70/3

He was fab!
 

I’m not a journalist, but…

Look, I’m not a journalist.  Never have been, shouldn’t ever be.  Like every other self-respecting political ’blogger, I regularly criticise political reporting in the (cliché alert) MSM, but I’m not actually saying I could do it better.  I often wonder if I could, but that should be seen as more a reflection on their standards than my ability.

However, last night I came across something that I really think someone ought to have picked up on if they are paid to observe and write about politics.

During the Western Australian leaders debate, the issue of the state’s 18 billion dollar debt was put to premier Colin Barnett several times.  Towards the end of the debate, he said:

“Yes, debt is an issue because we’re building this state for the future.  We’re taking advantage of this unique time in our history.  For health care, for education, for industrial development, for public transport. And if we don’t do it in this decade, we won’t have a chance.  That’s not arrogant, that’s seizing the opportunity.”

This seems to be completely at odds with Tony Abbott’s mantra that all debt is all bad all the time, regardless of the fact that we have had a global financial crisis to deal with since his party was last in power.  Part of his slogan in 2010 was Pay back the debt.

Now I know we shouldn’t conflate state and federal issues.  I don’t know whether the issues behind the Western Australian debt and the federal debt are the same.  As I said, I’m not a journalist.  But still, it ought to be fair to assume that being in the same party, Tony Abbott would support Colin Barnett as premier of Western Australia and endorse him for another term, and that Colin Barnett would support Tony Abbott’s position on federal issues and endorse him as the potential next prime minister.  Therefore, I would think it might be worth putting Mr Barnett’s view that there’s a time and a place for going into debt and that it’s not necessarily a sign of poor economic management to Mr Abbott to see if he agrees or disagrees, and why.

I think the answer would be especially interesting considering the fact that when launching the WA Liberals’ campaign, Mr Abbott said he would model himself on the Barnett government should he win the federal election in September.

In fairness, we all know how hard it is to ask Tony Abbott any kind of question, but if anyone gets the chance, please do.
 

We need to talk about how we talk about Kevin

In what passes for political reportage and analysis in Australia in 2013, the only thing that comes up with more monotonous predictability than a Tony Abbott photo stunt, is speculation about another Kevin Rudd challenge for the leadership of the ALP and therefore, the prime ministership.  I’ve observed before how it’s much easier to report on personality politics than it is to analyse policy and how it might affect people.  The press gallery long ago decided that whatever they collectively think might be happening is ipso-facto what is happening.

Kevin Rudd continues to throw the media (and therefore, a large chunk of voters) for a loop because he refuses to stick to the script.  That is, any script that the eager-to-dumb-it-down media can allow for.  Ex-prime ministers are supposed to spend as little time as possible on the back bench before resigning from parliament, forcing the additional expense and inconvenience of a by-election.  They are then supposed divide their time between consultancies, gardening and charity work, returning to public prominence only for state funerals and the occasional embarrassing op-ed piece.  Anything else would mean they’re up to something, right?

For sure, this is the way things have gone for the last thirty years but that doesn’t mean it’s the way things always have to be.  This is not the United States where having held the highest office disqualifies you from subsequently holding any other elected office.  In fact, retiring hurt is a comparatively recent thing.

Prime ministerships almost never end well.  Bob Menzies was the last prime minister to leave office entirely on his own terms in 1966.  The only other prime minister who came close would probably be Chris Watson in 1907.  This does not mean the end of a prime ministership has to be the end of public life.  John Gorton was challenged by William McMahon in 1971 and although the leadership ballot was tied, Gorton resigned deeming the ballot a vote of no confidence.  Despite this, he remained in parliament, served in Billy Snedden’s shadow cabinet until 1974 and only left parliament in 1975 after unsuccessfully standing for an ACT senate seat as an independent.   As for McMahon, He also served in Snedden’s shadow cabinet until 1974, but he continued to represent his electorate until he retired in 1982.  I don’t remember him ever being accused of trying to destabilise the Fraser government just for being there.

