Malcolm Turnbull has been getting some nice pieces written about him. They're easy to write, partly because Tony Abbott was singularly awful in his stint as Prime Minister, but also because Bill Shorten looks a little light weight next to Malcolm Turnbull. This has made Malcolm Turnbull look a lot better than he is capable of being given the precarious nature of his backbench support. When it gets down to it, politics remains the art of the possible, and when your backbench is lobbied heavily by the Minerals Council of Australia - yes, those very same bloody-minded cunts who went after Kevin Rudd - then there really isn't much possible.
And so Malcolm Turnbull backed right off the pledge to stop subsidising fossil fuels. When it got right down the nitty-gritty, too many of his constituents weren't ready to face the future. So much for the tremendous courage and all that. At this point in history, you do wonder whether they really believe there is no climate change or whether they just dig their heels in to keep dying industries alive - and if so, why didn't they dig in harder for the automotive industry? It's a veritable mystery.
What's more poignant is that as with Kevin Rudd at Copenhagen, Malcolm Turnbull's limit is demarcated by the very limitations imposed by his own side politics. He might believe that Global Warming is a terrible challenge we must face, as with all the other beggar-thy-neighbour moves that the Coalition seems to love, Turnbull is committing us to "me-last" as Australia's mantra. The surrounding rhetoric sounds nice I'm sure, but this is the same dog's breakfast government when it comes down to the crucial aspects of emissions control.
Conservatives Like To Control You Through Your Meal Ticket
I just want to point to this interesting thing in Peter Hatcher's series on the execrable Abbott Government and how it failed most dismally.
In another incident, Credlin was angered and distressed by a column in The Australian by Niki Savva that appeared on October 30 last year. The particular sore point? Savva reported that Credlin had organised a dinner launch for a group to mentor Liberal women staff in Parliament House. The guest speaker at the dinner was Abbott.
Savva thought it odd that Credlin had not invited the only woman in the cabinet and the deputy leader of the party, Julie Bishop, to the dinner. Relations between the two women had been increasingly difficult. Credlin was unhappy that the Savva column could contribute to the impression that she was trying to freeze Bishop out.
Credlin sent a text message to the newspaper's editor in chief, Chris Mitchell. He tells Fairfax Media: "For several months she'd been complaining about Niki and the text said 'I've had enough, you have to sack her'."
Mitchell replied that in 24 years as an editor no political staffer had ever made such a request and that he was shocked that she would ask.
"Then Abbott got on the blower," says Mitchell. "He rang me about 10 minutes after my response to Credlin.
"He asked me why I'd object to Peta's request to sack Niki when I had sacked Glenn Milne [an earlier columnist at The Australian] at Julia Gillard's request. I explained to him that that wasn't what had happened."
Abbott denies asking for Savva's sacking, but Mitchell says that was exactly the interpretation he'd put on the prime minister's call.Let them eat cake, seems to be the going motto there. It's staggering that the Prime Minister's chief of staff rings up a newspaper and demands somebody get sacked of writing an article that had negative implications. And when she couldn't get her way, the Prime Minister calls and demands somebody lose their job for actually doing their job. Worse still, this was a Prime Minister who presided over more jobs lost than jobs gained, and essentially, he wanted specific people to lose their jobs for being politically unfavourable.
What's particularly nefarious about this is that, not only are they lobbying for somebody to lose a job, they're doing so using the weight of public office, and doing it in a covert manner so that the columnist has no rebuttal - and then they deny it. It's a flagrant abuse of power, to even try this crap. The fact that they expected results, and then covered their tracks by denying it took place tells you well enough that not only are they sneaky and evil, they know they're being sneaky and evil, and are further enlisting sneakiness and evilness to get their little way.
Amazingly, this is the government Australia elected.
No Age Pension For You
Australia's federal budget is in a spot of bother. Something like $50billion will be missing, thanks to the Chinese economy 'tanking'. It's bit of a worry going forwards because that kind of demolishes the old Coalition platform to reduce the deficit to zero by the end o this decade. Given the Federal Budget is roughly $400billion all told, that 50 is 12.5%. Whatever you call that, it's not chump change.
Naturally, this leads to Scott Morrison enthusiastically saying that we can't count on the age pension in our old age any more. I don't know that getting the age pension is a great thing to begin with, but let's face it nobody's going to employ the elderly - that's why you retire. On top of which it doesn't pay great anyway; some of the stories are downright harrowing. So you kind of hope you can kind of shore up some sort of position going into old age, but what Scott Morrison's doing here is stealing from the future to pay for today, and in the process, ripping up old social contracts. It seems like these kinds of announcements are going to abound. They're ding badly, and they need the money.
The bottom line is, the future is going to suck even more than the present, precisely because it's the only place from where this government can steal. In that way, it's somewhat like a bad Terminator sequel.
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