Category Archives: Tony Abbott

Meanwhile, over breakfast in the News Nips household

Posted on August 22, 2011 by | 112 Comments

Me: Pah! The people did vote. Just because you don’t like the outcome doesn’t mean we should have another election. We had to put up with Howard for ten years.
ManFriend: Yeah, suck it up, princesses.

Convoy of No Confidence

Indignant dude in the Convoy of No Confidence. Picture: Stefan Postles/SMH

Signs like this one crack me up. We did vote. And we’re not going to do it again just because you don’t like the winner.

Years ago, an ant bit me on the bum while I was in bed. ManFriend laughed so hard and said the look of indignation on my face was fantastic. That’s what this “Convoy of No Confidence” stuff is like. Being bitten on the bum by an ant. You’ll get over it, but it feels better if you throw a little tanty.

Yes, they should rally. If they want to spend their money to protest over having to spend a little more money to make our environment cleaner, then go for it. (Although I have to laugh at Nick and Fluff Weckert who spent $3000 on fuel driving from Port Lincoln to Canberra to protest over the rising cost of living.)

If they want to demand a new election, then go for that too. But it doesn’t mean we should have one. Particularly when the 2010 election cost us $161 million. And particularly when their argument is “the politician is a liar so let’s have another election”. If we had to have another election every time a politician said one thing and then said another – or broke a core or non-core promise and thankyouverymuch John Howard for that slimy contribution to political discourse – then we’d be at the polls every fucking weekend. It would bankrupt us.

Sure, Labor went to the last election saying there’d be no action on climate change, which is why I didn’t vote for them. But minority governments change the game. It’s called compromise. You know, that thing you arrive at after negotiating with the people you have to form government with. The people who were voted in by lots of other people. Deal with it. Besides, it’s no different to the “never ever” GST. Many politicians will say anything to get into power and I can’t believe people are whining “oh, but they liiiiiiieeeeedddddd”. I don’t recall any pro-Abbott fans protesting over his constant changes of mind. His political opportunism is embarrassing and makes me think his supporters must be stupid. Or selfish. Probably both.

But I do have to laugh at the sign above: “Let’s take our country back”. That’s exactly how I felt in the lead up to the 2007 election when it became clear that we’d finally be able to take our country back from the Coalition and their mean-spirited policies.

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Posted in Politics, Tony Abbott

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Proudly not a real Australian

Posted on May 31, 2011 by | 38 Comments

I go away for 10 days and the Coalition falls apart and suddenly Cate Blanchett isn’t a “real” Australian because she’s rich, or an actor, or modified her house to use less energy, or something. If the second part wasn’t so pathetic, I’d say I should go away more often.

By now there’s simply no doubt that Tony Abbott thinks we’re all idiots. And the everyday Australians that he always speaks about, he thinks they’re the biggest idiots of all. That’s why he happily admitted that people shouldn’t believe what he says unless it’s scripted. He believes that no one will remember and/or care that he’s a big liar. That’s not the most flattering view of the electorate, is it?

Abbott seems to think that, despite the large number of Australians who didn’t vote for him, we all agree with everything he says and want him as our leader. Talk about being delusional (in the colloquial sense, not the DSM-IV sense). Dude, we know you’ve had your dickstickers in a knot for the last nine or so months, but you didn’t win so let it go.

I arrived back in Sydney to this utter nonsense about Tony Abbott/Barnaby Joyce/Australian Family Association* saying Cate Blanchett – whose environmentalism is well known, installing Australia’s second largest roof-top solar system at The Wharf – isn’t a “real” Australian because she’s in an ad for a carbon tax. Of course they’re attacking her – can you imagine them trying to say Michael Caton isn’t a “real” Australian? Actually, I’d love to see them try, that would be hilarious.

Blanchett isn’t a “real” Australian simply because she disagrees with them. It’s the Howard-era “unAustralian” bullshit all over again, where instead of acting like an adult when people hold views that are different to your own, you act like a petulant child and attack them personally. Can someone please call the waaaaambulance for Tony Abbott? For a great post about the attacks on Blanchett, see The Conscience Vote.

