Grief. Edgar Bertram Mackennal via Commons Wikimedia
One thing the Shadow Minister for Immigration reminded me of yesterday is that whatever qualities may be required for the practice of politics, the possession of emotional intelligence is not one of them.
Morrison’s race to the bottom whine about misuse of taxpayer dollars to bring bereaved asylums seekers from Christmas Island to Sydney has brought down buckets of approbation down on his head, and deservedly so.
Jonathan Green’s piece also reveals the morally bereft position of the government on the issue.
Morrison’s complaint was that Australians have to reach into their own pockets to attend the gravesides of loved ones, but asylum seekers don’t.
I did for a moment have a wild fantasy that this was a bit of theatre. Well, it gave Joe Hockey the opportunity to parade his compassion, and he is trying to get somebody from the government to go on Sunrise with him to lift his profile. And if there’s to be a tilt at leadership, given that Abbott’s apparently in roughly the same place as was Rudd when he got the axe, then Hockey’s a likely candidate. What better way to pitch him than as the mature voice of emotional reason, with Morrison’s forces-of-darkness gibberish as the foil?
But as LP’s Mistress Kimbrella (oh, lover,lover,lover, come back to me…) and Ken Parish reminded me, I have the capacity to think like a loony conspiracy theorist if I’m not vigilant.
BTW, friends, I was proved right about the OLO strife being provoked by more than one person, IBM stating it was the article that offended employees in their offices as well as their advertising agency, and it being revealed that Gregory’s call to the ANZ didn’t get a mention anywhere. I guess someone will apologise sometime? Just kidding.
I notice that LP’s supporters are still busily defending over at the Drum, including one commenter who writes, mysteriously,Christopher Pearson has every right to his vile hate-speech.
A generous friend gave me Leonard Cohen’s On the Road DVD and CD for Christmas. Listening to Cohen, and watching him, (not to mention the spectacular Javier Mas) is a great antidote to the inevitable and profound spiritual exhaustion provoked by politicians using the funerals of babies to let everybody know how tough they are.
I thought of politicians when Cohen sang:
I asked my father
I said, “Father change my name”
The one I’m using now it’s covered up
With fear and filth and cowardice and shame
Vale little babies, mothers, wives, husbands, uncles, brothers, sisters, aunts, daughters, sons, cousins, lovers and friends, drowned at Christmas Island. Vale.
No Place For Sheep 
After watching Greg Sheridan on QANDA, even Morrison’s utterances are no longer a shock.
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I know, a shocker, probably worse because Pilger was sitting next to him – mistake putting them both on together.
I really couldn’t believe for a while that the Morrison comment wasn’t theatre – they’re learning from the French nazi when you’re not being nazi party.
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Whenever I have flown to a funeral, the government does not pay for it. Nor do I expect them to.
Just as I don’t expect them to pay for anybody else to fly to a funeral.
Clearly I have missed something. Should I have been submitting invoices for flights to funerals, or should I have just faxed my desired travel arrangements to the govt & awaited my free air ticket?
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Steve at the Pub, I know what you mean. If it was your funeral, I would make the effort even without sponsorship.
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Be sure to book your ticket swiftly Paul, as the local crowd will have one helluva head start on you. They won’t stop until they’ve drunk the place dry!
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Way to go, yo, mate!
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With Morrison’s as a shadow minister for immgration who would still dare and come here?
He would make Eichmann look reasonable and Bergen Belsen a vacation resort.
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Hmm is this right thread?
the ABC, was it, the blog given over to MIR?
What a long. drawn. out. painful. thread. at a drab, metallic site.
What have they done to the once gentle and viewer/listener/reader/ideas friendly ABC.
MTR, well that was time too often back to the well for me, as far as that writer is concerned.
All the Hollywood froth, if anything, obscures the squalid, back street, bluecollar realities of the “industry”at its down at heel exploitative end.
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When it comes to the spectacular spiritual dehydration of Scott Morrison and his disciples……
L.Cohen
Oh the sisters of mercy, they are not departed or gone.
They were waiting for me when I thought that I just can’t go
on.
And they brought me their comfort and later they brought me
this song.
Oh I hope you run into them, you who’ve been travelling so
long.
Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control.
It begins with your family, but soon it comes around to your
soul.
Well I’ve been where you’re hanging, I think I can see how
you’re pinned:
When you’re not feeling holy, your loneliness says that
you’ve sinned.
Well they lay down beside me, I made my confession to
them.
They touched both my eyes and I touched the dew on their hem.
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Yes _Pearson and one ot two LPers perhaps thinking of a philosphical revisit to catholicism are on nodding terms, I find Pearson’s role in the thing more peculiar, for this. Personally, Pearson’s relationship to the private Media has me al ittle bemused, given that Murdoch loaths indie blogs.
SATP, might use the air fare for a retrospective back here in the south, in that case. Wont be the same, but…
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Did I spot something about asylum seekers?
Another bad day for this issue of many bad days, both the opposition and government, for different reasons, making absolute hashes of their tasks for the day.
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Going through some stuff today I found a paper I gave at a conference in 2003 about asylum seekers.
Eight years on, still in the same quagmires, still having scandalous eruptions, still divided.
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Yes,
Where does it stem from? The xenophobia and hatred for the different and the strange?
Is it still the island culture of England transported on boats whereby so many were chained to decks and fed gruel ? The squattocracy cunningly gaining from the downtrodden starting their own fiefdoms and then the emergence of private schools. Kids at primary school levels sent to boarding schools and then to single sex high schools. No parents and care, love?
Are the Scott Morrisons and the Donnellies taking it out now and taking a revenge?
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Actually, 2011 marks ten years since Tampa – I did a quick email round a few friends and everybody reckons things have got worse.
I’m about to put up part two of Jane and jennifer go to Woomera.
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