I only know a couple of people who I know are members of the Liberal Party, and one of them suggested that Aboriginal Australians should be gathered together and ‘done away with’. I have no doubt that almost everyone else in the Liberal Party would be as outraged as I was upon hearing such a statement, and that should their party leadership make such a statement, they would be unable to support it any further. However, there are many policies of the Liberal Party which while nowhere near as disgusting, they are still having a deleterious impact on the poor, the unemployed, the young, the old, asylum seekers and those wanting a future on a habitable planet.
This is a plea to moderate members of the Liberal Party, if indeed there are any remaining in parliament. I plead that if you are a member of the Liberal Party, and realise that scientists are not idiots and are not involved in a conspiracy, please help us get rid of your climate change denying Coalition government. If you know that your government has no real plan for coping with such a catastrophic fire season as this one, let alone coping with climate change, please help us get rid of them. If you know that at least the northern part of the Barrier Reef is doomed because of heating of the oceans, please help us get rid of them. If you think it is unreasonable to keep two adults and two young girls on Christmas Island at the cost of many millions of dollars, please help us get rid of them. If you realise that having Newstart at a level which hasn’t been increased substantially for decades, is just a way of punishing the poor, please help us get rid of them. If you realise that several of your members of parliament are so mired in corruption, that they will eventually bring all of you down, please help us get rid of them. I could list many more items which demonstrate that the Liberal Party will end up being on the wrong side of history, and for which many of them will face some sort of judicial reckoning. If you are a moderate Liberal member of parliament, please make sure you end your parliamentary career as a hero and not a criminal.
You need to realise that there comes a time where integrity counts, despite the fact that it may lead to you losing power. Being in thrall to Gina Rinehart, Rupert Murdoch and other billionaires and millionaires is not something that will be looked upon fondly when this all comes crashing down, and criminal charges for corruption, crimes against humanity and perhaps even treason are being suggested, or when the pitchforks start being waved around. And it will come crashing down because, as Richard Flanagan said: “A corrupted, sclerotic system incapable of the change needed, surviving only by and through a dull repression of dissent and dissenters can, nevertheless, seem eternal – until the hour it crumbles. At some point something gives. Something always gives. The longer the impasse, the more denied the common voice, the greater and more terrible that future moment.” That moment is rapidly approaching.
As a Ouiji board avatar of telepathy and channeling, upon reading this report, I feel something coming over me. Wait…what is it?? Ah yes, it’s the immediate thoughts of the great and wise Barnaby Joyce. Let us all hearken unto him for it behooves us to do so as patriotic Auissies….except for the dirty traitor Admin of course.
“I’m in the local watering hole here enjoying number twenty of my beers- reckon I might go back to the missus soon for me dinner. Look, I’ve tried to tell the country on TV and radio before about all this global warming bullshit, but for decades nobody seems to recognise my God-given expertise. It’s shocking how long Australians have failed to act, when the information about the Lord’s judgment day was real real clear. in my way of thinking, and I don’t need a hayshed full of that left wing Soviet cow dung on climate change to do this, these bushfires are a message from up top. The modern world is so full of fornication outside of the sacred bonds of marriage, so full of greed, sloth and arrogance and homos, that the holy bloke from Nazareth has had a gutful of youse. When will folks start to obey the Ten Commandments that forbiddens them evil things? So if ya keep on with them, a’course the weather goes berko, just like with Noah and the flood in the book of Numbers…er…John …I forget just now. Anyways, too late, God sent the mega-fires down as a sign of his wrath, spelt R O T H for those of youse who are unliterate. Youse all gotta act now, leave before it’s too late, evacuate your homes and get right to a happyclappy session at church. Then if we all pull together the fires will reverse, like a movie reel going backwards. The land will return to green and safe for people with faith. AY SCOTTY, ANOTHER BEER HERE!”
Russell,
Just read that out to my partner in a sweltering 42 degrees here, and we both had a good laugh! Thanks!