Abbott said “People who live in an eco-mansion have a right to be heard … But their voice should not be heard ahead of the people of Australia”. I call bullshit. By “the people of Australia” he means those who attended that awful anti-carbon tax rally in Canberra where he stood in front of the sign calling the Prime Minister “Bob Brown’s bitch”. So actually, Blanchett’s voice is being heard after the voice of “the people of Australia”. But Tony Abbott has never been big on the truth. Or making sense. Or being consistent.

And so Labor continues to let the Coalition control this discussion (it would be a lie to call it a debate). What the hell is wrong with them? Before the last election, Labor should have been selling the country’s economic health thanks to the BER and stimulus packages, but instead they couldn’t sell beer to a pissed rugby league fan.

The pathetic state of public discourse in this country makes me cringe.

So, having had my first post-holiday whinge, I am proud to declare that I am also not a “real” Australian. Not because I’m a rich actor with an energy-efficient home, but because I want the carbon tax. And if doing something for the environment costs me a little bit of money, then that’s ok because I’m not a selfish arsehole who thinks my cost of living in a rich country with a good welfare safety net is more important than everyone else on this planet.

*The Australian Family Association was founded by the National Civic Council, a conservative Christian organisation that believes a woman’s role is to have babies and that her “self-identity and self-esteem may be found and grown through giving themselves to and loving their husband and family”. They also want “extensive” censorship of film and tv. Funnily enough, I think they’re rubbish.

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Posted in Politics, Tony Abbott

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Just when we need it the most

Posted on March 9, 2011 by | 3 Comments

I read the Sydney Morning Herald every morning, listen to ABC radio during the day (two of the benefits of doing a PhD full time), and watch SBS news every night, and all I know about Tony Abbott’s carbon plan is that it’s better than the Government’s unmade one because he said so. Oh, and he’ll “stop the tax”.

This is a really important issue and he said, she said journalism is just not good enough. In that link, Jonathan Holmes quotes one of my brain heroes, Jay Rosen, who defines he said, she said journalism as:

* There’s a public dispute.
* The dispute makes news.
* No real attempt is made to assess clashing truth claims in the story, even though they are in some sense the reason for the story. (Under the “conflict makes news” test.)
* The means for assessment do exist, so it’s possible to exert a factual check on some of the claims, but for whatever reason the report declines to make use of them.
* The symmetry of two sides making opposite claims puts the reporter in the middle between polarized extremes.

Familiar, huh? It’s what we get every day. Holmes writes:

Consumers of news are largely left to fog it out for themselves. Of course, those who have the time and inclination can do so. But as the news story develops, the assumption is made by daily journalists that everyone knows what happened yesterday, and a week ago. It’s far harder than it should be to find the background analysis.

I wrote yesterday that I think it’s going to be a good year, and that doesn’t just apply to women. The gutter politics we’re seeing – in particular, from Cory Bernardi and Scott Morrison – can’t last, because the backlash has already started. Joe Hockey is positioning himself as the not-Abbott, which will leave Abbott’s attack dogs without a supportive master. And the independents keep showing that they are above the petty bullshit that passes for “political debate” these days.

This from Tony Windsor on the carbon tax:

He says people in his electorate are telling him that they want a productive debate, rather than one dominated by politics.

“They want it a little bit more advanced than the word ‘lie’ and the word ‘tax’,” he said.

“I think they want to find out what could happen, what sort of contribution we should be making, what are the advantages in regional Australia for instance in terms of renewable energy?”

He says he would like the same, and says he needs plenty more information about the implicit price of carbon and how Australia’s efforts sit globally before the Government can win his vote.

But this is all we get from Tony Abbott:

“I’m running a truth campaign against the carbon tax, because the truth campaign appears to be having an impact,” he said.

“I imagine that [Labor] will run an ad campaign, because the one thing that these guys specialise in is ad campaigns using taxpayer’s money.

“In this case it would be a dishonest ad campaign – this is a tax based on a lie and it shouldn’t happen.”

This would be a really good time for journalists to do the most basic of basic Google searches and point out that the Howard Government spent $2 billion on advertising:

According to Melbourne University academic Sally Young, the author of Government Communication in Australia, the Howard Government’s spending on advertising is among the highest per head in the world.

