To: Ms Susan Bower
Serially Failed Liberal Candidate & Putter-up of Big Billboards

Dear Ms Bower Suze

It’s time, dear. I’m thinking less Whitlam, more witless. In the photo above from the ABC’s website, it’s clear what you’re thinking. Expressing it for the whole electorate. Shafted by your own party. Eaten alive by Lyons, again, even with the sitting member retiring.

Yes, it’s time to Bower out…note to self: proud of that line I am, sharp as me blade, might use it again.

Maybe you’re addicted to the buzz: the frisson of seeing images of yourself flapping on fence posts, strapped to haybales and agricultural rejectamenta along Highway One through the near-empty middle-island hinterland. But you know what Dutton always tells his friends: never get high on your own supply.

First, it’s the politics. How many elections do you have to lose before you accept the result? Is it a case of sack me or I resign?

Or blind delusional hope? Diverting to Lambie or even PHON before succumbing to the inevitable is just not worth it. One might cruelly suggest running to The Nationals like an reverse PumpkinJumper Price.

Then there’s the day job, luv.

Somewhere, over the rainbow created by state debt raining on the sun shining out of Eric Abetz’s clacker, there’s a massive factory that will employ every Tasmanian. And it will make shit forever in demand and its debt will be forever serviced by a magic porridge pot public purse and no-one shall worry evermore. But that’s not Liberty Bell, tolling for whom … we know very well, don’t we?

Back on terra firma, there’s no plan. No plan for energy-intensive industries, no plan for trade-exposed industries. Hostility to and incomprehension about corporate imagination and industrial innovation.

Instead, TEMCO’s deadcat bounce from bankruptcy, millions of dollars of public money plus Greensill’s money magicked out of thin air later, a rebrand and now under the guise of Liberty Bell circling back to square one.

There you are, squeezed in a loving sandwich between billionaires and premiers swathed in toxic smoke.

It’s not clear what you brought to the table as CEO at Bell Bay Advanced Manufacturing Zone (BBAMZ). Maybe just a blue tablecloth?

This is Tasmania’s mania for heavy industrial corporate welfare: as covertly as possible heaving as much free capital shit as possible the rent seekers’ way, while taking a second pass creaming the public purse for a preposterous salary in exchange for tipping as much stuff as quickly as possible into our collective consumerist void, barely justified by employing a handful of confused reprobates.

The art/schtick of the possible. (Sad face, though unsurprised face).

Did we forget to mention the damn cheap electricity whose actual price has been the island’s secretest secret since hotdamn forever? Or the now high and dry hydrogen stuff?

There’s no shame in being a signed-up cargo cultist. The trick is to keep the show on the road.  Hide debts in the books of other GBEs, claim you’re viable when you’re a basket case, etc. It’s the Tasmania Way.

But in a black flash, the day job and political career – such that it is, er, was – have collided in an underwhelming singularity and careened off the road into an industrial-sized ditch filled with Libstench. A BBAMZ-Bower big bangarang.

Fitting really. Time to ditch the whole caper, Suze, honest.

It’s way past time to Bower out and Meander back to the Valley.

The Axeman clears the deadwood from Tasmanian public life in a new monthly column. Oh boy, does he have a lot of work to do.

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