For those who don’t remember anything before the 1983 election, we could instead look to New Zealand, where David Lange resigned as prime minister in 1989 but went on to become Attorney General and when the Labour party lost government, he continued to represent his electorate until 1996.  Former prime ministers don’t have to just go away simply because reporters in search of an easy story don’t know how to explain it if they don’t.

A couple of weeks ago, I saw a tweet retweeted into my stream that said, “Gillard has obviously called the election now to avoid a Rudd challenge.”  I won’t name the person who said this, but their twitter bio says “Freelance journalist.”
I replied, questioning whether this was “obviously” the case and the reply that came back said, “Why else would she?”

Well, there are numerous reasons.  It prevents a year of speculation about the date, gives everyone plenty of time to make plans and it challenges Tony Abbott to make good on his promise that he has bagloads of policies ready to release just as soon as the election is announced.  So far, he has spectacularly failed to do this.

Now I’m not saying that any of these are the actual reason Julia Gillard broke with convention and announced the election date early, and I’m not saying she didn’t do it to somehow gazump Rudd, but whatever your theory is, you’re going to need a better reason for it than, “I can’t think of anything else.”  You could even try asking.

I’m not denying for a moment that Rudd is quite visible, and this should be embraced by the Labor Party and their supporters.  The fifth anniversary of the apology to the stolen generations should be something that Labor is proud of and they should expect Rudd to have made an appearance for it whether he was still prime minister, a backbencher, or whether he’d quit politics altogether in July 2010.  Likewise, they should welcome his regular appearances in the media since he advocates Labor policy far better than a lot of Cabinet.  Parties always send lower-rung members out to spruik their policies.  Christopher Pyne, Joe Hockey and even former opposition leader Malcolm Turnbull have been far more visible than Tony Abbott has this month.  Does this mean they’re all gunning for the top job?  Of course it doesn’t!  I’m not saying they aren’t, just that you can’t automatically assume they are just because they were on tele saying stuff.

I’m also not denying that Rudd probably wants to be prime minister again.  Who wouldn’t?  Who doesn’t?  Rudd’s ambitions were made clear with his disastrous and embarrassing leadership challenge last year, but having been soundly defeated, there’s no compelling evidence that Rudd is trying to roll the leader any more than the usual background chatter that is around in any party at any time.  There’s always someone who wants to roll the leader at the best of times.  Joe Hockey nominated at the last Liberal spill, so are we really supposed to think he is behind Tony Abbott and not seeking to undermine him with every television appearance?  Really?

Of course Rudd wants to be PM again but so what?  So does every single member of parliament.  Nobody dreams of being Parliamentary Secretary for Trade.  They want the top job.  For no good reason, we have had quite a few stories recently about how people who knew Tony Abbott when he was young thought he might be prime minister one day.  Guess what?  Pick any MP, federal or state, or even a lot of local councillors, and I’ll bet you’ll find people in their past who tell you, “We all reckoned s/he could be prime minister one day.”  It means nothing!

It’s not Kevin Rudd’s fault that he can’t leave the house without some journo fresh out of media studies, or an old hand who ought to know better, saying, “Rudd seen with new tie. Leadership challenge imminent?”  It’s not Rudd’s fault that the standard of political journalism is currently on a par with Big Brother.  He was voted out of the house so why hasn’t he gone away?  The reason is because there’s no reason why he should.  I’m not going to repeat his tired line about cold showers but everybody just get a grip.  What I will repeat is my plea for the press to start reporting what is actually happening, not what you think might be happening or would like to happen.
 

What did we learn today?

Well, we learned that South Australian Liberal MP Christopher Pyne says that the Gillard government resembles a scene from the film Downfall.  He also compared the government to a plot from Home and Away.

This is really stupid stuff.  Referencing Downfall is an obvious way of attempting to compare Julia Gillard to Hitler without doing so in as many words.  No not only has Christopher Pyne broken the golden rule of debating, which recognises that if you have to go comparing people to Hitler, then you’ve lost the argument, but he’s also insulted everyone’s intelligence by using a film to refer to someone that everyone should know and recognise.

I will give Mr Pyne the benefit of the doubt that he knows Downfall is a serious and confronting docu-drama and not just a long-running series of video memes, but I don’t know that for sure.

