We kind of knew way back in 2010 that the current crop of Liberal and National Party MPs running for government were intellectually deficient. If that seems like a big claim, then you really need to go back and reread the headline after the same mob got into office after 2013, because it's been gaffe city and the outer-suburbs of loonyville ever since. The most symbolic bit of rhetoric might have been WTE - that's Worst Treasurer Ever! - Joe Hockey made the remark that the age of entitlement was over, and proceeded to cut welfare. In an era when wealth inequality was increasing at an ever accelerating rate and when the well-heeled scions - the most entitled people with the most entitlements society confers upon them - start cutting at welfare in the name of ending entitlement, no amount of double-think is going to get you over the line of acceptability. Accept that, and you may as we'll get a lobotomy.
On the whole, it is unsurprising then that Tony Abbott's time in the Lodge was shorter even than Julia Gillard or Kevin Rudd, and that Joe Hockey would be dispatched right out of Parliament in the dumpster fire purge that followed. We should pay attention to The Hon. WTE Joe Hockey because now, he's the ambassador to Washington as well as pulling down his MP superannuation. Entitlements and double-dipping much Joe? This mentality of sticking their hands deep into the public purse for personal gain seems to be ingrained in the Coalition MPs.
Now, it appears it is all coming to light. Susan Ley this month is the first casualty of the war in Turnbull's cabinet. Bronwyn Bishop - she of helicopter-gate notoriety - blamed to socialists, which garnered her a new round of ridicule, and today Julie Bishop is being scrutinised for her polo trip on the public purse.
The thing that is striking about all this is that they really don't care how this looks to the world. Whether it is Susan Ley or Bronwyn Bishop, they put up a front saying they're allowed to be spending public money on expensive personal jaunts, and as such the scrutiny itself is unwarranted. It's staggering how they can't put the two together and see how bad they look. You wonder how we got to this point, but maybe it was simply always thus. But it doesn't help to have such stupid people fronting for the government.
The Dearth Of Thinking Talent
I know I keep writing about this, but not a week goes by without making itself apparent in the public discourse, so here I go again...
One of the problems with any long running group is that it get sclerotic. The most notable feature of the current LNP Coalition government lineup is just how lacking in intellectual firepower they are. There is not a single one of them who won't come out with some neo-liberal ideological cant as their substitute for actual thinking. It used to serve them well until the GFC happened, but the GFC has opened up a problem for the neo-liberal ideology that it has proven itself to be entirely self-serving for the wealthy investor classes. Worse still, many of the current problems arise out of the long pursuit of neo-liberalism since John Hewson's manifesto Fightback. Doing more of the same is clearly not going to solve those very same problems.
As I pointed out a couple days ago, the verdict is in and this government isn't very good at managing anything. If Tony Abbott's time did anything, it was to put the Australian economy in full reverse. When you add up all the information out there, you get the picture that this government actually hasn't got the faintest clue as to what to do. Worse still, they don't exactly have the next John Hewson to give them a blueprint. What they have is more of the same guff being generated from the IPA, which in turn is just reciting article of the neo-liberal faith.
There's simply nobody doing proper thinking worth spit on the conservative side of politics. Worse still, because they don't do any thinking, they enter the arena without much thought, and are incapable of creating the kind of solutions to problems that don't first kowtow to ideology. We are at the point in history where whatever worked for Reagan and Thatcher and by extension Howard, Blair and Clinton are not going to work any more. Yet there is simply a dearth of thinking that actually is going to serve the greater good, coming form the right. Instead it's the usual user-pay, trickle-down, privatise-the-lot, tax less, cut-welfare, - see how it has become a self-parody? - policies they trot out as if that is some kind of panacea. As if the problem with the ALP government under Rudd and Gillard was that they couldn't do neo-liberalist economics properly.
You wish politics hadn't become so idiotic, and surely the Left have made their own contributions to the general stupidity going around, but it is surely the intellectual failings of the Right that have turned our economy around from surprising success to doldrum failures. And there's only more of the same to come from whence that came.
I Didn't Expect This
This is utter hearsay but here goes...
Years ago, somebody told me they once had dealings with Malcolm Turnbull, and they came to the conclusion that he was a crook. I don't know on what basis this was said to me, or what Malcolm Turnbull might have done to earn such scorn, but basically, the advice being offered was, "if you have a choice to vote for Malcolm Turnbull to be Prime Minister, don't".
He lamented on the day Malcolm Turnbull became opposition leader the first time and said, if Australia ever elected Malcolm Turnbull, it would rue the day. And then the Godwin Grech thing happened and this person was relieved that Malcolm Turnbull would leave politics. Of course subsequent events have gone entirely in the opposite direction and he is now our Prime Minster, has been for a year and we still don't know what the hell he stands for.
We think he stands for Malcolm Turnbull being Prime Minister and not much else. I know it's hard having a Parliament with a 1 seat majority, but it's not like the Turnbull Government is setting the place on fire, getting stuff done, or for that matter passing sensible legislation. It's not as if he's doing anything that he hinted he might want to do, should he ever become Prime Minister; it's more like he just sits around basking in the warm glow of the office of Prime Minister, swanning around going to the cricket or whatever. It sure doesn't look like a government with a solid agenda, certainly no more than the "Jobs & Growth" slogan it took to the election, and even allowing for the alarming banality of that slogan which it is underperforming immensely, his government doesn't even seem to be even about that. (Judging by his cabinet ministers it seems to be about shoving public monies into their purses as quickly as possible)
I think Turnbull is just going to try to ride out as long as possible, and then when they do finally oust him, he's going to enjoy the reckoning that the Liberals have nobody with a brain with whom they will replace him. If people had high expectations for Malcolm Turnbull, he's sure not living up to them, but more to the point, he's incredibly pleased and satisfied that he does't have to live up to expectations. He is Prime Minister. He will always have been a Prime Minister, an exclusive club that he can forever flaunt to his dying day. He will be in the history books forever, his name is immortal.
It's a pity the rest of us are the ones who have to pay for such indulgences.
Maybe we should take solace in the fact that he's not completely fucking up the very institutions our country while he swans about being Prime Minister of Malcolm-ness. Maybe this is all there is to the man, and the most important thing about him is still, that he is not Tony Abbott.
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