Prime Minister Tony Abbott is destroying the Coalition’s prospects for re-election day by day. His lobotomised brand of politics, far more suited to a brainless period of war than it is a liberal society of mixed and subtle tastes, is casting the Government as a genuine idiot. If the Coalition waits too long to neck him -which it is without doubt going to have to do before the election – it is going to suffer irreparable harm.
Following his near death experience and terrible polls, Abbott rebuilt a little political momentum by reversing out of all controversial policies and laying low. In short, he made himself and the Government a small target. That works well in opposition but a Government still has to govern and as the national challenges roll in, Tony Abbott is being forced back into the limelight with disastrous results.
Witness yesterday’s gaffes after clangors. The PM opened with this on terrorism, from the ABC:
At today’s summit, Mr Abbott said the threat posed by the IS group, also known as Daesh, was global.
“Daesh is coming, if it can, for every person and for every government with a simple message: ‘Submit or die’,” Mr Abbott said.
“The declaration of a caliphate, preposterous though it seems, is a brazen claim to universal dominion.
“You can’t negotiate with an entity like this, you can only fight it.”
Nobody is going to deny that IS is beastly but this is turning it into something far more successful than it is. It’s a regional insurgency created by the war in Iraq not a global menace, unless you want to make it so and thereby glamourise it. That’s the irony given IS’s only global dominion is as a brand for disaffected locals and boy is the PM giving it some excellent PR.
By over-egging it on IS, the PM looks like the tin pot dictator of a Banana Republic aiming to drum up some some local fear, not the soaring leader of Western values that he is aiming for.
Next up was housing and superannuation:
This is why I am so concerned about the Labor Party’s apparent attempts to dabble with negative gearing because if you muck around with negative gearing effectively you have put rents up,” he said.
“If you look at what the Labor Party is proposing at the moment they want to hit your super with more tax, they apparently want to drive down the value of your existing home and now it seems they want to put rent up by fiddling with negative gearing.”
This is reducing some of the most deeply personal issues of most Australians to a stone political club. It is totally misreading the social mood, which is obviously swinging towards the need to address housing affordability for our children’s future. If you need polls to tell you that then you should not be in politics, but here’s one from Dad’s Army just in case:
An Essential Research online poll taken in the week Treasurer Joe Hockey advised potential first home buyers in Sydney to “get a good job that pays good money” asked 1020 people their view on the effect of rising prices on different demographics.
The poll found about half of respondents unsurprisingly said rising prices were good for home buyers and investors.
But three-quarters thought they were bad for new buyers and over half said they were bad for the average person, while more than a third said they were bad for the economy.
By over-egging it on protecting housing and superannuation, the PM looks like the tin pot dictator of a Banana Republic favouring the interests of the landed few at the expense of the many, not least children.
Finally, we had the wind farm farce:
Prime Minister Tony Abbott has described wind farms as “visually awful” and boasted slashing the Renewable Energy Target will restrict growth in the industry.
Mr Abbott also said the Howard government would never have introduced the clean energy policy if it had its time over again.
In a wide-ranging interview on Sydney radio station 2GB, Mr Abbott said he was prevented by the Senate in his desire to further cut the growth of new wind farms.
I don’t even know what to call this. The world is moving towards Paris, there’s an El Nino brewing and associated droughts building, the news flow is turning inexorably towards greater carbon abatement in China, in the US, in Europe, BHP and other large corporates are backing carbon pricing, and the social mood around climate change will swing increasingly towards action.
But one doesn’t even need to be operating in that context to see how dumb this is. In what universe is a PM whining defensively about wind farms being a eyesore, not least when he is an open fan of belching smokestacks and mines, a good look for the leader?
By over-egging it on the aesthetics of wind farms (no, not whether they are an appropriate form of power, just the way they look) the PM looks like the tin pot dictator of a Banana Republic happy to privilege his own petty and eccentric tastes over good policy.
There are times when the lobotomy politics of populism works well. When the nation is under threat or at war, for instance.
But it’s neither right now. We’re rich and we’re safe and people are not interested in fear but building ideas to keep it that way.
Framing every issue for morons is only making the PM and the Government look like one.
