Tag Archives: Tony Abbott

Labor is the despicable winner in the Triggs affair.

27 Feb

 

The Abbott government’s attacks on President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, have served the ALP’s interests more than any other.

They certainly have done nothing to ease the ongoing plight of the 1,129 children successive Australian governments have kept in mandatory detention in appalling circumstances. Many of the children suffer long-term damage from the experience of being treated as criminals for no reason other than that they exist. The conditions under which the children have and continue to be incarcerated would likely make Charles Dickens flinch and look away, yet since the release of the AHRC report, nobody in the major parties has bothered so much as to mention their suffering.

Abbott’s attacks on Triggs have done nothing for the

233 assaults involving children
33 reported sexual assaults
128 incidences of self-harm
34% who require psychiatric support

documented in the recent AHRC report.

However, what the government’s latest lunacy has done is to hand the ALP on a silver platter access to a high moral ground which they do not for one moment deserve, having been as despicably callous towards asylum seekers for their own political gain as has the LNP. There is not a bee’s dick of difference between the two major parties in terms of their ill-treatment of those they consider less worthy than the rest of us, and therefore infinitely exploitable in their mutual pursuit of power.

The ALP is now bellowing self-righteously about the government’s treatment of Professor Triggs, but not, of course, about the contents of Professor Triggs’ report. About that they cannot bellow, as the report condemns equally ALP asylum seeker policies implemented under the Rudd/Gillard/Rudd incumbencies.

Labor has now referred Attoney-General George Brandis to the AFP for allegedly inducing Triggs to leave her position at the HRC for something less disturbing to him. Carefully worded denials have ensued, reminding us that language can be used for ill, and in politics, invariably will be. In case we forget what was said about the Triggs “inducement” at the estimates hearing:

 

If this disgraceful fracas surrounding Professor Triggs tells us anything, it’s that the majority of our elected members on both sides of the house care nothing for the lives and fates of asylum seekers, and logically, it is only a matter of time before they care nothing for the lives and fates of many of their own citizens. Once a government makes scapegoats of one group for political expediency,  they’ll have no qualms scapegoating any other for the same motive. Indeed, there are those who could put up a good argument that this is already the case.

We do not, in this country, have a good record for the treatment of children by authorities. The history of child abuse unfolding before us in the Royal Commission into Child Sexual Abuse, for example, demonstrates as nothing else ever has the prevalence and consistency of the savage mistreatment of children across all demographics, from institutions that house the most underprivileged child, to institutions that house the children of the wealthiest and most influential citizens in the country. It is inevitable that our cruelty seamlessly extends itself to children of asylum seekers.

We are in dire need of politicians of calibre, who are capable of and willing to refuse the lure of political gamesmanship and instead do what they are elected to do, and represent the interests of those who gave them their trust. The ALP has no high moral ground on which to pitch its tents on the matter of the Triggs report and the ensuing unseemly brawls. Given its own foul record, the ALP has no choice but to either admit its failures and undertake reform, or make whatever miserable and poisoned political capital it can from the government’s sickening attacks on Gillian Triggs.

All in all, we are one of the most fortunate nations in the world, cast adrift in a tumultuous sea aboard a ship commanded by fools.

 

PiersonShipOfFoolsLE27x32WS

 

 

 

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A PM who only knows aggression is a threat to the country

26 Feb

Agressive Abbott


The Abbott government’s attempted defenestration of President of the Australian Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs has, like so many of this government’s ventures into domination through aggression and bullying, badly backfired.

This latest debacle is yet another example of the Abbott government’s pugilistic default position, and follows hot on the heels of the Prime Minister’s combative approach to Indonesia in the matter of the looming execution of Australian drug smugglers Chan and Sukumaran.

Attorney-General George Brandis, chief instigator, along with Abbott, of an extraordinarily vitriolic personal attack on the head of a statutory authority, was yesterday asked what next in their campaign to publicly eviscerate Triggs, presumably to force her resignation which does not seem to be forthcoming, and why should it?

