Flailing, Sneering “Leadership”
Clearly, Peter Dutton’s astonishing achievement of parity or better on the preferred prime minister poll measure as a first term opposition leader has done two things. It has marked Dutton as Australia’s fourth great opposition leader (see also under Whitlam, Fraser and Abbott). And it has also reduced our minimally venerated Prime Minister to a gibbering, spittle-flecked wreck of a leader. It is not even a faintly visible simulacrum of leadership.
Now the threat from the Greens’ own lunatic Melburnian, Bandt, whose unique take on life and policy was articulated at the National Press Club last week, has brought into focus the real prospect of a second term Albo Government as a minority coalition with the support of said Greens and other parties of similar hue. God help us all if that eventuates.
The ageing Murdoch scribbler, Paul Kelly, drew our attention to Bandt’s push for power in his usual erroneous and insipid defence of Australia’s UniParty system.
Adam Bandt pioneers a new brand and a new ambition: progressive populism is the brand and selling the Greens as the nation’s authentic social democratic party is the ambition. He has contempt for the Coalition. But Bandt’s real target is Labor.
Source The Australian, 4 September 2024, paywalled.
Real populism it ain’t.
The Government’s reaction to its slipping position has surfaced, specifically, in two recent sprays. First, there was the positively undergraduate outburst by the Treasurer against the head of the Reserve Bank, rightly called out by John Howard for both its embarrassing ignorance of economics and its equally embarrassing and juvenile attack on a public servant doing her job and expecting the Government to do its.
Ah, charmless Chalmers. It was reminiscent of one of ScoMo’s (many) lowest moments in his diatribe against that AustPost heroine, Christine Holgate. If you are going to use the bully pulpit, for God’s sake use it wisely and with some semblance of control.
If the Government was going to pick on a public servant, I would be starting with the head of Asio and his bullshit over the “rhetorical” flourishes of the Australia’s terrorist adjacent Hamas supporters who have graced us with their cheerful presence since 7/10, but that is another story.
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-09-03/asio-boss-says-comments-distorted/104306668
What a fool. He is the one who should have Albo and Charmless spraying at public servants.
The second Government spitting attack related to the recently departed (from the Liberals) Gerard Rennick, a genuine Covid era hero with generally good policy instincts and priorities. Putting people first, as the good Senator would say.
You might think that even someone as dim as Airbus Albo could come up with something better than the Libs being full of conspiracy theorists and “cookers”. As a recent (clearly angry) Reddit commenter noted, aptly:
Cooker is objectively one of the shittest insults that has ever existed.
It's just cooked with an R. That's it. Just the word cooked. It's f…… shithouse. Every time you see someone say cooker it's immediately apparent that they have the wit of a waterhead and genuinely could not think of a better word. (Emphasis in the original).
Ah, waterheads! Just about sums up dear old Albo.
Three points.
First, sadly, the Liberal Party isn’t actually full of Rennicks. The Liberals dispensed with the good Queensland Senator’s services in a recent pre-selection. Just like they forced Craig Kelly and George Christensen out. The only other Liberal/Nationals that come close are Canavan and Antic, and the latter’s continued service to the Libs will be forever dependent on a South Australian branch of the Libs riddled with Birmo-Pyne-type wets. Forget Albo and Labor. They see Alex Antic as the enemy. The kicker is the recent vote AGAINST a genuine Covid inquiry by Birmingham, Henderson and James “IPA” Paterson. These represent the ongoing core of the Liberals. No, Rennick is (err, was) an outlier.
So, the PM is telling lies about the Libs. Alas.
Second, Airhead Albo isn’t just insulting Liberal mavericks (aka independent thinkers, not careerists beholden to the powers that be). He is insulting the approximately one third of the electorate that doesn’t vote for the legacy parties and which is prone to bursts of free-thinking. One might have thought that a precariously placed legacy party leader might have the wit to engage with these voters. Like by agreeing to a genuine Covid inquiry. And by showing some respect. He really is a low rent type. Sadly, this is a type that now infects the polity. There is not much that is Menzian-traditionalist about gutter-bred insulters.
It isn’t a good look for one who aspires to, indeed occupies, high office.
Third, the Prime Minister is merely showing his (wilful?) ignorance of the core issues about which the so-called cookers are so concerned. Vaccine deaths and harms, and the proper compensation thereof, exposed by hero journalists like Mark Steyn and Naomi Wolf. The putting to death of Covid patients denied real cures by a medical establishment corruptly in cahoots with vaccine manufacturers. The insidious role of the pandemic planning industry. The utterly compromised position of the media, especially Murdoch journalists and assorted Guardian types, and the grant-troughing academics in the universities. The real policy lessons to be learned from the Covid fiasco. The dangers to our freedom posed by cancel culture, state-serving fact checking and digital surveillance. The sort recently admitted by Zuckerberg in relation to Biden.