“It’s up there with only a few other countries,” she said.

Seriously, it’s not that hard to inform your readers. You know, that thing news is supposed to do? Otherwise we’re not being journalists, we’re being state stenographers (hat tip to John Pilger for that term).

It is precisely when an issue can be reduced to slogans – “we’ll stop the tax” – that we need better reporting than just he said, she said.

And, in honour of the title of this post, this:

I was looking for the Dolly Parton version, but this video is gold! And Randy VanWarmer is my new favourite name.

Update March 10: I stand (a little) corrected. One article today on the Coalition’s Direct Action plan: Direct yes, but not a lot of action:

Over the past week some journalists have made Coalition MPs squirm by asking: can you name an economist who backs your direct action climate policy?

The Coalition is banking heavily on being able to massively boost the amount of carbon dioxide stored in soil, estimating it could deliver 60 per cent of Australia’s 2020 emissions target. It remains a bold call…. Soil carbon is not recognised under international carbon accounting rules

But, it’s an opinion piece from The Age‘s environment reporter Adam Morton, so it’s not on the SMH homepage, nor is this information in any story in the paper. Why is a journalist giving readers the information we need to judge the Direct Action Plan considered an opinion?

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Posted in Journalism, Politics, Tony Abbott

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Will ‘shit happens’ put Tony in the shit?

Posted on February 9, 2011 by | 20 Comments

Probably not. People Skills has morphed into Teflon Tony. Even saying on national television that we shouldn’t believe what he says unless someone else has written it down for him didn’t stick.

I didn’t see the story last night but when I read about it this morning in the SMH I thought, well, unkind things that breach this blog’s no-name-calling policy.

This isn’t a post about yet another dumb and/or insensitive thing Tony Abbott has said. It’s a post about how you need to go looking to find out the basic information you need to make up your mind during the hysterical reporting of “gaffes”, and how that’s not good enough.

So, briefly, when Tony Abbott was in Afghanistan and told that no single factor caused the death of soldier Jared MacKinney, he said “sometimes, shit happens, doesn’t it?”. When Channel Seven journo Mark Riley approached Abbott about it yesterday, Abbott borrowed Julie Bishop’s death stare and turned it into Tony Abbott’s Death Stare of Rage with Added Speechless Nodding.

Check it out:

I read the SMH story over breakfast. It wasn’t until 2.30pm that I got on the internet and watched the video. And discovered that I was wrong – about Seven, the SMH and Abbott.

The SMH reported that Abbott said his comment was taken out of context, yet there was no sentence saying, “When pressed, he would not say what context his comment was delivered in”. So I assumed that he wasn’t asked to explain, which would be Seven’s journalism fail. Saying your comment has been taken out of context is meaningless if you don’t explain the context in which something offensive isn’t actually offensive, and it’s a journalist’s responsibility to ask that question. That would be like saying, “We’ll stop the boats” and not being asked how. Oh, wait.

But he was asked to explain the context, which makes it an SMH journalism fail. That Abbott wouldn’t answer the question is an important part of this story, because it shows us how he reacts under pressure.

It’s no secret that I’m not Tony Abbott’s Number One Fan. I’m horrified by the thought of him becoming Prime Minister. Horrified and despairified. But that the head of the Defence Association isn’t pissed off suggests that the story is more nuanced than we’re led to believe. Pirra and kimsonof can help me out here, but I imagine that when your job involves trying to kill people while not getting killed yourself, you need coping mechanisms, and maybe “sometimes shit just happens” is one of them. And “sometimes, shit just happens” is very different to “well, shit happens”. I’m thinking about ambos who crack jokes to deal with the shit they see. And about the faces of the soldiers around Abbott when he said it. Their expressions didn’t change.

Now, here’s where I call bullshit on Tony Abbott. He says he was ambushed by Riley, yet Riley and Channel Seven had apparently been trying for three months to get the Defence video through Freedom of Information laws. Abbott would have known about that. He’s had three months to figure out how to answer the context question and he came up with nothing.

The real story is not that he said “shit happens”, but that when asked a tricky question, he couldn’t answer. Couldn’t do anything but a bobblehead impression. That’s not a good look for someone who wants to be in charge of a country, is it?

