View From The Couch - 03/Dec/2015

The Shambolic 729 Days Of Abbott

Some time earlier this year, I simply gave up with Tony Abbott. He was doing and saying crazy stuff, and you could only really chalk it up to stupidity day after day. If you search this blog for 'stupidity' you will find it coupled with Tony Abbott at an ever increasing rate during his tenure as Prime Minister. You were left shaking your head most days and then you noticed your neck muscles were getting well toned because thanks to the Prime Minister, you were shaking your head so much. Now that he's gone, it seems redundant to be jumping all over his tawdry miserable execrable record, but Peter Hartcher is doing a five part series over at the SMH.

I was going to leave it until he was done before I wrote anything about it, but each day has brought fresh misery with its revelations. Here is today's revelation:

Malcolm Turnbull was nothing if not forthright in telling Tony Abbott his shortcomings. On one occasion, Turnbull found himself in an Adelaide pub drinking beer with a group of workers from the Australian Submarine Corporation.

Abbott, the workers told him, was an idiot. 

Of course he isn't, Turnbull replied. The man is a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics from Oxford University. He's actually very bright. 

The argument went back and forth for a bit till one of the ASC crew delivered the line that ended the argument: "If he's not stupid, why does he keep doing stupid things?"
Other ministers might have kept such an exchange discreetly to themselves. But Turnbull took it straight to the prime minister. 

The communications minister related the anecdote. He told his leader that it was important to explain things to the people, not be limited to slogans.
Yeah, yeah mate, was Abbott's response. If he was annoyed, he didn't show it. He certainly didn't heed the advice.

There are some disturbing points in that exchange that do need remarking. It is of course a universally accepted point that Tony Abbott did stupid things. The onus was on Malcolm Turnbull to explain how such stupid things weren't actually stupid - a feat he would not attempt - or the appearance of stupid things in fact obscured deep thought. He clearly could do neither because on some level, stupid is as stupid does, and just as a rose is a rose is a rose, stupid is stupid is stupid.

So Turnbull had to go back and tell Tony Abbott that anecdote; which is striking in its boldness, but also tinged with a surprise, a Eureka moment. Amazingly, we're told Abbott for his part was dismissive - "yeah yeah mate" - but also incapable of seeing how he looked to the world. Either he was dismissive because it came from a political rival and therefore he waived the message, or his narcissism was so strong that the anecdote simply did not register as a problem.

The other disturbing thing is Turnbull's defence of Abbott's intelligence rests upon his credentials. That surely a Rhodes Scholar with a degree in economics could not be stupid. Surely somebody with such credentials was actually very bright. We understand that Turnbull is very bright, and has been known to the world as being bright for a very long time, and he too is a Rhodes Scholar so he probably drew some kind of equivalence and assumed Abbott had to be bright. Maybe not as bright as the great Malcolm Turnbull, but certainly bright enough to be at the same table talking politics.

Today, we know that Abbott's Rhodes Scholarship had much more to do with political and ideological inclination than actual academic merit, so it would actually destroy the argument mounted by Turnbull that somehow the credential of having been a Rhodes Scholar was proof positive that Abbott was "very bright".

It doesn't exactly reflect all that well on the bright Malcolm Turnbull, that he even mounted the argument because what this tells us is that Malcolm Turnbull sees things in very categorical, broad terms. This is a man for whom the Ruddean 'programmatic specificity' would be an anathema. It also shows Malcolm Turnbull has a high tolerance for cognitive dissonance. That is to say, he can see Tony Abbott doing stupid things, but because he is aware of Tony Abbott's academic credentials, he is willing to pretend the stupid things are not stupid, and somehow there is a political program worth defending. But it takes an ASC worker to point out that stupid is in fact is as stupid does; and when this short-circuits his cognitive dissonance, he can't help but try to place the cognitive dissonance back onto Tony Abbott who is incapable of feeling the very same cognitive dissonance because he's actually politically stupid.

I point this out, not to further dump on Tony Abbott, but to point out the degree to which politicians operate under such cognitive dissonance, and what that might mean for policy. George Orwell's explanation was that through propaganda, politicians can argue white is black, truth is dead, ignorance is strength and so on. Reading the excerpt above, it seems far more likely that politicians argue white is black, truth is dead, and ignorance is strength simply because they are unaware of their own cognitive dissonance. The propaganda is merely a subsequent phenomenon.