The pond has noted a general rule, more certain than Darwin when it comes to political reporting.
Once the Liberals are safely in power, the commentariat can smugly turn to sniping at the Liberals in power.
It makes them seem balanced, even-handed, fair-minded, sound, solid, at one with the citizenry, when actually all it does is show off some splendid internecine feuds.
1. Of or relating to struggle within a nation, organization, or group.
2. Mutually destructive; ruinous or fatal to both sides.
3. Characterized by bloodshed or carnage. (more details about changing meanings here)
Thus it was that today Janet "Dame Slap" Albrechtsen could fire off a salvo at the NSW Liberal Party's executive, and in particular state director Mark Neeham, in Nothing liberal about it. (behind the paywall to keep you sheltered from the bloodshed and the carnage).
It turns out that the state Liberal executive is given to sending Dame Slap most stupid emails, part of the flotsam and jetsam of absurd emails she receives, while routinely conducting a Star Chamber on their own, threatening anyone with a five year suspension if they dare talk to the media.
It seems the state Liberal party is deeply anti-democratic, and full of branch-stacking and bad candidates and rorting, and skewed towards maintaining this deeply unsatisfactory status quo, and operates on the same level of involvement and engagement as in the days of apartheid-era South Africa (with 5% voting for the president).
Reform has come to naught, lobbyists are part of a toxic mix in a debilitating factional system, and big Bazza O'Farrell is a malingerer supporting a weakened code while factional warlords run amok in a decrepit body:
As Norm Abjorensen, from the Australian National University's Crawford School of Public Policy and co-author of Australia: The State of Democracy, wrote a few years ago: "Is it too much to expect in a political democracy that the political parties contending for office practise internal democracy?" Whether it pursues Ruddick's suspension or not, or slaps him on the wrist for being a bad boy, the state executive, many believe, may have signed its own death warrant.
As one senior NSW Liberal says, the foolish overreaction has revealed how vulnerable the state executive is to Ruddick's allegations of factional corruption and the need for democratisation. The noise members of the NSW executive hear, and don't much care for, is the sound of their decrepit body clashing with democratic reform.
Oh indeed, it's shocking and shameful, but not to worry, because when elections roll around, the NSW Liberals will get the nod, and the factional games - aided and abetted and played by the commentariat with fetching vigour - will continue apace ...
The sudden discovery by Paul Sheehan of a conscience can be slotted into the same basket. He too was at it today, having discovered buyer's remorse, in Tony Abbott must stop the perks to retain authenticity:
Authenticity is the greatest asset a politician can have. Yet Tony Abbott and his staff are wasting no time dissipating Abbott's authenticity. It's only taken them three weeks. Abbott has a problem. He's a perker. Over the past three years he has claimed more than $50,000 in what I regard as spurious demands on the public purse. He has charged the taxpayers for his own self-promotion, his fitness obsession, for going to weddings, everything from the Birdsville races to the Hervey Bay Ocean Swim. Abbott's actions, and the justifications presented by his office - that the other side does it - are symptomatic of something far deeper, a culture of double-standards and double-dipping in Australian politics. The culture extends to both sides of the political divide.
Uh huh. But surely you'd have to be delusional - or Paul Sheehan - to believe that Abbott entered the office with anything remotely resembling authenticity ...
Meanwhile, poor old Niki Savva is trembling and anxious about when the axe might fall:
The trouble is, the commentariat rewarded Abbott's bad behaviour in opposition, and now expect him to be able to reform, and run a government safe from hot-blooded scalp hunters.
Greg Jericho, in a piece for The Drum, What is said in opposition stays in opposition, catalogues with some care the many ways that Abbott, in his brief weeks in power, has turned his back on many of the positions, policies and nattering negative stances took during his time in opposition - a litany that Sheehan, once number one ticketholder and chief dispenser of kool aid, regularly regurgitated in his columns.
Jericho is particularly telling about jolly Joe Hockey and debt:
I guess wasteful government spending is a bit like the adage about a weed just being a plant you don't like - debt raised for NBN spending off budget is bad, debt raised to build the East-West Link is good.
And so on, and unlike Sheehan Jericho hits the ground running with a joke:
You can't deny that the Abbott Government has hit the ground running. Their increase in productivity has been quite breathtaking. Usually it takes a few months for a new government to become comedic punch line, but the Abbott Government has been able to achieve this level before Parliament has even sat!
This spring at weddings around the country, the probability of a best man's speech including a joke about claiming travel expenses must be close to 1.
Indeed.
The various points that Jericho makes applies to all sorts of policies that cut to the bone.
It's symptomatic of Sheehan that he never gets beyond the bleeding obvious, which handily relates to both sides of the aisle:
If Abbott could make an immediate move against lobbyists seeking to use the party as a cash machine, his next step should be to admit that a culture of junketeering exists and has to end. No more overseas study tours. No more non-urgent charter flights. No more weddings. No more sporting events. That would be authentic.
Actually what would be authentic would be Sheehan admitting that he was a cheer-leader for Abbott of the most grovelling and obsequious kind during Abbott's time in opposition, and that there are many more authentic and serious policy issues than parliamentary allowances where Abbott has been inauthentic.
He was inauthentic as a viciously negative leader of the opposition, and now that negativity has come home to roost in a a startling way, with more inauthentic backflips in the first month than many politicians manage in a year ...
Where was all this talk of the inauthentic when it mattered? Abbott was a serial offender, as authentic as Putin, and now all Sheehan can do is splutter about weddings, parties and not much of anything else ...
He should form a band ...
Meanwhile, David Rowe has been having something of a field day.
Rowe is about as close to Bell as we get down under with his love of the grotesque, and lordy lordy has this scalp-hunter got some grotesques to work with.
Best men, sharpen your quills.
(Below: more Rowe here, where you'll catch his latest on the tea party follies).
Dorothy we are living with a monster the conservatives have won and will be supported all the way to the next election we will not get the likes of Michelle Grattan or Niki Sava writing about the failures of the free loaders like Abbott, Brandis or Barnaby and how they have rorted the system.
ReplyDeleteI have followed this story before on IA and it was known that Abbott was stealing from the Commonwealth with false claims so now after the election we have the sanctimonious media detailing his false claims.