(Above: who is that ghost still wandering the battlements and making blithering blathering pronouncements? That's not the ghost in Hamlet, that's Peter Costello).
Who on earth could make a statement like this and keep a straight face?
One day it might dawn on Brown, Manne and Hamilton that voters do not like moral condescension. Sanctimony can make you feel good, but it rarely appeals to those listening.
Peter Costello!
Bet you didn't bother to read the scribbles of that ghost from the Howard era still parading the battlements of the Fairfax media castle in a permanent re-enactment of the opening to Hamlet, the latest iteration being Greens take moral high road - and finish last.
And so you missed a beauty, a corker, a rip snorter. A sanctimonious goose speaking of moral condescension. Oh it's so richly ironic, it's made my weekend, and it's only Wednesday.
Was so long ago, on Australia day, that the goose uttered these immortal lines to Pastor Danny's Catch the Fire flock of maddie fundies, though not so long ago that it fell in the same year that Pastor Danny announced that the bushfires were caused by Victoria's abortion laws, and then headed off to Mount Ainsley in Canberra to exorcise the capital of demons?
There are many people today that are telling us that religion is all a lot of superstition, that the laws that have been laid down, of respect for individuals, property and for our creator are all a load of nonsense, that don’t respect life. If we fall for that trap, if Australia falls for that trap then the very basis of our society and its order will be threatened. That’s why we need Christian people to pray for our country, we will never understand the way in which God moves. But we know that if his people pray, He will hear that they will be a light to the nation and the nation will be covered and protected by Godly people who are giving direction and standing for it in prayer. And I thank you for what you are doing today and can I encourage you to continue in it.
The very basis of our society and its order will be threatened? And Pastor Danny is our way forward?
What a smug, smarmy, sanctimonious, righteous, morally condescending, Cheshire cat grinning smirking goose. O possum, you know not what you say.
Well the ghost of Hamlet's dad is at it again, slagging off Malcolm Mackerras while calling him Australia's leading psephologist. Can you be a leading psephologist by always getting it wrong?Why there's more skill in a dwarf-throwing contest than in having a go at Malcolm Mackerras.
Then Costello builds up the circumstances in which the Greens found themselves in Higgins.
Higgins, home of Toorak!
It is hard to think of circumstances more propitious for the Greens: a sympathetic press, no Labor candidate, a Liberal leadership spill, parliamentary debate on the emissions trading legislation and the media focus on Copenhagen. And Abbott, as new Liberal leader, didn't get time for a visit. Still the Greens fluffed it.
In Higgins! Fluffed it in Higgins, home of Toorak! What twittery and he's not even using twitter.
Then after the only sensible point he's got to make, about the Greens choosing an out of towner in the form of Clive Hamilton as candidate for Higgins, Costello gets back into his ivory tower and delivers more sanctimonious claptrap:
Thirdly, the Greens have to scale down the sanctimony. They thrive on a message of impending doom. These days the cataclysm is global warming. Previously it was logging, or nuclear annihilation. Only by repentance and obedience to their doctrine can we escape the wrath to come.
Oh give me a break. Humbug of the highest hypocritical kind. Here's Costello delivering an Address to National Day of Thanksgiving Commemoration Scots Church Melbourne, Saturday, 29th May 2004, 7.10 PM:
Unfortunately today we see that legacy fraying all around us. It is almost as if the capital deposit has been drawn down for such regular maintenance that the capital is running out. The maintenance demands are unending. But we are not building up the capital required to service it.
We do not have to look far to see evidence of moral decay around us. We can see it and hear it in entertainment like rap music, in songs which glorify violence or suicide or exploitation of others.
As we speak drug barons compete for the distribution rights to sell drugs to our children in Melbourne. These rights are so lucrative that they are prepared to kill to protect their profits with 24 or 25 unsolved gangland murders in Victoria since 1998.
These barons sell young people into addiction. Drugs break up families and marriages. Many addicts end up in prostitution or burglary. These outcomes are the very antitheses of all those values set out in the Ten Commandments about how to order society.
People well known to the police apparently live in luxury with no visible means of support or explanation as to how they maintain their lifestyles.
We do not have to look far to see evidence of moral decay around us. We can see it and hear it in entertainment like rap music, in songs which glorify violence or suicide or exploitation of others.
As we speak drug barons compete for the distribution rights to sell drugs to our children in Melbourne. These rights are so lucrative that they are prepared to kill to protect their profits with 24 or 25 unsolved gangland murders in Victoria since 1998.
These barons sell young people into addiction. Drugs break up families and marriages. Many addicts end up in prostitution or burglary. These outcomes are the very antitheses of all those values set out in the Ten Commandments about how to order society.
People well known to the police apparently live in luxury with no visible means of support or explanation as to how they maintain their lifestyles.
Yep back then the goose was calling for moral outrage at the decline and fall of western civilisation as we know it, but instead of calling on government, he was calling on us all to fall in behind the likes of Pastor Danny:
I do not want to suggest that there are no initiatives the Government should take. And what Government can do, it should do. But I do want to suggest something much more radical and far reaching. I want to suggest that a recovery of faith would go a long way to answering this challenge. A Government should never get into religious endeavors. But if our church leaders could so engage people as to lead them to genuine faith we should be much richer and stronger for it.
The Bible tells the story of the Prophet Elijah who got despondent about the state of decay all around him. He was running for his life. He fled out to the wilderness. He sat under a juniper tree and asked to die. He felt alone and let down. He had no supporters. He thought he was the only person left that was true.