I can’t unscramble the egg, Brandis replied, in a rare admission of stupendous failure.

The egg certainly is all over the faces of Brandis and Abbott. In a move of unfathomable stupidity, Abbott decided to focus personally on Professor Triggs, rather than the report on children in detention the HRC published last week. Seemingly bereft of all politically savvy, Abbott made this choice despite the fact that the report fully covered the previous government’s abysmal record on this matter, and despite the fact that more children have been released from detention by the Abbott government than were by the previous Labor incumbents.

The down side is that this government keeps fewer children in detention for much longer. However, in spite of this reality there was much political capital to be made had Abbott chosen to take that path. Instead, he embarked upon a vicious campaign to force Professor Triggs out of her job, to be replaced, rumour has it, by the Brandis/Abbott protegé  “Freedom Boy” Tim Wilson, who, as you may recall, was parachuted by Brandis into his position at the HRC without so much as an interview.

This latest in the Abbott government’s expressions of contempt for the HRC has caused the International Coordinating Committee of National Institutions for the Promotion and Protection of Human Rights to write to the government protesting its attacks on Professor Triggs.

As Wayne Janssen explains,  the ICC  co-ordinates relationships with the UN human rights systems. Its accreditation system is based on compliance with the 1991 Paris Principles and grants access to UN committees. Australia currently enjoys “A” status which allows us speaking and seating rights at such committees.

Abbott’s attacks on Triggs imply state interference with the independence of the AHRC that may be a transgression of the Paris Principles. If this is the case, Australia stands to lose our A status, and the access to speaking and seating rights this status confers.

Add to this the suggestion that Brandis attempted illegal inducement by offering Triggs another job to get her out of the HRC, an allegation now referred to the AFP, and it’s difficult to see how this move has brought the government anything other than ongoing grief.

Abbott’s aggressive, combative, high conflict personality dominates his thinking and his decision-making. He has proved repeatedly that he is not capable of controlling his pugilistic instincts. He is entirely unable to overcome his primitive need to shirtfront somebody, anybody, even his own back benchers, by instead employing mature, considered thinking and mental clarity. This is a personality defect that has catastrophic potential for a country led by him. It has equally catastrophic implications for the party he leads, as many of its MPs surely know.

Like an abusive partner in an intimate relationship,  Abbott is in the process of isolating this country from the rest of the world, and from international bodies such as the United Nations that offer what little opportunity there is for cohesion and communication between nations. He is an isolationist, as the violent always are. He seeks to sow seeds of discord and disharmony within our own communities, in his efforts to assert the superiority and domination of white, middle-class alpha masculinity, to the exclusion of all other groups.

He’s a threat to this country. He may be the biggest threat this country faces. He needs to go.

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Benefit of the doubt. What the Minister for Women doesn’t say

23 Feb

 

Minister for Women

Minister for Women

In his desire to distract the general public from the depth and breadth of the country’s increasing contempt for him (with the exception of Gerard Henderson, bless) Prime Minister Tony Abbott has resorted to the good old conservative standby, fear, in an effort to somewhat fancifully reinvent himself as the nation’s protector.

As part of this cunning stunt (no doubt thought out by someone in his office I’m not naming anyone but I wouldn’t employ them to wash my dog and he’s dead) Abbott announced that anyone perceived to be a potential terrorist would no longer be given the benefit of the doubt.

Immigration and Centrelink have been touted by the PM as two possible areas for increased scrutiny. That is, don’t admit possible potential maybe somehow some day terror suspects in the first place. Failing that, it is incumbent on someone behind the Centrelink counter to exclaim oh my! Immigration missed that this person might potentially possibly somehow maybe some day somewhere be a terrorist and I must not give him/her the benefit of the doubt even though Immigration did, damn their eyes, and I’m not giving them any welfare and I have now foiled a terror attack.

Man Haran Monis, perpetrator of the Martin Place Lindt Cafe horror, passed through both Immigration and Centrelink. He was also well-known to police in matters of domestic violence for which he was on bail, and there were a string of allegations of the sexual assault by him of some forty women.