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Posted in Journalism, Politics, Tony Abbott

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When you’re losing, just call her a bitch

Posted on October 12, 2010 by | 23 Comments

Because no one likes a woman who is mean and nasty.

So, we’re into week two of this nonsense. First Tony Abbott said he rejected Julia Gillard’s offer of a joint trip to Afghanistan because he didn’t want jetlag (Phillip Coorey has a good piece in the SMH today about what a pain in the arse these trips are). Then, embarrassed that people might think he is weak, Abbott went to Afghanistan to pose with guns, drag his knuckles on the ground, and accuse the PM of “low bastardry” because he used the “wrong words”. What a joke.

Last week, we didn’t learn a thing about the overseas trips taken by the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition. They were pretty important trips, but all we got here was news about how much sleep Gillard got, and that she ate some fries in Brussels while not wearing make up. Not a word in the mainstream media about what Gillard said to world leaders at the Asia-Europe Meeting, or about what Abbott said to the British Conservative Party conference. Those things are important. That the PM and Opposition Leader disagree is not.

And now Christopher Pyne has accused Gillard of “back alley bitchiness”, which is fucking disgraceful. A back alley bitch is a woman who gets off on sucking random dicks in dirty lanes. Pyne should get his arse kicked for this, but he won’t.

And of course, Abbott is doing his usual trick of saying something offensive and then, once it’s been reported and therefore in the minds of the public, he backs away from it and says ‘let’s all play nicely’.

This whole thing is being driven by the Coalition to deflect attention from the fact that they lied their arses off about their election costings. And the media has fallen for it, hook, line and sinker, because yet again, the MSM is failing to ask the hard questions. Or any real questions because they’re too caught up in thinking that this shit is important.

Update: When asked if she was involved in back alley bitchiness, Gillard said no. Yet the SMH has given it this headline – I am not being bitchy: Gillard – and made it the most important story on the website:

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Posted in Politics, Tony Abbott

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Deep for a Tuesday

Posted on August 24, 2010 by | 32 Comments

During an election post-mortem breakfast on Sunday with Lexy, Ms X and my newest subscriber Janine (the button’s just there on the right), I was reminded that I move and work in small-l liberal circles. Of course there’s a ‘well, derr’ response to that, but when you’re surrounded by people who understand the correct order of things, it’s easy to forget that the rest of Australia isn’t quite there yet. I’m ok with that, because there’s room for lots of different views, but what I’m not ok with is the way politicians promote ignorance to get votes. They know that asylum seekers who arrive by boat aren’t a big problem, so when they stir up the issue they damage Australia. Journalists also know that asylum seekers who arrive by boat aren’t a big problem, yet they let the politicians get away with saying it is because they believe that simply ‘he said, she said’ reporting means they’re doing their jobs well, as though somehow it’s good enough. When did we all get so lazy?

Anyway, I’ve digressed. Back to the circles I move in. We talk about politics; about policy; about books and movies; about music; about experiences that got us to this point in our lives. We talk about meaning. Does this mean that this bunch of soulless atheists ain’t so soulless after all? No one tell Abbott and Pell, they’d go into shock.

I’ve been thinking about the monopoly religions have over spirituality, and this idea that if you don’t believe in something in the sky your spiritual life is barren (just like my deliberately barren womb of doom).

When people talk about having a spiritual life – not in the sense of believing in fairies and spirits, although to me that’s the same as believing in God – what do they actually mean?

Does having a spiritual life simply mean you think about stuff? I think about stuff, but I wouldn’t call myself spiritual. Yet I’ve worked with a few people who pretty clearly don’t think about stuff, so is that all it is? (My favourite insult is stolen from recovering philosopher Justin Tauber: “you have no internal monologue”. That’s freakin’ awesome!)

So, over to you – what is a soul?

