The Spectator
26 September 2018
David Flint
Our political class are being seen more and more as arrogant and as out of touch as the French aristocracy were in the lead-up to the revolution.
The people who decide elections— those who are not rusted-on Coalition or Labor voters— see little difference between them. Most have neither the time nor the interest to go into the detail which would demonstrate that, however inadequate government policy is, Labor’s is worse. And the only news most see is on TV bulletins where someone from the gallery typically presents politics through a left-wing prism
Seeing little difference in policy, the undecided see only one thing, disgraceful self -indulgence, the latest being for many the last straw. They will make the government pay, however much Labor is involved.
Before I discuss that, the crucial thing in any poll, at least in Australia, is the ‘two-party preferred vote’ the two-party preferred. Everything else is décor.
The latest, 44/56, demonstrates that Scott Morrison has to show his policies are significantly different and what the people want. He has at least acted to retain the Catholic vote which Simon Birmingham lost, a vote Menzies long ago seduced from Labor by acting on the grossly inequitable treatment of the parochial school system.
Following the constitution, Canberra should otherwise keep its nose out of schools, as should all politicians. Using schoolchildren as political props does not attract votes. In fact, most voters are sickened by this form of child abuse.
To win, Scott Morrison must adopt policies significantly different from Labor’s on energy, the rate of immigration and pouring taxpayers hard-earned money down the drain. He should spend a few hours with Tony Abbott who’ll put him right.
He should also announce a plan to drought-proof the country, with Stage 1 to be completed in five years. This should incorporate the three B’s —the Bradfield, Beale and Bridge Plans. He can borrow this from Alan Jones who’ll be delivering a major address on this next week, see www.norepublic.com.au
Morrison should also apologise to the Liberal base who’ve walked out or gone on strike by repealing the dopey superannuation legislation he and Kelly O’Dwyer pushed through. Not only does this offend just about everything the Liberal Party stands for, it has encouraged Labor not only to do worse but to announce it knowing that the Liberals can’t complain — some achievement.
He must also appoint a real and not a jack-in-the-box Minister of Defence, one whom the military would respect. Morale is at an all-time low from the Canberra-assisted campaign against war heroes, the way cultural Marxists are running recruitment and the raids on the defence budget, bigger even than Labor’s, to shore up government seats.
The last straw for many undecided was the award to two politicians of travel so luxurious as to be beyond the wildest dreams of most Australians. This involves a three-month stay in luxury accommodation in New York at a cost of about $100,000 each. Neither the Liberal, Anne Sudmalis, nor Labor’s Jenny Macklin, can make the usual feeble argument that this will enable them to better represent their constituents by improving their understanding of the UN, global government and how and why our sovereignty is being sold out to the rule of international bureaucrats from an organisation dominated by foreign dictatorships.
Almost as soon as they return, both will take their parliamentary superannuation, possibly picking up ‘jobs for the boys’ and well-paid postings in foreign corporations, banks and other places.
While some will recall Ms Macklin’s role as a great distributor of taxpayer-funded largesse, Ms Sudmalis only rose to prominence with her recent unpersuasive complaints about ‘bullying’ within the Liberal Party. Her face, but not her name, was however well-known by being placed strategically behind the PM during Question Time, that fourth-rate version of the real question time at Westminster where the Speaker chooses the questioners. Her involvement in this farce may not have raised her prestige, her job being either to nod approval to whatever ministers read from their prepared answers or to laugh at their attacks on the opposition.
As a result of ‘bullying’ and not because the seat will be among the first to fall in the election, Ms Sudmalis announced she will seek re-election.
Since neither indulgence involves Bronwyn Bishop, the mainstream media has not continued to pursue them. Nevertheless, in workplaces, kitchens, clubs and pubs across the country and in people’s memory, this rort is a subject of outrage where the common lament is that this time the politicians have gone too far.
Marie-Antoinette, who never even saw the sea, was guillotined for less. In fact, she never said of the starving poor “Let them eat cake”. That was an invention of the fake media of the day. In fact, all of the charges against her were concocted by the Jacobins, as if they were Democrats undermining a Republican judicial nomination in Washington.
Meanwhile, in Australia, the parties and their leaders do not seem to realise how this grotesque indulgence is a slap-in-the-face for the farmers who are persecuted constantly by the politicians and bureaucrats who have stolen their water and turned vast parts of their land into carbon sinks to venerate the fashionable and foreign religion of global warming.
Nor do they see how this excess has so outraged those hard-working taxpayers who are paying not only for the politicians but for the armies of apparatchik-advisors wholly unknown at the time of Menzies and Fraser, the vast numbers of bureaucrats now paid at imagined private sector rates, the brigades of consultants and now, an emerging class of crony capitalists created by substituting political patronage for the essence of the free enterprise system, risk.
Thus an increasingly vast part of the economy, supposedly free enterprise, is simulating that of the banana republic Mr Shorten wishes to force onto a reluctant nation.
This once again presages a descent into, if not the Venezuela, the Argentina of the South Seas. This can only be reversed by fundamental reforms to the governance of this country.