Strangely, we have not heard the Minister for Women Tony Abbott once mention that anyone who perpetrates domestic violence ought to be noted as a potential terror suspect, and definitely not given the benefit of the doubt.

If Immigration and Centrelink are to be burdened with the task of identifying potential terror suspects and withholding the benefit of the doubt, why not police who are at the front line of domestic violence allegations?

Of course, the idea of expecting either Immigration or Centrelink to have the capacity to assess a potential terrorist is ludicrous, as is my suggestion that police assume terrorist potential in every person they arrest for domestic violence.

What is interesting, however, is that Abbott did not even go to the latter option, which out of all of them makes the most sense in a triad of bone-achingly senseless options. Obviously, no agency has the capacity or the training to identify terror suspects unless they are so bleedingly obvious as to have already embarked upon their ghastly vocation.

The number of ways in which the Minister for Women avoids the topic of domestic violence are spectacular. What other Minister in any government ever in the history of Western democracy has remained so consistently silent on his portfolio and kept it?

 

 

 

 

 

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Meta data. The effects of surveillance

19 Feb

 

SurveillanceLogo

Proposed mandatory data retention legislation might well see citizens regressing to cold war practices of leaving notes in hollowed-out trees and chalk marks on park benches, in an effort to escape the scrutiny of law enforcement agencies.

Labouring under the assumption that every citizen ought to be surveilled, the Abbott government wants to introduce legislation that will require Internet and phone providers to store meta data for up to two years, for access by law enforcement agencies without a warrant.

Meta data is the footprint that reveals where you have been, but not the content of your visit. I understand it will remain necessary to obtain a warrant to access content. Until it doesn’t.

Aggravating the dodgy nature of this proposed escalation of State intrusion into our private lives, is the lack of a legal definition of meta data in the proposed legislation. This sounds suspiciously like a deliberate omission that will permit a broad interpretation, according to what a law enforcement agency wants to obtain at any particular time.

Attorney-General George Brandis doesn’t know what meta data is, while Prime Minister Tony Abbott likens it to what’s on the front of an envelope, rather than the envelope’s contents. As the two prime movers of this legislation can’t coherently explain what it is actually about, they likely ought to proceed with caution.

Abbott has argued the necessity for the proposed legislation in order to prevent terrorism, crime and Internet pedophilia. Without mass surveillance there will be “an explosion in unsolved crime,” he warned, and added that we all want to stop the horrible offence of child abuse, don’t we, much of which occurs online.

In the absence of a war or a terrorist attack he can manipulate to get him out of the abyss of unpopularity into which he continues to plunge, national security, crime explosions and child abuse will have to do. Abbott is pressuring Labor to bring forward debate on the proposed meta data legislation, rather than take the time needed to properly examine the possible repercussions. These could be many, particularly for journalists, whistleblowers, and freedom of speech.

So what are the effects on individuals and societies of constant surveillance by the state?

As Michel Foucault puts it in “Discipline and Punish:”

He [sic] who is subjected to a field of visibility and who knows it, assumes responsibility for the constraints of power; he makes them play spontaneously upon himself; he inscribes in himself the power relation in which he simultaneously plays both roles; he becomes the principle of his own subjection.

In other words if you believe yourself to be constantly surveilled it hardly matters whether you are or not. Your behaviour will be controlled by that belief, and there will be little need for exterior monitoring. You are experiencing …the division of the subject into a judging authority and an accused individual. You will have adjusted your way of being in the world according to the belief that you are constantly visible, and so will regulate your own behaviour by becoming both the observer and the observed. Power over you will function automatically, and corrupt your sense of autonomy.

This dynamic operates whether the surveillance is within the family, or imposed by the State or religions. “God is watching you” has a determining effect on how someone behaves if they believe there is a god who wants to keep them under constant surveillance. In families where boundaries aren’t respected a child or partner can be subjected to surveillance that intrudes upon their sense of independence, and they often self-regulate to accommodate the demands of the more powerful parent or partner, and not according to their own wishes.