But the still small voice of God came to him and lifted him and told him that there were still thousands that had not lowered the knee to the spiritual and moral decay all around him. (1 Kings, Ch 19)
And this is the point I would like to make to those who have gathered here tonight. There are many that have not, in their hearts, acquiesced to the kind of decay which is apparent around us. They do not believe it is right. They earnestly pray for the expansion of faith and yearn for higher standards.
They will get up tomorrow and go to their places of worship in suburbs and towns across the country, affirm the historic Christian faith, and go to work on Monday as law-abiding citizens who want their marriages to stay together, their children to grow up to be healthy and useful members of society, and their homes to be happy. They care deeply about our society and where it is going.
These people will not get their names in the media. They will not be elected to anything. They will not be noisy lobbyists. But they are the steadying influence, the ballast, to our society when it shakes with moral turbulence. They give strength and stability and they embody the character and the traditions of our valuable heritage. It is their inner faith which gives them strength. Our society won’t work without them.
All citizens share in the heritage and the blessings that heritage brought to our country, something for which we can all give thanks. We should not take these blessings for granted. We should not become complacent. We should genuinely give thanks because we have been genuinely blessed. And each, to our own ability, should nurture the values which were so important in bringing us to where we are today and which we need so badly to take us on.
I do not want to suggest that there are no initiatives the Government should take. And what Government can do, it should do. But I do want to suggest something much more radical and far reaching. I want to suggest that a recovery of faith would go a long way to answering this challenge. A Government should never get into religious endeavors. But if our church leaders could so engage people as to lead them to genuine faith we should be much richer and stronger for it.
The Bible tells the story of the Prophet Elijah who got despondent about the state of decay all around him. He was running for his life. He fled out to the wilderness. He sat under a juniper tree and asked to die. He felt alone and let down. He had no supporters. He thought he was the only person left that was true.
But the still small voice of God came to him and lifted him and told him that there were still thousands that had not lowered the knee to the spiritual and moral decay all around him. (1 Kings, Ch 19)
And this is the point I would like to make to those who have gathered here tonight. There are many that have not, in their hearts, acquiesced to the kind of decay which is apparent around us. They do not believe it is right. They earnestly pray for the expansion of faith and yearn for higher standards.
They will get up tomorrow and go to their places of worship in suburbs and towns across the country, affirm the historic Christian faith, and go to work on Monday as law-abiding citizens who want their marriages to stay together, their children to grow up to be healthy and useful members of society, and their homes to be happy. They care deeply about our society and where it is going.
These people will not get their names in the media. They will not be elected to anything. They will not be noisy lobbyists. But they are the steadying influence, the ballast, to our society when it shakes with moral turbulence. They give strength and stability and they embody the character and the traditions of our valuable heritage. It is their inner faith which gives them strength. Our society won’t work without them.
All citizens share in the heritage and the blessings that heritage brought to our country, something for which we can all give thanks. We should not take these blessings for granted. We should not become complacent. We should genuinely give thanks because we have been genuinely blessed. And each, to our own ability, should nurture the values which were so important in bringing us to where we are today and which we need so badly to take us on.
Yes, I let the goose run on and on, but that's because - a tear trickling down my cheek, and thanks to the dear lord, I don't think I've recently come across that kind of spruiking outside the pages of Elmer Gantry. Name me a green who could match him in full over-powering sanctimonious Christian flight, a-honking as he goes.
But then the goose has the cheek to go on berating the greens for their sanctimonious ways:
... educated people are a little less credulous than that. They know in political policy, outcomes rarely match the promises, particularly the overblown promises of zealous activists. They know that moral absolutists rarely deliver what they promise.
Yep, especially when they rabbit on about drug barons, and the decline and fall of western civilization as we know it.
The Greens have a moral superiority complex. In their mind they are not only right but virtuous, which makes their opponents not only wrong but immoral.
The Greens have a moral superiority complex. In their mind they are not only right but virtuous, which makes their opponents not only wrong but immoral.
Unlike Christians and Peter Costello in particular?
Spare me days, and bring me a bucket, I feel an upheaval coming on, perhaps to do with Costello's constant preaching about the need for a turning point in the moral history of the country. Oh sorry, he thinks that's the Greens:
This is why Hamilton has compared climate sceptics with Holocaust deniers - if you disagree with his policies you are complicit in, or covering, up mass murder. Robert Manne, who launched the campaign for Hamilton, put it this way: ''If the Greens can achieve a breakthrough in the byelections … [this] might come to be seen as a turning point in the moral history of this country.''
Well it takes one sanctimonious righteous goose to recognise another.
Well it takes one sanctimonious righteous goose to recognise another.
Come on down, Peter Costello, righteous prat and prattling goose of the year ...
And just to show we have an even-handed sense of fun, why not now race off to hear Jonathan Biggins sending up Bob Brown on radio national? Listen, or download audio facility available here.
Biggins has fun sending up the greens, and shows a sense of humor, something that always escapes the morally righteous, sanctimonious blatherers of the Costello school of Christian claptrap.
Now Jonathan how about a nice Salvation Army number for Costello's pious thoughts ...
(Below: who is that ghost still wandering through the banquet scene and making blithering blathering pronouncements? That's not Banquo's ghost in Macbeth, that's Peter Costello. Didn't he get a sinecure in the Future Fund? Why's he still bothering us with his blather? Can't he just do his god bothering in private? So many questions, and goose feathers the only answer).
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