MYEFO ... and Tony and Joe's favourite lie
Like a mantra (the repetition of a sacred word over and over again) Tony Abbott and Joe Hockey keep telling their favorite lie: that the Labor Party left a dirty big black hole in Australia's finances.
I was almost going to write 'Abbott and Costello (Bud and Lou),' a mental blunder about the two famous comedians of the 20th century. That would have been appropriate, because Peter Costello made the same claims that Australia was dead broke when he became Treasurer.
The Coalition parties have been using this line about Labor since Bob
Menzies was still a schoolboy. He would use the same later when he
became prime minister.
It is the oldest trick in the political book. Tell the country it is in a mess and we have to fix it by cutting incomes and increasing taxes and make the rich richer and the poor poorer because that is "good politics".
What Labor did in fact while coping with the first big international
financial blowout of the 21st century was eliminating the horrid John
Howard Work Choices
program, increasing wages, increasing necessary incomes for the poorest
families, building better school facilities, adding the Gonski reforms,
raising employment to the largest level in Australia's history and
beginning the layout of the NBN, now a crippled wreck of a glorious
dream.
All of this was carried out under a hung parliament and an abusing,
screaming, sanctimonious opposition that nevertheless passed all the
legislation that the Coalition now wants to remove, along with the jobs
of thousands of Australian workers.
Labor was under more media pressure than ever before in our history.
Rupert Murdoch had sealed his newspaper monopoly and owned most of the
media and used it savagely, driving his automated slaves to follow his
commands from whatever part of the planet he was inhabiting at the time.
The Business Council of Australia was leading its own cheer squad against Labor as it always does.
Wayne Swan, Labor's Treasurer throughout its term, has written more
explicitly about the blowout swindle and I commend him for it.
In the meantime, what has also to be said is critical of Labor:
political party infighting always turns off voters and that's what Labor
did last year in a big way and the Murdoch media made a meal out of
what were leaking internal matters.
A party that does not have internal arguments is not doing its job. A
party that agrees with everything its leaders say is a dictatorship.
Australian politics, like every other free nation, has differences on
policy and very occasionally has changed a leader. When a rampant media
is determined to destroy one of the parties, the opportunity is there
to be exploited.
The more both parties can keep their internal disorders within their
own meetings rooms, the better for the nation. If you have to change a
leader, do it quickly, quietly and with a short, simple explanation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
No comments:
Post a Comment