View From The Couch - 06/Oct/2014

They Gave Up On The 40 Job Applications Thing

I have to tell you I am feeling great relief that the Federal Government has backed off its crazy idea of making unemployed youths send 40 job applications a month. Eric Abetz originally made it out that it was no big deal without considering the impact of 30million half-hearted job applications a month might actually be a great hindrance to the productivity of businesses in Australia.

In backing down, Tony Abbott made it out like, this is the nature of consultations. I have to tell you Mr. Abbott, if it's genuine consultation, it would have taken place before you came to announcing the eminently stupid idea. The fact the stupid idea got aired as policy without the consultation beforehand   tells a sorry story of how this government is run.

Now that I think of it, this stuff came out of consultation with a body he appointed to give recommendations. So somebody is definitely giving crap advice to the government and the government is so crap it just goes with it until it hits a wall of common sense popular opinion.

Anti-Terror Laws

It's mostly flying under the radar because we've been so freaked out by this business of Islamist terror cells allegedly planning behaedings in Australia, but really these laws are so Orwellian it's not funny. They can jail journalists for reporting on special intelligence operations.

They're obviously written so they can grab hold of the future version of Wikileaks and jail the future version of Julian Assange. The only problem is that it steps all over freedom of expression and the role of the media as the 'fourth estate'. I have said it before and it bears repeating that it is the antithesis of liberalism to try to gag the press, and it is anti-intellectual to justify this gagging of the media is somehow for our own good. It's alarming that the man pushing this is Attorney General George Brandis, who earlier this year was banging on about people's right to be a bigot.

What we can learn from the Brandis scorecard is that it's okay to be a bigot, because that's freedom of expression; except if you are Islamic in which case you deserve all the surveillance coming to you. I'm just not interested in the doublethink and hypocrisy that this demands of me.

This is an eminently bad government that's never going to find its way.