Sign Of The Times

I Didn't Know They Had It In Them

The last thing I expected was for the Coalition to head for a spill. I honestly thought that it wasn't in their culture to spill on an actual Prime Minister, as opposed to merely an opposition leader. I guess you learn something new every day and these Liberals really are no different to the ALP they so despise - or claim to at any rate - when it comes to reading polls and trying to keep a job.
So, yes, I was wrong. These guys really are generic as the ALP politicians.

This has got me to thinking that the news cycle is so fast and furious it has become impossible to have a Prime Minister go for long. Japan hit that point early in the 2000s and kept changing Prime Ministers every year. Italy had been that way since the 1970s until Silvio Berlusconi came along, but essentially he controlled the media. Politics has become so fractious it has made the voting public volatile. The instant gratification offered by polling and sending a message has resulted in a kind of feedback loop that enforces an anxiety about poll figures over actual policy.

And so in the last decade we went from the tired old John Howard to the immensely popular Kevin Rudd to the immensely divisive Julia Gillard and back to Kevin Rudd, only to end up with the immensely unpopular Tony Abbott who having dislodged the ALP has managed to dislodge himself. As Julie Bishop is reported have said, he is indeed his own worst enemy and thank goodness we might be rid of him within the week.

What it says about the electorate is much worse.

Blaming It On Peta Credlin

The enforced myopia of the media makes us overly familiar with the Prime Minister whose mug is on TV or newspapers or everywhere on the interwebs 24/7/365 so we forget how lofty an office it really is. A backbencher really has to prove their worth before having any real concrete input into policy and maybe if they're lucky they might see time as a fringe minister. It's almost understandable that their access to the PM's office is limited and narrow and that chief of staff of the PM's office is a great obstacle.

Which highlights the problem of having Peta Credlin as this figurehead of the Prime Minister's office who controls the flow of meetings and is known Australia wide as wielding this kind of centralised power. The un-democratic nature of her power was bound to be an issue in a Parliament that is operating under the Westminster system. An unelected figure who wields such power has more in common with the Secretary General of the old USSR (read: Stalin) or North Korea (read: Kim Dynasty) than a democratic state. Although nominal communist,those regimes were (and are) essentially totalitarian nightmares. All the same it is kind of interesting that the right side party fell into that Totalitarian trap.

The irony may be that it was the Liberal Party that succumbed to this bit of micro-fascism infestation, but then again it's not surprising given how Tony Abbott has never shied away from his own fascist impulses. When he made his speech on Monday and made the case for him to continue, he was essentially quoting Hitler and the Nazi's fuhrerprinzip. No joke. Paraphrased, he was saying "I'm the leader. We all have to unite behind the leader. Only the leader can decide. We must not become a rabble."

The only thing missing were the "Zieg Heil" chorus. I have to say at least the unelected skullduggery of Paul Howes in his time as Union boss didn't succumb to this kind of rhetoric. He might have thought it but he didn't quite say that.

The backbench unrest is entirely understandable (but not necessarily admirable). It's their meal tickets being threatened by an uncaring Prime Minister. If you threaten enough meal tickets, they'll come at you like a mob. This is why most things end badly in politics.

So Now It's Time To Think Of An Alternative

This is the hard bit because they're all a bunch of brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunts. And then there's Malcolm Turnbull who is not any of that but mercurial and relatively environmentally-friendly-sounding which makes him the Left's favourite pick. But the Right hate him so much for the very fact that the Left likes him and he's environmentally-friendly-sounding. He might not be environmentally friendly at all, but he's suspected of the crime because he's the boss of the Australian Republican Movement.
It's ironic the knighting of Phil the Greek has brought this all out.

I always ping him on 'Utegate' and the Godwin Grech phoney email and the glaring absence of judgment in that entire episode, but it has to be said Australian politics is about comebacks and maybe Turnbull is due his own. Lazarus had a quadruple bypass, maybe you can flog a dead horse to life.

Scott Morrison on the other hand is a textbook example of the sort of brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunt the Liberal Party breeds, so he might lead them the way they want, but over a cliff. Coming to think of it, that's exactly what Tony Abbott's done so why would they want to do that again? Oh I forget that they are brain-damaged emotionally-stunted intellectually-crippled, mentally-deficient cunts.

Which means that the time might have finally arrived for Julie Bishop, star of 'Seven Years A Deputy'. I could write a nasty sentence or two about her career in law and the kinds of bastards and shills she defended but no. It would smack of misogyny to do so. "Pass".

The other wonderful news is that the Budget is due in 3 months. And they don't really have a candidate for Treasurer to replace The Worst Treasurer Ever Joe Hockey, mostly for fear that they might uncover somebody who is actually - to fudge a word - "Worst-er".
We sure live in interesting times.