Of course as Foucault also pointed out, where there is power there is also resistance, and humans tend to resist external control, but the point is, why should we have to when the will to control originates in the democratic State?

With the proposed new legislation, law enforcement agencies will access without a warrant information about where you have been on your phone and your Internet. They will know who you’ve emailed and when, but not the content of the email. They will know who you’ve sent texts to and when, but not the content of the text. If you get drunk and text your ex they will know where you were when you did it, and how many times. The government believes it is reasonable for it to gather such information about every single one of its citizens, because that is the way it will protect us from terrorism, crime, and pedophiles.

If the only way the State can combat terrorism, crime and pedophilia is to subject every one of its citizens to constant surveillance, then the State is incompetent. It is reckless to trust any government to that extent, but this one?

The State is presuming all its citizens to be guilty until proven innocent, and demanding by law that we relinquish our individual privacy for the government’s perception of the common good.  This trade-off between freedom and protection is a false dichotomy, and one that conceals the totalitarian impulses born of power exercised without due concern for citizens’ rights.

Not only will Abbott refuse people who might be a threat to Australia the “benefit of the doubt,” he’s denying every one of us the benefit of the doubt.

Actually, I have no idea what he means about denying potential security threats the benefit of the doubt, and I don’t think he has either.

You cannot argue that it is necessary to surveil everyone  in order to ensure our safety, or to control everyone in order to control those who would do harm. That is a ludicrous position to take. So what does the government want with all this information on all of its citizens?

Surveillance is never neutral. It is never innocent. It presumes potential deviance, according to the watchers’ definitions of that term, and if it happens with our meta data, it will change the way we think about ourselves, and live our daily lives.

 

 

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The government you have when you don’t have a government

16 Feb

I woke up this morning thinking that I don’t feel as if we actually have a real government, or a real Prime Minster.

Tony Abbott seems to be increasingly decompensating under the stress of discovering he’s so unpopular with his party he had to face the prospect of a spill motion without even a challenger for his leadership, and that must be a rare political event just about anywhere.

(Decompensation, psychology: the inability to maintain defense mechanisms in response to stress, resulting in personality disturbance or psychological imbalance.)

After the acute trauma of the spill motion passed, everyone involved needed a little time to collect themselves, pass around the talking stick, and begin the process of healing. Instead, Abbott went right out and sacked Philip Ruddock as his Chief Government Whip, on the grounds that Ruddock had not adequately warned him of growing backbench discontent.

This is amazing. The rest of us knew all about it, but the PM’s office didn’t?

I’ve had doubts about the efficiency of this office for quite some time, after all, they’re supposed to be there for Tony yet every day since he took office things for him have traveled increasingly south. At first blush, it appears the PM’s staff are incompetent on a Monty Python scale.

Perhaps their secret agenda is to ruin him, or I have been watching too much In the thick of it. Either way he should sack somebody in that office and hire Malcolm Tucker, but instead he went after Ruddock.

I don’t care much what happens to Ruddock: I will never forget his days as Immigration Minister in the Howard government during which he instigated a powerfully successful campaign to demonise and criminalise asylum seekers arriving by boat, largely through the use of language he adopted from Nazi anti semitic propaganda of the 1930’s. Without Ruddock we would have no Morrison. He might look like a hurt old man, but I’m not fooled.

Then there were Abbott’s belligerent attacks on President of the Human Rights Commission, Professor Gillian Triggs, after the Commission’s report on children in detention was tabled in Parliament on Wednesday. In a typical conservative shoot the messenger and make so much noise that everybody will forget the message tactic, Abbott railed long and hard about Professor Triggs, while entirely disregarding the appalling findings of her report.

With the stubborn determination of the utterly cloth-eared stupid, Abbott keeps the three-word slogans hiccoughing off his far too evident, lizard-like tongue: boats, mining tax, carbon tax, boats, carbon tax, mining tax; we are open for business but not for boats, carbon tax, mining tax. I wonder to myself, does he or anyone in his office really think there are still people out here even listening to this drivel?

