As Throsby surveys Sheep Station Central, the shenanigans therein elicit a sweaty itching of delight, as might lobbyists’ pheromones wafting through parliamentary halls titillate the peoples’ representatives.
A half-century exposure to our Strine Kabuki suggests a decline, of a steepening nature, in the caliber of our four-square and formidable lawmakers.
These industrious shysters, polishing legislative benches since federation, are to be admired for, at the very least, escaping Commonwealth servitude without entangling laden coat tails in the revolving doors that lead from the peoples’ house to citadels of donor corpocracy.
Yet, of late, the precincts seem infested with a blatant greed, cruelty, and illiberality that tempt even pundits of studied dignity to readily derogate the conservative side of Australian politics with unflattering epithets like The Nasty Party.
Which is why, as Labor lies lower than a snake’s armpit, government alt-righters, climate-deniers, racists and supremacists, coal-lovers, renewables-haters, welfare-privatising asset-sellers, hands-in-the-till trough-snufflers, and assorted buffoons – elected or not, dual citizen or not – feasting at the public-funded buffet, have the headlines all to themselves, day by exhausting day, with apparently little inclination to tone things down.
In the Barnyard
Barnaby Joyce, recent Nationals leader, previous dual citizen, and former Deputy Prime Minister, exploded once more in national media, almost literally, in a fit of pique at innuendo about his leadership aspirations and alleged sexual harassment.
“Beetrooter” – as Mr Joyce is fondly hashtagged by Twitter devotees for his oft scarlet complexion and a preggers mistress – in yet another lunge at privacy by public pronouncement, during an interview on national wireless telegraphy totally lost the rag.
He was, he bemoaned,
…elected the deputy prime minister of Australia” so it was “ridiculous to say you wouldn’t accept the job if it [were] given to you’…”
He then inadvertently detailed others’ calls for his return to leadership. Mr Joyce wrathfully affirmed, in defence of eluding a sexual harassment charge,
…It wasn’t proved… if I can’t prove that you [didn’t rob] a bank then it doesn’t prove ipso facto that you did.”
Police reportedly renewed interest in unsolved bank robberies committed by perps resembling a beetrooter.
In the Bubble
Oxymoron of the decade is “moderate Liberal.”
Remnants of these staunch troopers occupy the ramparts of that once respected and proud political fortress, those conservative yet liberal-minded welfare-tolerant servants of the people that Australians were quite happy to vote for when the Labor side of the road got a bit too boggy.
Like its centre-right counterparts around the world, Australia’s Liberals-Nationals coalition parties are infiltrated by uncompromising hardline extremists. So a battle rages, tearing them apart.
The turmoil disintegrating Australian conservative politics is driven, we are informed, by hard “conservatives” who occupy seats and offices in parliament consuming a quirky diet of NewsCorpse punditry – a potent hallucinogen for inflexible minds.
[In] the Canberra bubble, the fact that [Sky] commentators, in the isolation of your office, can whip people up into a frenzy… Sky has no impact on public consciousness in Australia at all, but the impact they have is in the mind of the politician whilst in Canberra – that’s something we need to break” ~ Craig Laundy
Throsby’s at a loss why the honourable members, who are supposedly working and not watching the telly, don’t follow his example and turn the bloody thing off. As he did in 1999. And ever since
Rage Against the Green Machine
One of Andrew Giles’ friendly gripes at the launch of Shaun Crowe’s book, Whitlam’s Children, was that Shaun was too kind to the Greens, because they’re not so much policy-seeking as they are a vanity project.
Andrew, Labor MP for Scullin, then took umbrage with an “office-seeking” ALP establishment course-plotting for the grand vessel of Australian socialism, one that keeps drifting starboard into neoliberal waters.
Throsby wholeheartedly agrees. And until Australian Labor more sensibly applies its rudder he will vote for these vanity project leftists and preference the next most socially progressive candidate on the electoral cheat sheet.
Lacking any appealing candidate, there’s always the fine tradition of pencilling some expressive graffiti to salve the scrutineers’ sore eyes.
