Narcissist versus mysoginst

Advertisement
6195488-two-rotten-apples-isolated-on-white-background

For those that missed links this morning, David Pilling of FT last night composed a darkly amusing take on Australia’s current political choice. Some will disagree but the outsider’s perspective does seem to cut to the quick!

For two decades, Australia has deserved its reputation as a “lucky country”…The term “lucky country”, however, has an addendum. Coined by writer and social critic Donald Horne in 1964, the full phrase is less breezily optimistic. “Australia is a lucky country, run by second-rate people who share its luck.” Next month’s general election, in which voters must choose which of two flawed politicians should steer them through the choppier economic waters ahead, will test Horne’s aphorism to its limits.

Both Kevin Rudd, the now-you-see-him-now-you-don’t prime minister, and Tony Abbott, head of the Liberal party-led coalition, are flawed in their own way. Whichever of them wins will have a tricky job in managing the transition from what Mr Rudd calls “the end of the China resources boom”.

Mr Rudd is fiercely intelligent, a Mandarin speaker with a good grasp of the forces shaping a nation whose main security partner is the US but whose principal trading partner is China. He can, however, be a lousy politician, loathed by many in his own party for his highhandedness.

…Step forward, Mr Abbott. Though his Liberal party, with its fiscally cautious platform, is now more trusted by Australians to govern the country, Mr Abbott himself is not. A former Rhodes scholar who trained briefly for the priesthood, he is a social conservative with a bully-boy reputation. Ms Gillard laid into him for his views on women and abortion and his association with a “ditch the witch” campaign against her.

…That, then, is the voters’ choice: an unlikeable narcissist versus an unpopular misogynist.

Hear, hear!

Advertisement
About the author
David Llewellyn-Smith is Chief Strategist at the MB Fund and MB Super. David is the founding publisher and editor of MacroBusiness and was the founding publisher and global economy editor of The Diplomat, the Asia Pacific’s leading geo-politics and economics portal. He is also a former gold trader and economic commentator at The Sydney Morning Herald, The Age, the ABC and Business Spectator. He is the co-author of The Great Crash of 2008 with Ross Garnaut and was the editor of the second Garnaut Climate Change Review.