It is a measure of the collective desperation of Abbott and his staff that they continue to cling to this cringe-worthy robotic recitation: they have totally failed to come up with anything new, for all the millions of tax payer dollars we’ve spent on them.

The zeitgeist as far as I can tell is one of trembling, panicked uncertainty: what will their leader say next, how much longer can this go on, how can they make it better without looking like the ALP. This latter possibility seems to be the very worst thing they fear could happen to them.

It isn’t, though. Worse things are happening every time their leader opens his mouth and puts both feet in it. But hey, it’s good for the ALP.

There’s been a cute white rabbit appearing in our garden for the last few days, and like Alice in the wonderland, I’m thinking of drinking the potion to make me oh so tiny, then I can follow White Rabbit down his hole.

But wait! I’m already there!

The final straw is the sudden wheeling out of Margie. You know he’s a dead man walking when he rolls out the wife.

Tony & Margie Abbott

 

 

 

 

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Is domestic violence gender-based violence?

11 Feb

Domestic Violence

 

Domestic violence is usually included in the umbrella term gender-based violence, that is, violence that is directed against a person because of her gender, and violence that reflects inequalities between men and women.

Domestic violence, intimate partner violence, (IPV) and family violence are defined in Australian federal and state government policy released in 2011 as gender crimes, committed overwhelmingly by men against women and their children.

As the majority of domestic arrangements in our culture are heterosexual, that seems an obvious conclusion to draw. However, look at any one of a number of world-wide studies on domestic violence between same-sex partners and you’ll find the similarity to heterosexual couple violence, not only in occurrence, but also in performance.

Domestic violence is about power and control between men and women, women and women, and men and men. If we lived in a culture in which same-sex couples were as prevalent as heterosexual couples, it’s safe to assume the incidence of domestic violence would hardly vary.

My point is that to define domestic violence as gender-based is inaccurate and unhelpful, particularly to those in the LGBTI community whom it excludes. Many researchers suspect a current under-reporting of same-sex couple violence, perhaps in part due to that definition. The proportionally equal rates of domestic violence in hetero and LGTBI communities suggest the violence is not gender-based, but an outcome of couplings in which one party exerts control over another using violence, regardless of gender.

Framing domestic violence as a gender-based problem does little to help combat the issue, as decades of failure to reduce the figures suggests.

It’s sometimes argued that LGBTI couplings mimic the heterosexual and the abused party in LGBTI relationships is “feminised” by virtue of being abused, therefore the abuse is still in that sense gender-based. This argument has a ring of making the evidence fit that leaves me unconvinced.

Our problem is that the need to exert power and control over others is endemic in our culture and manifests itself in a multitude of ways, from school bullies to violent intimate partners. My concern is that in making gender the focus in domestic violence we’re allowing ourselves to be distracted from the core problem, and as long as we do that we are unlikely to find workable solutions.

As long as our dominant couplings are heterosexual, there’s no reason to think women will not continue to bear the brunt of domestic violence inflicted on them by male partners. But does that make intimate couple violence gender-based, and ought we to be addressing it solely from that perspective?

We need to have adequate protections in place for people needing refuge from violent domestic situations, and our Minister for Women, Tony Abbott, has cut funding to women’s services that will in the next couple of weeks severely curtail these protections. It is not always to our advantage to have domestic crimes against us defined as gender-based.

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Dear Mr Abbott. Unlike god, the people are not infinitely forgiving

9 Feb

 

Good Government

 

“Good government starts today,” promised Prime Minister Tony Abbott, fresh from his party’s first failed spill motion this morning in which 39 members of his team turned against him, and one of them cast an informal vote. We are moving on, the difficulties are now behind us, is the vein in which he continued.

All of which begs the question, what kind of government does he think we’ve we been enduring since the LNP won power in September 2013?  Many of us already sensed it wasn’t a good one, and it’s reassuring to have this view validated by our PM, who is, after all, responsible for its lack of substance and quality.

