Will somebody please tell Eric Abetz to put a sock in it:
Tasmanian Senator Eric Abetz has said he believes there is evidence people who are homosexual can become heterosexual.
Senator Abetz, who campaigned fiercely against the Safe Schools bullying program, said he believed the media needed to be more balanced on reporting of sexuality issues and slammed business leaders over their campaign for same-sex marriage.
…“So do you personally believe that gays and lesbians can pull up their bootstraps and show a bit of discipline and become heterosexuals, do you actually think they can stop being who they are?” Sky News’ Samantha Maiden asked
Senator Abetz replied: “The evidence that has been given to Senate committees where people who have been in gay relationships have then gone into heterosexual relationships”.
Perhaps with the help of chemical castration? Or “reconditioning” of some kind? Maybe some well placed electrodes…
Sheesh, let’s not get bogged down in the specifics, the exchange is only useful as an exemplar for a series of episodes that hold one thing in common, the Do-nothing Government has gone one way while Australia has gone entirely another.
Politics is all sorts of things but at bottom it is a custodianship for some central amalgam of what makes country what it is. In Australia’s case that is:
- a fair go;
- having a go;
- freedom and mateship;
- irreligion and materialism.
You can squash and mold these things into a variety of political myths that favour either labour or capital but they can’t be broken into pieces and put back together as anything you like. Yet that is what the Do-nothing Government appears to want to. It’s current agenda is:
- to prevent and turn back social progressives wherever possible;
- to redefine free speech as a politically correct set of pseudo-Christian values;
- to protect big business wherever and whenever possible;
- to disbelieve in climate change and fight all fights against it;
- to inundate the nation with foreign interests and, most importantly
- to drive up house prices any and every way that it can.
These objectives have boiled down to a raft of recent policy positions that are disastrous for the Coalition and the economy:
- the complete butchery of gay marriage reform;
- the celebration of hate speech in 18c reform;
- a corporate tax cut that hits the Budget hard while doing nothing for any business;
- a war on wages as families die of poor income growth amid a global push back against just that;
- a war on renewables that is threatening to turn a long predicted energy crisis into an economic disaster;
- opening the immigration flood gates even as the big cities are crush-loaded and grind to a halt, and
- no reform to the tax concessions that drive property prices.
This is a random grab bag of anti-science, unfair, prejudiced, religious, kick the dog and greedy wants and desires that would not look out of place during the Salem witch trials. Moreover, the sheer arbitrariness of the agenda leads to perverse public priorities in which a sovereign-threatening energy crisis is ignored while a fastidious push to delete thee words from some arcane human rights document steals the headlines.
Is it any wonder, then, that the Coalition is now shedding allies as fast as it is creating enemies. Large swathes of business are progressive. The vast majority are now committed to climate change and carbon pricing. Banks, business lobbies, regulators and consumer groups are all clamouring for property tax reform. The immigration debate has spawned One Nation. Many of the interests that once stood in the way of the desperately needed structural reform of the economy are now in favour of it. Yet nothing is done.
None of the Coalition’s above policy positions is part of a narrative that is woven around Australia’s core values and attributes. Things are just done, hosed down, arced up, dropped or pressed fanatically without rhyme or reason. There is no preparation for anything, no vision or objective to unite anything, no national project, no research to direct outcomes, no conception, planning and certainly no execution, no beginning, no middle and no end. It’s like a pack of feral dogs wanders into Parliament every day and proceeds to bite anyone in their way.
Yet beneath it all it’s bleedin’ obvious what Australian’s want and need:
- gay marriage;
- lower immigration;
- affordable house prices for youth;
- improving standards of living via a revitalisation of markets and liberal principle;
- reward for effort and support for the vulnerable.
We are a very simple people, really. Yet the Coalition is today such a pack of breathless imbeciles that it has totally lost control of everything that we are, want and need.