It is obviously easier for Covid midwits like our Prime Minister to remain in their cloud-cuckoo-land world than to engage with the (mostly peer-reviewed) science relating to Covid. The science of which he and his ilk claim to be so enamoured. Rennick is far, far closer to the truth. Even if his opponents are closer to “the money”. Literally.
Albo is a Covid memory-holer, of course, nothing more and nothing less. And he wasn’t even in government then! He has literally nothing to defend, apart from Andrews, McGowan and the certifiable guy from Darwin. Having recently visited Dachau, I am only too well aware of the evil of memory-holing. A whole generation of post-war Germans did it. As did the Americans in Europe, after the Nuremberg trials.
No, Albo is merely a globalist, progressive stooge of the crudest corporatist kind, even if this means sucking up to the global drug cartel that is Big Pharma. For it is Big Pharma, above all else, that is in the sights of Team Rennick. Labor won’t acknowledge what the “science” of lockdowns and vaccine mandates teaches us, post-Covid. Even the rapidly exiting wimp, Perrottet, gets this, God help us.
No, Albo cannot afford to admit Covid truths. This is why he has to create enemies, in Orwellian fashion, accuse them of being nutters and monster them away from the perceived centre of the ideological spectrum to the political fringes, at least in the minds of our generation of low-information voters. That is the plan, at any rate. Senator Rennick and outsiders generally are very useful to the ruling class, for this reason.
What of Albo’s other spray allegations?
In a post on X (formerly Twitter), Senator Rennick claimed “institutionalised Childcare is a sacred cow” for Labor which would “destroy the family unit” and “brainwash children early with the woke mind virus”.
This is not cooker stuff, either. It is cold, hard reality. Handing babies and little children over to be raised by the state and the corporate childcare sector from as young as six weeks old is possibly the greatest social experiment in history, and with very obvious outcomes. And the creeping sexual deviancy being imposed on the youngest generation today ain’t a myth either. Again, it is the new reality. The libraries insisting on “pronouns please” at five is merely one example of the rot.
All of it is being done on our dime, too.
What Rennick is exhibiting is called right thinking and courage. Saying the quiet bit out loud. The only reason that we have gone as far down the road to perdition that we have is because there have been so few Rennicks across the political system over the last thirty years. The only question is whether the family’s destruction by the outworkings of the sixties cultural revolution is deliberate policy or merely a massive error of omission.
The Labor Party might want to have a look at the recent State elections in Germany (Thuringen and Saxony) where that similarly minded one third of voters recently took to the legacy parties with a hatchet. And much of the rise of the Alternative for Deutschland was driven by … young voters! Not all old pale, stale, male Rennick-type cookers. And for years, these voters have been treated as modern day Nazis by the media and other assorted useful idiots with ties to the establishment. Russell Brand has noticed what is going on, and what it might mean.
Others have noticed it, too. Not our own governing class, though.
Albo seems to have forgotten, if he ever knew, that he is not where he is because we either like him or approve of his policies. We-the-people do not. He is there because slightly more voters holding their noses in 2022 voted for his lot rather than for the proven leftie failures of the Liberal Party. Nearly 70 per cent of us didn’t and probably don’t want him there. He should have gotten some inkling of this nearly a year ago, as the results of the voice referendum poured in.
Maybe, sometime soon, a modern party leader might think about trying statesmanship, talking respectfully to opponents and to voters, treating public servants (who deserve it) with decency, governing for everyone, and leaving bullying methods behind. Then we might actually like them. Vote for them, even. Turn out on election day. And perhaps have faith in the system, once more.
Paul Collits
4 September 2024
Good to hear your pushback on the ‘cooker’ perjorative.
The diatribe was beyond disrespectful and reeked of contempt.
How Rennick can show up again and again in the face of such ignorant hostility deserves respect.
I’ve been in contact with Gerard Rennick, a victim of the Inner City LNP clowns whose claim to fame is their repeated ability of handing government to Labor through infighting and other idiocy, and support him as one of the very few holding the blow torch to the Labor incompetents.
One would have thought that Dutton in his capacity as PM and his electorate in Brisbane would have laid down the law to the LNP Leadership over Rennick’s deselection….
Nothing surprises me any longer with the Liberals/LNP with the parties now replete with traitorous ‘moderates’ and anti-conservative cowards…