These last seventeen months, as Bill Shorten remarked in a splendidly energetic display during Question Time this afternoon, are seventeen months of the nation’s life it will never get back, and what has it been good for?

Abbott’s determination to put all this behind him and make a fresh start reminded me that he is a Catholic, and so is very used to making fresh starts and putting awkward things behind him.

This is one of the many things I fail to understand about the Christian god. He is, apparently, infinitely forgiving and that to my mind is just plain stupid. Generous human beings will forgive much, but we have the sense to know when forgiveness is a waste of time and the offender has no intention of changing his or her behaviour.

One of the many problems in believing in a god who will forgive infinitely is that it can make you morally sluggish. It doesn’t actually matter what you do, you can count on being forgiven. We’ve seen this played out a million times in the Catholic priest pedophilia scandal, for example. Those priests surely confessed their crimes against children and were forgiven every time, then went right out and did it again, because why not?

And didn’t Abbott give one of them a reference once?

The concept of putting things behind one has much to be said for it, on the proviso that one has learned the lessons to be learned first. To be honest, I don’t have much trust in a government that admits it’s only starting good governance today, seventeen months after it took office. That’s a little long to stay on the training wheels, and they weren’t actually out of office long enough to forget how to govern.

I am also becoming more than a little aggravated with mainstream media commentators who are busily writing a new narrative about volatile, over-sensitive voters causing leaders to crash and governments to fall. This is codswallop. With the advent of social media and the twenty-four hour news cycle, voters are more engaged and more vocal than at any time in our history and we often do not like what we see. Politicians are more scrutinised than ever before, and we all too often and with very good reason take a set against what our scrutiny reveals.

The problem lies not with an hysterical (and therefore feminised, don’t you love it) electorate, but with the lack of substance and integrity of many of those who seek high office. The Abbott government (and the Newman government in Queensland) attempted to inflict its pathological ideology of inequality on a nation whose general ethos is still, miraculously, the fair go. We’ve turned on them. We’ve done this because we are largely a decent people who don’t believe those at the bottom  of the food chain should be ground even further into misery, while those at the top profit obscenely. We haven’t done it because we are volatile, over-sensitive and hysterical.

Politicians and mainstream media can find democracy a struggle.

Abbott is on notice, from his party and from the electorate. Not only does he have 39 home-grown dissidents to contend with, his personal polling figures are abysmal. I have no idea what the PM’s idea of “good government” might be, but I do think it is an admission of grotesque failure that he is promising the electorate good government from today, when he’s been in office all this time and only now because of a revolt and attempted coup. In other words, Abbott has been forced to consider “good government.” It hasn’t come to him naturally.

Prime Minister Abbott might well be about to learn the hard way that unlike god, we the voters are not infinitely forgiving, and he’s likely had his one and only shot at reforming himself and his ideologically driven party.

A song for the changed Tony Abbott: Bruno Mars and Today my Life Begins 

“I will leave the past behind me…”

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Abbott’s future: lose-lose

7 Feb

Pragmatic480w

 

Prime Minister Tony Abbott, former Oxford boxing blue, is up against the ropes in the biggest fight of his political life, a fight he can only lose.

He could of course do as John Gorton did, vote against himself and run for the deputy leadership, but Abbott does not strike me as a man capable of voting against himself.

Should his party dump him as leader on Tuesday his losses are obvious, and all that remains to be seen is what he does with them.  Retire from politics? Stay as a back bencher? If so, what kind of back bencher: obstructionist and vengeful, supportive and calm?

Given his powerful desire to stay where he is, any of these options are humiliating smacks in the face over a prolonged period with the equivalent of dozens of stinky wet fish. Quite a come down for the bloke who threatened to shirtfront Putin.

Should he retain his position it will be as a mortally wounded leader who can only limp, bleeding and bandaged though the rest of his term.

