It turns out Christopher Pyne wasn't running some deep Machiavellian plot when he ran a petition to save the ABC production facility in Adelaide. Now we learn he's begging the Prime Minister for a rethink. All because he is not polling well in his own electorate and if he had to explain how he lost the production facility from Adelaide, it's hard to see how he doesn't get humiliated at every doorstep in his electorate. That's the funny thing about democracy - your constituent's opinions count for something some of the time.
To save the bit on his turf, Christopher Pyne is arguing that the ABC should be made to spend some of the money in regional production, which would save Adelaide's production facility. In other words, he's arguing for jobs protections for his constituency as being an exception. You'd think he was - god forbid - in favour of regulation as opposed to the rampant deregulation for things in his own portfolio.
Quite apart from the total departure from the regular Liberal Party economic rationalist patter, he wants to save his turf at the expense of somebody else's turf. As you can see it's unprincipled on at least three levels but I guess you try anything when it comes to trying to save your own skin.
Malcolm Fraser Thinks They Suck
Live long enough, you see lots of strange things. Perhaps principle amongst my list of strange things is the sight of Malcolm Fraser attacking the Liberal Party from the outside over the asylum seeker issue.
Mr Fraser says migration legislation passed last week has given Immigration Minister Scott Morrison "dictatorial, tyrannical powers" over the lives of asylum seekers and "destroyed the rule of law as we know it".
He has accused the crossbench senators who supported the legislation, on the basis of concessions they negotiated with Mr Morrison, of committing "a political error of fundamental proportions".Well Mr Fraser, we are talking about Scott Morrison here. You can't expect much better from that man on the best of days.
All the same, it's a very vexed topic where there is much electoral support to punish the asylum seekers. It's a weird thing, this impulse to punish the asylum seekers, but there are some clues as to the thinking out there.
A long while back, Sam told me about his qualms about asylum seekers arriving in boats. "It's a bit like if I tried to drown myself in a swimming pool in the Eastern Suburbs and they rescue me. And I tell them that people are trying to kill me in the Western Suburbs so I had to come to Vaucluse; and the only way I could think of making you take me in was if I tried to drown myself in your swimming pool. Now you have to let me live in your house."
Now, just to be clear, Sam was joking.
Sam went on to say that of course Australia is much nicer than wherever the hell the people come from, much as Vaucluse is much nicer than say, St. Marys. So if you're picking and choosing, you would pick Vaucluse as the place to pull your stunt rather than anywhere in between. Once you decide you don't want to live where you live, then it's time to shop and people are shopping for Australia as a destination. If we all had the choice, maybe we'd all choose to live in Vaucluse, in which case who would be left to live in the poor suburbs to work as garbage collectors and plumbers?
But if you're a resident of Vaucluse, should you take this choice seriously? Isn't it obvious that the people in Vaucluse would ring the police and have the intruder removed or arrested for trespassing? And that is essentially what Manus and Nauru and Christmas Island detention Islands are - prisons for trespassing. Naturally the people who believe in Manus and Naura (or Cambodia!) as a 'solution' believe that the prison system is a fine deterrent to crime. If you bought that, Sam also had a boat ticket for you to buy.
And so the analogy went. It was all a bit 'Down And Out In Beverly Hills'.
I can see one aspect to the fear is that Australia is in the middle of a housing bubble that is pricing lots of people out of the property market. There is a lot of mortgage stress even if you can get a piece of it. It's not an environment conducive to being generous to the needy when people are seriously worried about keeping their own roofs and backyards. Scott Morrison is obviously playing to this pathetic anxiety, which in turn is at the very core of this pathetic kind of politics we're witnessing in Canberra. However, on a deeper level, people are wanting to reject the asylum seekers because they see the boat-and-drown asylum seekers as gaming the system - and nobody wants to be a schmuck.
The sad thing is that people out there in voter land genuinely don't want to see people on boats drowning on our doorsteps. Their preference is that the charade stops altogether, and the problem simply went away; but that would entail the dispossessed stop picking the metaphorical Vaucluse as the destination. Vaucluse is kind of nice if it weren't for the people. But it's those people who are saying piss off, don't care what your story is, just go back to St Marys.
I'm pretty sure Malcolm Fraser would be unhappy with this characterisation. It really is pathetic that Tony Abbott counts stopping the boats as an achievement. It would be an achievement if they went home because their homeland improved with our help. The deeper truth is that as a nation, we really don't give a shit about that part of the equation, and that makes us all just as pathetic as the politicians in Parliament.
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