Mercifully, Pyne did not repeat the Downfall analogy and later chose to compare the government to a soap opera instead.  However, this suggests two things.  Either Christopher Pyne doesn’t know that you shouldn’t mix your metaphors, or he can’t see a difference between a film about the end of the Third Reich and a teen soap.

None of this is quite so disturbing until you remember that Christopher Pyne is the opposition spokesman on education.

So to summarise,

Update: Pyne has 'retracted' his comment saying he was not comparing the prime minister to Hitler, but saying the "chaos" in the government was similar to a scene from a movie.  About Hitler.

Get out of the bloody way!

Barely a day goes by without Tony Abbott pulling some kind of stunt at a photo opportunity.  So instead of constructive policy announcements, a tame media receives a steady stream of vision of Tony Abbott pulling on a hi-vis jacket, hard hat or hair net and proceeding to make a goose of himself trying to drive a forklift, use a nail gun, gut a fish or whatever they happen to do at the latest workplace that has allowed him to darken their doorstep.

If the businesses he visits are prepared to wear the loss of productivity involved in hosting Abbott’s media circus, then that’s their own lookout.  It becomes something else entirely when the scene of Abbott’s posing is a disaster area.

Photo: The Courier-Mail

The most recent and talked-about of Abbott’s publicity stunts have involved Abbott fighting bushfires and yesterday, filling sandbags for the Queensland floods.  I am even prepared to give Abbott a pass on the fire fighting.  He is, after all, a volunteer RFS fire fighter so for once, he would actually have had some training in what he was being filmed doing.  There have been accusations that Abbott left as soon as they were finished filming but I won’t comment on that until it’s been debunked or confirmed.  What I will say is that if you’re going to volunteer to help out in an emergency, that’s wonderful.  If you bring a camera crew with you, then I begin to question your motives.  When Abbott’s cronies start talking about what a top bloke he is for fighting bushfires while Julia Gillard was off… I don’t know, being the prime minister or something, I would take that as confirmation of my initial suspicions.

The sandbagging though has to rank as the worst of Abbott’s stunts.  As with all his other photo ops, he didn’t just show up on his own.  There was his entourage and the ever-present camera crews.  Getting Abbott and all his photographers in there would have meant getting in the way of several other people who were actually there to do a job.  That is indefensible when there are rapidly rising flood waters and time is clearly of the essence.  He was also wearing a business shirt and dress shoes which doesn’t imply he was there for a hard day’s work.

Sometimes, the most helpful thing you can do is keep out of the way while people do their job.  There were dozens of people there doing some pretty urgent work.  The last thing they needed was to have a politician getting underfoot saying, “Ooh! Ooh! Let me have a go!”  It makes me despair that there will actually be people who think this was Abbott chipping in when he was clearly more hindrance than help.  By pushing in and holding things up, Tony Abbott showed that he cares more about his own political vanity than he does about helping in a time of crisis.

The next time you want to help out, Tony, get out of the bloody way and let people get on with their work.
 

Prediction:

The "fiscal cliff" will become another debt ceiling - a meaningless limit that will be deferred, delayed and extended ad nauseum, invoked only when one or other party finds it politically beneficial to do so.
  
 

A white Christmas

Greetings from Perryville.

Unless we are related by marriage, then there’s a good chance you’ve never heard of Perryville, which is fair enough because you probably have no reason to have. Perryville is a rural town in Arkansas, about 45 minutes’ drive from Little Rock. Although it’s small enough to list the exact population on the sign at the town’s entry (1458, if memory serves), it is the largest town in Perry County and presumably serves quite a few outlying areas.  We are here for Christmas because dearest’s mother has family here. I was looking forward to coming here if only for the fact that the town has almost no tourist value. You don’t come here unless you mean to. Therefore, what you see when you visit is a real community going about its business.

From the middle of last week, there was talk of the likelihood of snow here for Christmas. I had only seen snow once before when we visited dearest’s older brother in Kansas early last year, but the snow was already there. I had never seen snow falling before. By the time we got to Arkansas, all the weather reports were talking about the possibility of snow for Christmas day. US weather reports are generally more detailed than Australia’s anyway and there are all kinds of practical reasons for tracking snow but I suspect Christmas meant an additional layer of interest. The local station was showing three disagreeing projections which predicted anywhere between 1 to 3 and 10 to 12 inches. It was getting to the point where I was wondering where Nate Silver was when we needed him.