Energy War-gaming – COALition Energy Gaming
Young Master Turnbull (close relative of that obscure former PM) is quite disturbed by what Turbines Taylor and ilk are cooking up, in what’s likely a final round of gifting wealthy donors whilst sabotaging Australia’s policy framework and infrastructure to bog down a probable 2019 Labor government.
National good be damned.
But were piglets to fly and a broken LNP to win, then the chaos and degradation thus lovingly created is pretty well just where they would want to be anyway, if the past five years is an indicator.
We [me, a few utilities analysts & players] joked about the possibility that this good [ACCC] advice could be turned into a policy to subsidise companies that own coal plants and coal.
[The] divestment proposal would appear to be designed to compel AGL to sell Liddell” to possibly “Sunset Power owned by Brian Flannery and former National Party candidate and LNP donor Trevor St Baker.”
And the most disturbing thing about current policy is that it is market intervention to the direct benefit of only some apparently favoured players.”
So horrendous this prospect, the IPA joined the fray, complaining PM Shouty’s “big stick” in energy policy breached Liberal values. “Picking winners should be an anathema to the Liberal Party,” said IPA’s John Roskam, in a possible segue to the upcoming Melbourne Cup.
He managed to insert the mandatory swipe at Labor with a telling: “You can’t out virtue-signal the Labor Party.”
The electorate paused, collated, and moved on.
Roundup ~ and Not the Chemical
Indigenous affairs minister Nigel Scullion was not told Tony Abbott would be appointed Indigenous envoy. But he didn’t mind. He understood this was a great idea. It wouldn’t impinge on his work. Two heads are better than one. There’s much work to be done. Anyway, the envoy would report to the PM directly. He also said the reaction to this news by the Indigenous community was basically “meh” and not, as reported in the crazy left media, upsetting to our native folk.
Foreign readers might wonder about the significance of this. Throsby can but analogise that if General George Armstrong Custer were still alive, Donald Trumph would appoint him Special Ambassador to Native Americans. Would he not?
Benito Dutton, unable to resist, declared yet again that, in a state twice removed from his own, African Gangs still roamed the lawless streets and terrorised god-fearing communities in the anarchic precincts of Melbourne – in an apparent effort to assist the ugly campaign message of the Liberal Party in that state’s impending election, and despite police criticising commentary of this nature by federal MPs.
Victorian Premier Daniel Andrews responded:
He’s talking about serious issues, but very few people I think take Mr Dutton seriously now… He’s part of a government that is a shambles, and he’s irrelevant to the work that we’re doing.”
The rightwing knuckle-dragging philistines of the Coalition federal government were accused of being rightwing knuckle-dragging philistines for interfering with research grants of Australian universities, based apparently on former education minister Simon Birmingham’s disapproval of the titles or subjects proposed by grant-seekers. Universities Australia’s Catriona Jackson said it undermined the impartiality of the process:
You don’t expect the federal sports minister to choose Australia’s Olympic team. In the same way, we rely on subject experts to judge the best research in their field, not politicians,” she said.
Labor Senator Kim Carr further honed this already exceedingly fine point:
“These are grants in arts, culture, music and history, which somehow or other in his [Simon Birmingham’s] mind are not acceptable … what is his research expertise to justify interventions of that type?”
And Those Socialists
Dear Bronny Bishop of #ChopperGate eminence served at Her Majesty’s Sheep Farm in the Antipodean Colonies for nigh on three decades. In retirement, as former minister of the crown, she enjoys a generous stipend donated (under duress) by the uneducated barefooted rabble she no longer need endure.
All this is sarcasm moot, however. For Throsby wishes only (by way of this cautionary prelude) to prepare more gentile readers for some shocking news.
The former Prime Minister of Australia, Malcolm Turnbull, is a socialist!
Uniquely, a socialist whose personal wealth exceeds $200 million and who resides in a $50 million harbourside mansion.
Hoo boy! Socialism. Where do I sign?
Ms Bishop, whose fervent and relentless loathing of socialists and their associated ‘ism’ has goaded even the pearls of her perennial necklace to denigrate these enemies of laissez faire, declared on Sky News:
Malcolm Turnbull was a socialist who came into the Liberal Party by subterfuge, tried to change the party and, like all socialists, when he crashes and burns he wants everything around him to crash and burn as well.”
Political scholars scrambled to revisit centuries of semantics.