I’m not sure there are any moderate Liberals any more. The way they have been over the last twenty years or so the moderate ones are weak and spineless and the rest are simply nuts. Which leads me into a story. Many, many years ago (40 in fact) I was invited to a barbeque with free booze and food by someone who I don’t think realised I was member of the ALP. The do was actually a young Lib get together. As I was always happy to have a beer, and particularly for nothing, and particularly if a Liberal was paying, I went along. It was the usual collection of college educated prats and budding rotarians and they were a bit boring, I thought, but not impossible to have a drink with, I thought. Then, for some reason, the senior young Lib, at whose house this event was occurring, decided that everyone, male and female, would like to watch a video, which he ordered his wife to set up. It turned out that the video was a porno movie, and his poor wife made a comment that she thought it probably may not be appropriate. He yelled at her and ordered her again to set it up. She started, slowly to do it (I have no idea why he couldn’t do it, it must have been woman’s work) and as she bent down under the TV he kicked the set over deliberately on top of her. I leapt to my feet and went to see if she was ok. No-one else moved. He swore at her, and then at me and said don’t interfere. She said she was ok and it was just his way. None of the other twenty or so people there said a word. I told him to get fucked, and that, by the way, I was an ALP member, and thanks for the beers and I left. Weak, spineless people and nasty, nut jobs that is the way I will always think of Liberals.
Mark,
Jeezuz! That is extraordinary. Maybe that is why they are less than keen to do anything about domestic violence.
Once again I insist that there’s a part-solution to this nation being blighted by so many politicians of low merit, idiotic fringe religious beliefs and susupect undemocratic agendas that have nothing to do with truly improving things for ALL the people. And that is, to filter electoral candidates for any partiy elite by having objective standards set. Fair but exacting tandards of education, political suitability, and most of all, a clean bill of moral health must be the key requirements.
Presently it’s less than a dog’s breakfast, and we the more intelligent of the mob, we know it and commentaste it ceaselessly. The country lets anyone from anywhere attempt to join Parliament, with very mixed, often scary, results. Any dumb, rabble-rousing, semiliterate Joe or Joan like Joyce or Canavan or Abbott or the Ipswich witch, or that loony with nothing to say, Cash the Lash, can run for a party. That may well appear democratic, but it’s actually just the illusion of having a democracy. What the hell use in these crucial demanding times, is a pack of corrupt or half-witted folk in Canberra going to achieve for the nation? ZERO, that’s what, And we have evidence in front of us: a national catastrophe that these bastards didn’t and wouldn’t see coming at us like a freight train last year.!!
Policy is asked of them, sound, rational, well thought out decisions. Decisions made with the long view, considering projected outcomes of spending or social effects, over twenty years at least
So Australia must bite a hard bullet. This poorly managed mess is the LAUGHING STOCK of the G20, allowing for Trumpland to take dishonorable first place. We must demand high quality control on who makes domestic policy and who goes overseas to represent us. Our half-democratic system is presently hijacked by ego-driven autistic bores and lousy carpetbaggers (like Morrison). The bushfire mega-catastrophe would not be occurring to any extent like this we see, if the PM and both front benches had been mostly concerned, ethical, humane, acutely aware citizens. There would have been a willingness to project ahead, listen to sage advice from the fire authorities, buy up new materel for the coming season and beyond. Government parties MUST now think of more than their own next terms and how to win marginal electorates in the next three years.
If we continue the way this so-called democratic federation operates now, Australia must go unheeded at the UN, an odd little south Pacific circus that eventually has no moral or economic influence in the world. And fails itself at home as it is with the pre-planning for mega-fires certain to strike. We are millimetres from that minority status already. We are going to hell, if only the Libs, Labor and the nutty assorted right could wake up to themselves and look in the mirror squarely.
That’s it, nothing but better and higher quality in our law and policy-making bodies will pull us from the mire of our own stupid creation.
Russell,
I agree it is a major problem. The quality of politicians is abysmal, but what we do about it is not simple. Education is only one aspect. You do not want someone who is as thick as a plank and uneducable. However, the pinnacle of undergraduate education, a Rhodes Scholarship, has not always provided us with anything useful, with Abbott and Taylor being alumni: one a moron and the other a criminal. I also know people who are highly educated who have trouble working a photocopier. I wouldn’t trust them with running a country. I think what we need to do first is to stop anyone but citizens of this country making donations, and making the upper limit such that nobody like the malevolent Palmer or Rinehart can buy politicians like Joyce. There also needs to be truth in journalism laws, and a breaking up of the Murdoch and 9 media, such that there is a spread of opinion, and no media is owned in any way by any foreign interests. This may require subsidy, but could be paid for by ceasing subsidy to the fossil fuel industry. This is just the start.
Sorry, should have spell-checked that last one! Typos all over.