For Christmas day, we were due to go to dearest’s uncle’s house in Benton for a family Christmas dinner. Dinner had already been moved forward from 6pm to 2pm on account of the weather and by the time we were all up, it was decided that we would make the 1-hour drive as soon as possible before the roads go too dangerous.

However, once we got out to the cars, my brother in law noted that what had looked like large drops of dew on the cars were actually frozen solid and the same applied to the moisture on the road. It was soon decided that it would be too nerve-wracking, if not outright dangerous, to make the drive.

It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes after that decision that sleet began to fall, further vindicating the decision to stay put. It was my first experience of sleet too. It struck me as a slightly more polite hail, where “polite” means not quite as noisy. As we watched the sleet, it gradually became snow, which continued to fall steadily for the rest of the day and into the evening. If we had been able to make it to Benton safely, we would not have been able to get back.

Dearest regarded this as an object lesson in being careful what you wish for. She had hoped that we might be able to share a white Christmas but wasn’t expecting us to get snowed in for a couple of days. Personally, I didn’t mind at all. While it’s a pity we didn’t get to see the uncles, aunts and cousins, I enjoyed improvising Christmas with seasonal television, hot buttered Os and a Christmas dinner of scrambled eggs on waffles. It just took our wintery Christmas to the next level.

So far, I have just about adjusted to the time difference and the season, but the one thing that I haven’t properly acclimatised to is the fact that it’s not daylight saving here. I am used to the sun setting at about 9 o’clock on Christmas night, so 7pm felt like about 10pm to me. Later in the evening, as the snow cover got heavier, we began to lose tv signal and there were several power brown-outs. These were very mild inconveniences but enough for us to make plans for if the power went out completely and remind us that despite being awfully pretty, there’s a whole lot of disadvantage, danger and hard work that comes with snow. Indeed, my father’s only experience of snow was building a television transmitter at the top of a mountain in the dead of winter. It was such a miserable experience for him that the idea of people enjoying snow in any way simply does not compute for him.

We woke to a picture-postcard white blanket. Our own measurements put the fall at 17 inches. We are still snowed in. Perryville is not used to this kind of snowfall, so the highways have been ploughed but the back streets (which is just about everything else here) have not. In fact, it’s being said that this is the most snow the area has ever seen. The local weather had to add an extra colour on the map to indicate blizzard warnings for north-east Arkansas, which had never been needed before.
If you listen to The Weather Channel, then this was Winter Storm Euclid, but you shouldn't listen to The Weather Channel because they're full of shit.  Their idea of naming anything below tropical storms is ridiculous and cheapens official naming.  Before long, we'll be up to A Spot of Drizzle Fernando or Morning Fog Genevieve.

Our plans to meet cousins in Little Rock for beer and pizza tonight will have to be postponed if not cancelled and we will be here at least one night longer than we had planned to be. Again, these are minor inconveniences. The uncle who we were to spend Christmas day with has been without power all day and also had a tree fall through his garage roof. Mercifully there was no injury to people or cars, but another aunt who lives ten miles out of town was without power until this afternoon so in the scheme of things, we have it easy.

The temperature is above freezing now and the snow is slowly melting, but we will not move until the roads are clearer. One thing I noticed on the way over here is that both on the highways and in the towns, there is nothing to stop you driving into a ditch. On roads that would have cables, Armco, or at least white posts around them in Australia, if you go past the rumble strips (which are carved out of the asphalt, rather than painted on), then you’re on your own. In fact, behind the house last night, a pickup truck got stuck in a drain since the snow cover forced the driver to take a guess at where the road was and unfortunately guessed wrong.

As much as I’ve enjoyed this Christmas adventure, I think I would be advising caution to anyone hoping for a white Christmas.  I have nothing but respect for those who have to deal with this kind of weather on a regular basis.

Mid-afternoon, Christmas day

Early morning, Boxing day