finished writing the article. Further fuel to my thought that the Libs have been taken over by the extreme Right who use that to put in unelectable puppets. Though it is encouraging to think that the Libs fear that a No.2 Senate spot might not be elected in Tasmania. I’d love to see their polling.
Following what is going on around the country, I think that is def a conspiracy. I’m not very inclined to believe in conspiracies, even though I’ve spent a lot of my life thinking up and organising them, but politics is The Art Of Conspiracy. And the RW Xtians are def very good at conspiracies and absolutely able to organise stacking every Lib Party branch in the country. It’s not even all that difficult…all you need is a lot of funding from the Koch Brothers and you’re in.
A friend of mine who is to the Right of Nicolae CeauÈ™escu but who is actually such a Good Guy that I helped him with his bid to win the seat of Maribyrnong for the Libs (because I’d love to break the Lab stranglehold on that seat, and achieved it with Council) tried to start a Lib branch for Western Melbourne. There is NO Lib branch in Western Melbourne; the party sends a fresh-faced 22-YO carpetbagger from Toorak for every election. Well, my mate was so disgusted with the chicanery around his branch that even tho’ he’s a completely RW Xtian himself, he resigned. Then the branch folded of course.
Ah Neil! It is always so nice to hear from our friends from the ACL! Hope the weather in Wilmot is nice. I would completely support your right for a voice – but the Xtian Right DOES NOT support democracy in any way, shape, or form. On the contrary, it does everything it can to undermine it. Moreover their PR is riddled with disinformation and deliberate lies. They want Shariah Law in Australia, regardless of whether Australians support it. Just myself personally, I don’t regard this as religious. They make up stuff which is not there, such as saying that I am progressive – which I say nothing about – and saying that I am slanderous, when all I have done is be very explicit about the truth. Just as with climate change, they ignore the science – which says that Aussies overwhelmingly support Marriage Equality. They tell lies such as saying that marriage is a Christian institution, which is a complete whopper.
And you know what? Whether the majority supports marriage equality is as irrelavant as whether the majority thinks that all red-haired people are dangerous and should be killed. Even if only .0000002% of Australian were gay and wanted to be married – personally I think wanting to be married is nuts – then they must get that freedom, inasmuch as it has no bad result for anybody else. This whole discussion about how many people supports it is just a RW red herring and the Left is mistaken to engage in that dialogue.
Say Neil, how about you get your mates in Parliament to support a plebiscite on the changes to Senate elections? Unlike Marriage Equality, we don’t know what Australians think about that. And that’s a subject on which a plebiscite would actually be useful.
Thomas Kent
April 10, 2016 at 22:53
…But we all know that the real reason why the ACL and their mates wants a plebiscite is so the question can be put in the following form:
NO!!! I don’t want Australia to be taken over by child-abusing Bestialists!
YES I want the marriage laws to remain as they are!
Mike
April 11, 2016 at 10:45
Australian schools will never match Finland’s unless teachers can tell the truth
Phew. School holidays. A chance to recover from a typically frenetic first term and take stock.
It’s been busy, in and out of the classroom.
Inside the classroom, it’s been business as usual. Preparing lessons, marking, dealing with parental expectations and trying to blend the diverse backgrounds of our students into harmonious classes.
We’ve just finished writing reports, making sure that we have reached “outcomes” that are incomprehensible to parents and students but fulfil a bureaucratic need for accountability. Instead of giving our students marks or, God forbid, rankings, we have disguised their results in generalities so their parents are saved from facing the truth about their children’s real progress.
We aren’t allowed to tell it how it is.
Even though we’ve been drowning in a sea of paperwork we’ve done our best to come up for air and actually teach our students. We’ve tried to give them one-on-one tutelage but the size of our classes has made this impossible.
Then there are the NAPLAN tests that we aren’t meant to prepare our students for but do because “bad” results will reflect badly on our schools and give those who want to bag us a free kick.
On top of this we’ve been filling in the host of forms that make taking students on excursions, to sporting events and into the woods prohibitive.
Into the woods? That’s where William Doyle’s son was sent when he spent some time in a Finnish school. Doyle wrote that his son was given a compass and told to find his way back to school. In Australia his teachers would be hauled over the coals for abrogating their duty of care let alone failing to comply with risk-management strategies.
Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/comment/australian-schools-will-never-match-finland-unless-teachers-can-tell-the-truth-20160411-go3cl4.html#ixzz45YLZSyTN
Simon Warriner
April 11, 2016 at 20:38
Mike, it might come as a shock but lots of other professions work bloody hard as well, many for much longer hours in far more onerous conditions, and they do not get a two week break every 3 months and near on six weeks off over Christmas. Yes teachers should be able to tell the truth, but so should everyone, and from my experience and close observation there are a few teachers out there whose inability to recognise the truth is a very large part of the problem. It certainly explained a plummeting roll at my son’s previous school.