With respect Admin, I think that blanketing most well-educated men and women (I mean high tertiary level graduates, researchers etc) as impractical or nerdy is not so fair. Yes, the don and boffin type is often not suited to complex, rapid-fire government activity where much depends on the ability to interact with many types of person in many walks of life. But to single out the people you and I call “morons” (Abbott, Taylor etc) is to argue the wrong point. Bugger Rhodes Scholarships; what I basically want to see in Parliament is a ROUNDED EXPERIENCED but smart type, not just intellectually bright, but with real ideas instead of blind ideology adapted from parental brainwashing. I think we have such younger folk in this country who would step up to be candidates, people of goodwill, not misled into false paths by religious balderdash, not so dumbly rusted on to neoliberalism and its offshoots as Abbott, Taylor, Morrison, Joyce and their pack of the rigid, non-lateral thinking. More intelligent and practical, dynamic people exist out there, but in no way will they enter the political arena until we say to them: AUSTRALIA NEEDS AND RESPECTS YOU -PLEASE BE A PART OF OUR GOVERNING STRUCTURE. Sure, pay conditions and benefits must vie with the income these folk could get beyond politician status. What I say in my last piece is that, honestly, AUSTRALIA HAS NO CHOICE BUT TO RADICALLY UP ITS ANTE!! Our present party political and ideological box mode of governing is an ONGOING FAILURE. One need only look at the several messes we are enduring. Why? Numbers of halfwits and useless ball-breaker apes in power. If we do what is required maybe, just perhaps, we will get many less disgusting fakes and sheer incompetents like Morrison and his clownish “Ministry for Silly Walks and Talks”. This is a juncture in history of major crisis, and it will make or break Australia.
As to the Murdoch and Sky pap and info-crap laden media, I entirely agree; these ruperters and our big-noise narcissists like the foul Alan Jones, are adding fuel to the fire that is continually burning our once reasonably successful nation to cinders. (To be relevant!)
Russell,
I was just pointing out that being educated is not the only criterion for selection as several of the Ministry for Silly Walks and Talks are educated. A couple of years ago, I was having a conversation with a bloke who used to work in Prime Minister and Cabinet, and given the quality of the government members, he and I both thought that it would be better if we left government to women. Of course this suffers from the same generalisation of choosing educated people. After all, the madwoman Michaelia Cash and the vacuous Julie Bishop are female. I think you are right in that the only thing that can save us from becoming the ‘white trash of Asia’ (as Lee Kwan Yew famously said) is radical change, if indeed it is not too late already. How we go about that is difficult to determine, but I agree that we need normal well-rounded people in government who actually listen to experts and do what they can to make the lot of the people better. Something that incensed me a day or so ago, was the verminous John Howard coming out to support Morrison, and then pontificating about climate science. Of course he prefaced this with ‘I am not a climate scientist…’ and then proceeded to tell climate scientists what the problem was. These vacuous narcissists who have no understanding of how science works, and seem to think that it is just someone’s opinion, and believe that their opinion, based as it is on no evidence is equally valid. That incenses me down to my core (I am a research scientist). It makes me so angry, I think I am likely to blow a gasket. That ‘my ignorance is as valid as your knowledge’ narcissistic stupidity has got the planet into this mess, and we may not be able to get out of it.
Yes Admin, Howard droning about science of climate is like Trump tossed into a Peace Studies lectureship, or Craig Kelly, George Christensen and David Littleproud explaining how intelligence grows, its types, neuro-chemical intricacies and philosophical issues. Imagine Kelly poring over even two pages of a text on that last ?? Hilarious. (Gawd, what a snoot I sound. (“I orta be cut down- ta soiz boi Craig or Georgie, then hoi-tail it down me local boozer fer an amber fizzy bender, too roit.”)
Howard cast a morose Ayn Randish miasma over the Libs after the time of Fraser, but especially 2006 onward. Johnny was so mundane and backward-looking; yet he had two winning political talents in coal slagheaps: rat cunning for seizing the chance to wedge opponents, and knowing how to exploit cultural-social hotspots. Still, he did climb the ladder without leaping over ten rungs, and worked up to leadership. Many present members of the Lower House had easier rides into a seat. This gives some a reek of unmerited vanity. In the case of Cash or, say, Fierravanti-Wells, nasty rudeness was much in evidence. Morrison getting to be PM is quite symbolic. And what scares me, is the right-of-righters. They are so uninformed, uncompromising, inhumane and inanely dogma-drowned. Australia doesn’t need such, and would do well to eliminate their squwaking cacophony from the chambers.
Russell,
I think that time is coming.