To a great extent Abbott has set himself up for this latter option, by haranguing colleagues and backbenchers as to the need for the LNP not to become the ALP and strand the country in similar chaos and angry bewilderment by changing leaders in their first term. This is a spurious argument. The two situations are entirely different, as I’ve argued here. It is an indication of the limitations of the conservative hive mind that nobody seems willing or able to differentiate between the Rudd/Gillard leadership woes, and the current LNP leadership woes, and it may well be their undoing that they can’t.

The false dilemma functions as a powerful argument for Abbott, and some would claim the only one he has.

The chances are few MPs will genuinely embrace retaining Abbott, but the majority may well embrace the desire not to be seen as resembling the ALP.  They will also be concerned at the prospect of the ongoing difficulty of dealing with the buckets of mockery and scorn they poured on the ALP being thrown right back at them, particularly in an election campaign. The threat of members losing their seats may not yet be great enough for them to throw Abbott out, and they may be inclined to give him another chance in an effort to avoid the appearance of Labor-like dysfunction.

The vote will not be for Abbott, but against the appalling prospect of being seen as like the ALP, mirroring the sentiments of the electorate who gave the Abbott government power in the first place as a reaction to its enraged disappointment with the Rudd/Gillard shenanigans.

If Abbott stays on as a wounded leader, this will not work in the government’s favour as far as the electorate is concerned. We do not want a wounded leader. We want a strong, competent, active, engaged, visionary leader. Abbott has so far shown no signs of being such a leader, either to the electorate or to his party. The leadership challenge in itself damages an already seriously damaged Prime Minister, and the LNP will have to weigh up the costs to them of keeping him, as opposed to the costs of cutting him loose.

Either way Abbott will have to personally bear the brunt of the consequences, and this may well be the only act of real leadership the man ever performs, albeit entirely involuntarily.

 

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How to use women to get you out of the deep excrement other women got you into.

6 Feb

Good woman:bad woman

 

Deconstructing a Paul Sheehan piece can be like shoving bamboo splinters under your toenails and watching them bleed. Fortunately I have pain killers.

Sheehan has, remarkably even for him, reduced the entire Abbott government leadership crisis into that good old patriarchal standby, the good woman/bad woman trope.

In yesterday’s Sydney Morning Herald Sheehan makes this claim: Tony Abbott’s new order: An invisible Peta Credlin and a visible Margie Abbott is the new template. Better late than never.

The new template? Template for what? The template for how, when all else fails, to use women to get you out of the trouble you think other women have got you into?

Margie Abbott is apparently at one with Sheehan on this strategy, calling for LNP “wives and partners” to get behind her man, a move Robyn Oyeniyi analyses succinctly in her piece on the topic.

Does Sheehan actually believe voters are so gullible as to be swayed by Tony Abbott wheeling out his wife in his time of sorrow, while tucking away controversial Chief of Staff Peta Credlin in a cupboard, presumably till things get back to normal for him, at which time he’ll pop Margie away again and let Peta out, because he can’t do without her?

Reading between Sheehan’s lines, which are so far apart you have to be careful not to fall into the abyss between them,  he’s claiming something as simplistic as Peta Credlin got Abbott into this, and now Margie will get him out.

In an extraordinary own goal of unintended irony, Sheehan writes:

Mrs Abbott has never sought publicity but at the height of then prime minister Julia Gillard’s “misogyny” diversionary campaign in 2012 (amid several scandals) she famously intervened in defence of her husband:  “Do you want to know how God turns a man into a feminist? He gives him three daughters … I believe a disservice is being done to women when the gender card is played to shut down debate about policy.”

Presumably, Sheehan and Mrs Abbott think they aren’t “playing the gender card to shut down debate about policy.” Really? Because it seems to me that’s exactly what they are doing.

In a desperate attempt to avoid the substantive issue, which is that some Abbott government policies have profoundly offended so many Australians the Prime Minister has been haemorrhaging political capital practically since the day he took office, Sheehan looks to a change of the woman behind the man to obscure this harsh reality, and save the government’s sorry bum.

