Back in the day when Australian society reacted to tall poppies by characterising them as too big for their boots many of them escaped overseas.
Today, as Australia has become more multicultural and cosmopolitan, it is almost okay to be a tall poppy as long as you aren’t a woman, a trade unionist, ABC journalist, environmentalist, Muslim or critic of the Morrison Government.
Scott Morrison loves saying he won’t take action on climate change without knowing what it will cost. Joel Fitzgibbon takes the same tack when defending his coal mining constituents.
Well thanks to a review commissioned by that notorious left-winger, Boris Johnson, we now have an accurate and frightening assessment of just how big the cost of not taking action is.
As the Labor Opposition jettisons policies on negative gearing, capital gains taxes, franking credits and climate change policies which don’t embrace coal you have to ask – what’s the point of Labor?
A simple answer could be that at least it’s not the Morrison Government. Given the Morrison track record it’s a compelling positioning which may appeal to many but probably not quite compelling enough to get over the line in an election.
Among the myths that seemingly never die is the belief – parroted by a supine media – that Liberal Governments are competent economic managers.
This is despite overwhelming evidence that Australia’s performance across a range of areas is in decline compared with other comparable countries.
Now Labor MHR for Bruce, Julian Hill, has belled the cat with a comprehensive report (and a social media campaign) which demonstrates that “Australia is going backwards under the Liberals, and falling behind much of the rest of the world.”
For those puzzled by Morrison’s good luck, and the apparent lack of widespread outrage about incompetence and corruption and lies and contempt for once-accepted standards, a concept derived from fishing research provides a useful framework for understanding how it happens.
Shifting baseline syndrome was a term coined in 1995 by a French-born marine biologist Daniel Pauly. He studies human impacts on global fisheries and is a professor and the project leader of the Sea Around Us Project at the Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries at the University of British Columbia.
A new sign of the ineptness of the Federal Labor Opposition is the campaign by Tony Burke, Opposition business manager, to pressure Government backbenchers in marginal electorates over voting to shut down debate in parliament.
The killer message: they have been too busy silencing the Opposition to pass legislation.
Morrison might not be as good a marketer or miracle worker as he and others think but he does possess a far more important thing – good luck.
First he got Bill Shorten as Labor Leader and now he has Anthony Albanese – a leader seemingly so concerned about not offending various interest groups that he is pleasing no one.
Where do we start when considering the $100 billion JobKeeper scheme?
Should we focus on the opaque nature of the scheme in which less than 3% – $3 billion of JobKeeper payments have been disclosed in public company accounts and there is no way of finding out who got what and how much?
Is it the fact that JobKeeper has enabled Solly Lew and others to boost profits and pay massive bonuses to senior staff? As Solly also stiffed his landlords should we be surprised?
If you think US polarisation is ending soon – think again. While there is frightening evidence of current US polarisation longer term research shows just how deep-seated it is.
While it is astonishing that between 70% and 80% of Republican voters believe the recent Presidential election was rigged this is not an outlier product of the Trump years but more a reflection of steadily developing attitudes over some decades.
Kishor Napier-Raman posed a question about the Australian political future when he wrote (crikey 15 January 2021) that: “The question is no longer whether Trumpian politics are on the rise in Australia, it’s now a question of how severe the damage will be.”
The reality is that this is the wrong question and that the right questions are about what is distinctive about Australian populism and right wing politics; how much Australian political problems are home-grown; and, our continuing delusions about our relationship with the US.