Neil Aitchison
April 14, 2016 at 02:00
Biblical Christianity (the one that Jesus taught and is the pure form of Christianity from it’s inception) has only ever been 5%-10% and so all other forms of “Christianity” are irrelevant because they are hybrid versions that comprise all sorts of human traditions/doctrines – including fake Gospels. So it is good to see the reduction of the fake Christianity and the rise of the Biblical Christianity. The more that Biblical Christianity is persecuted by so-called “educated, rational†humanists/atheists, the more it flourishes, so we will see a huge increase…..remember, I am talking about Biblical Christianity and not “Christendom†as a whole. The ungodly hedonism is purifying the Church as the fake Christians dump Christianity for their worldly ways (they were never true Christians in the first place and these are the statistics that you say the Church is in “declineâ€), but the true Christians get more and more emboldened – it is the true Christians who successfully attract non-Christians and this is how a person gets truly saved. Lifestyle Christianity never helped anyone, but Biblical “faith-based†Christianity is the way to achieve the greatest joy imaginable – and eternal life. Hedonistic humanism/atheism cannot compete no matter how sly and tricky their make-believe “science/facts/logic/rational/history/evolution theories†get. Praise God!
Plus, God’s prophetic plan of the world outlined in the Books of Ezekiel, Daniel and Revelation clearly show a temporary “falling away” into ungodliness (driven by satanic forces) all-of-which are happening before our very eyes. Thus the Bible is proven to be perfectly true in every way AND a Bible-believing Christian (like myself) is more than happy to see God’s plan unfold. As the ungodliness increases, the Godliness of Biblical Christianity becomes more appealing….after all, who wants to live through the worldly hell that hedonistic humanists/atheists/satanists are inflicting on our society?….not everyone!….so it’s time for me to expand my church for the influx. Praise God!….He is way smarter than humans.
As a Christian, my awareness of a Creator God in my life is as real as the people I meet and the computer I am sitting in front of now – just because non-Christians have not experienced the same thing doesn’t make it less real, it just means that they are missing out on part of life that is available to them, but they don’t want it. That is why the Bible is so important is because it provides us with the knowledge of reality as the Creator God made it and it gives us supernatural insight into human nature by explaining the good and the bad – it acts as the reference point (or measure) to determine “right from wrong”, “good from bad”, “moral from immoral”, “lust from love”, etc….without a reference point, you cannot possibly determine these things other than “what you make them up to be”. The logical implication of making truth whatever we want it too be (ie. “progressive moral relativism”, is that we all contradict ourselves as we all believe that “my truth is better than your truth”. This is the best proof yet that a Creator God exists and that His Word is truth. As creator, God then has the authority to do what He wants with creation including laying out the rules for living. I will therefore never be ashamed of my faith in God and my trust in God’s Word, the Bible. Homosexuality is unnatural because it doesn’t align with the natural order of the biological world as God created things and no “wishing” this away will change anything. God warns us of ignoring Him and He displays great pity on those who rebel against Him – that is why Jesus prayed (and I follow Jesus’ example): “Father forgive them, for they know not what they do”. Â
Apart from the Gospel message, the next greatest Biblical truth is in Romans 1:16-32. No honest person can disagree with the passage because it is being fulfilled before our very eyes (for example: “Professing themselves to be wise, they became fools”, “vain in their imaginations, and their foolish heart was darkened”, “uncleanness through the lusts of their own hearts”, “God gave them up unto vile affections”….and verses 28-31 describes most of our politicians perfectly). There is plenty in the passage that talks about “dishonour(ing) their own bodies between themselves” and “for even their women did change the natural use into that which is against nature: And likewise also the men, leaving the natural use of the woman, burned in their lust one toward another; men with men working that which is unseemly”…..hmmm….it’s not hard to work out what it says.Â
Leonard Colquhoun
April 14, 2016 at 15:57
The term ‘Biblical’ Christianity is in permanent danger of being interpreted as a sort of ‘Old Testament’ Christianity, conjuring up images of fire & brimstone TV evangelists, eye-for-eye revenge and self-styled creation science dissing the laws of physics.
Perhaps what is meant is ‘New Testament’ Christianity, usually summed up by Matthew 5:44’s “But I say unto you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you, and persecute you”. (As in the KJV, which is what any Anglophone humanist would cite.)
Anyway, the old defence of ‘real Christianity has never been tried / practised’ is just semantics, as absurd as claiming that mass-murderers who shout “Allahu Akbar” have nothing to do with Islam, or that the USSR’s KGB & gulags were not ‘real’ Marxism. (At least, no normal persons spout similar nonsense about Nazism.)
Christianity ‘lost its innocence’ on the 27th of February 380 when it gladly accepted being made the sole and official religion of the Roman Empire. (Didn’t do the Empire much good, either – it was gone within a century.) It then proceeded to do what all such ‘official’ creeds and ideologies do – stamp out the competition – for the next 14 centuries, which is about the same length of time that Islam has been, and is still, doing just that.
And it’s all so unnaturally and unproductively stupid, all this forcing us variously rounded pegs into one-size-fits-all square holes. Doesn’t even work for socks.