Then there’s Mrs Abbott’s remark that God turns a man into a feminist by giving him daughters. And they say we should have god in schools. This is what happens when you let god in schools. Women grow up thinking we’re vessels for god to give men daughters to make them feminist. I can’t even….

Next we have this from Sheehan:

She has since endured attacks on one of their daughters over a college scholarship, with information accessed illegally and leaked to the media to embarrass the Abbott family.

No, Paulie, the Australian people had the right to know that while the Abbott government was intent on making higher degrees excruciatingly expensive for everyone else, the Prime Minister’s daughter was awarded a once-off scholarship to see her through her tertiary education. If this knowledge becoming public embarrassed the Abbott family, so it should. Though I doubt it did. Annoyed them, maybe, but embarrassed them? I doubt it.

The reason some men love the good woman/bad woman trope so dearly is because it removes all responsibility and accountability from the man. He is helpless as a babe in the face of the influence of a good or bad woman. Sheehan is an unreconstructed idiot, peddling this ignorant, venomous trash. It no more serves a woman to be put on a pedestal than it does to be despatched to the gutter. One can make allowances for Euripides, given his times, but Sheehan has no excuses.

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Abbott at the Press Club

2 Feb

Drink!

 

There were so many slogans, I was drunk by 1.15.

We cut the carbon tax! Drink!

We stopped the boats! Drink!

We’re building the roads! Drink!

Margie and the girls! Drink!

Tony Abbott’s National Press Club speech had as its not so subtle leitmotif  blaming Labor for everything. In other words the man still hasn’t got out of electioneering mode and into governing mode. Someone had obviously instructed him to get a poke in at Labor at every opportunity, and that is just the kind of instruction he can follow.

How long can a government blame a previous government for the difficulties of governing? Is there a time limit? Please, somebody, make one, because this long since became ridiculous.

One of the many things I find intolerably offensive about the Prime Minister is his insensitive and egotistical penchant for co-opting awful tragedy into his autobiographical narrative. So we had his self-described  “brave” captain’s call about the shooting down of MH17 over the Ukraine brought in as evidence of why he can’t undertake never to make another captain’s pick. He subjected us to a little homily about the nasty rebels and the stricken families, as an example of why a captain must always be allowed to have a pick. He’d actually been asked about the knights and danes, as Senator Jacquie Lambie likes to call them. Great Danes. Danish people. Who knows. Abbott can confer an honour on anything with a pulse.

We had the role he’d played in the release of journalist Peter Greste from his Egyptian prison, and how the PM had been so warmly thanked by the relieved Greste family on the phone this morning.  Abbott had high praise for Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi, with whom he and his foreign minister Julie Bishop negotiated Greste’s release. He said.

There were the usual promises not to lead us into chaos, as did the ALP Drink! with party unrest and leadership changes. We are on a journey together, said the PM, leaning earnestly into the lectern. This is a new year that will be very different from last year with more consultation Drink! and more collegiality Drink! he promised.

I don’t recall the journo who went to the trouble of adding up the number of times since the election that Abbott has promised more consultation and collegiality, but it was something like fifteen or sixteen. Why should the backbenchers start believing him now, asked the journo, quite reasonably. Ah, well, look, lip smacking, Drink!

Abbott then contemptuously wrote off the entire Queensland election result by saying voters had favoured the ALP over the LNP in “a fit of absent-mindedness.” That should endear him to them come the federal election.

Oh, look, fuckit, if you want to know all the details there’ll be a transcript somewhere.

Abbott’s energy levels were high until the last ten minutes, when he began to visibly tire and I wondered if the drugs were wearing off. Much of his message was directed at his own party, reminding them of the dangers of division and visible unrest. The Australian people had elected both the government and the Prime Minister, he claimed, which is codswallop, we don’t elect the PM in the Westminster system, the party elects its leader. If voters had control of electing the PM, Abbott would never have got the job. He did, however, make the rather convoluted argument that once a government has been elected the voters have elected the PM. Drink!

Oh, and the PPL is in cold storage. Drink!

 

 

 

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