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Posted in Journalism, More like Betsy, Politics, Tony Abbott

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This is all I have to say

Posted on August 20, 2010 by | 22 Comments

(With thanks to the awesome Lexy)

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Posted in Politics, Tony Abbott

Like poking a wound

Posted on August 5, 2010 by | 21 Comments

I’m a glutton for punishment. Not only did I read the Sam de Brito column on Sunday, and Brian Holden’s anti-women rant yesterday, but today I read Miranda Devine’s piece in the SMH: Nobody died, so why is she demanding a king’s ransom? I know, I must be nuts.

The start is actually quite funny, with gems such as:

Now Abbott is no better than a rapist. What an insult to a family man who is anything but anti-women.

That’s right, Devine thinks Abbott is anything but anti-women. Oh, how I chortled.

It is just this kind of hysterical overreach that is behind the $37 million sexual harassment lawsuit launched against David Jones by its former publicist, Kristy Fraser-Kirk, 27. By claiming that absurd amount, she has lost credibility. The sympathy and respect she earned from her initial dignified and private handling of the case flew out the window. She is no longer seen as a victim but as another litigious, gold-digging, high umbrage woman egged on by lawyers using feminism to advance a personal cause.

Devine is conveniently ignoring the fact she also uses feminism to advance her personal anti-feminist cause. And is “high umbrage woman” another way of saying “high maintenance and without a sense of humour”?

But this is what it boils down to:

Playing up your victimhood rather than getting on with life invariably makes for an unhappy life.

I’m sure women who have been raped, assaulted and harassed will suddenly slap their foreheads and say, ‘of course, if I’d just gotten on with my life instead of reporting the crime, then I wouldn’t be unhappy about the illegal thing that happened to me’.

That is not to say that Mark McInnes, 45, wasn’t a sleaze who got away with much more than he should have in the way of predatory, overbearing behaviour towards female underlings. And that’s not to say the David Jones’ board should not have known of the CEO’s proclivities, even if it didn’t know of specific sexual harassment, as it has said. If even half of what is in Fraser-Kirk’s statement of claim is true, McInnes deserves everything he got.

How very generous of you, Miranda, after that nice spot of victim blaming.

The worst Fraser-Kirk alleges of McInnes would have distressed most women but it should not ruin her life – unless she dwells on it.

Oh, no, back to the victim blaming.

In any case, comments by the designer, Alannah Hill, making light of Fraser-Kirk’s lawsuit, tell you how complicated sexual politics can be today, with some women evidently welcoming McInnes’s passes.

No, it’s not complicated at all. If someone says they’re not interested, then don’t grope them. And don’t keep asking them for sex. How complicated is that? Suggesting that because some women welcomed his advances so therefore he couldn’t sexually harass anyone is like saying that just because someone has had sex once, then they can’t be raped.

[Hill] has since apologised but her remarks demonstrate the divide between the women of Fraser-Kirk’s generation Y who refuse to accept disrespectful behaviour from men and the more laissez-faire attitude of older women.

Hysterical legal hyperbole does not help women of any age. Greedy lawsuits only damage women in the workplace by making male colleagues resentful and wary. In the real world, this is a severe handicap for women making their way on their own merits.

And here we are, back at blaming women for everything.

Yes, $37 million is a fucking shitload of money. But since laws against sexual harassment in the workplace clearly don’t work, and many people in management still don’t take the issue seriously, why not go for the colossal kick in the financial nuts? It might finally work.

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Posted in Feminism, Journalism, Tony Abbott

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Tony Abbott makes a rape joke

Posted on August 3, 2010 by | 13 Comments

Tony “no one respects women more than I do” Abbott made a rape joke.

And thought he was pretty clever.

And funny.

What an arsehat.

Check out Napalmnacey tear him a new one at Hoyden about Town.

And check out GetUp’s latest video, featuring what Abbott really thinks about women.

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Posted in Politics, Tony Abbott

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I don’t have kids, and I vote

Posted on July 27, 2010 by | 19 Comments

I don’t have children. I’m not anti-children, I just don’t have any and I’m not particularly interested in having my own. I adore my friends’ kids and I love seeing families in the CBD because the city is for everyone, not just suits. But every single election campaign – state and federal – politicians go to childcare centres and playgrounds to show how “good” they are with kids. Or, as Tony Abbott unintentionally demonstrated yesterday, how good his wife Margie is with kids while he hovers uselessly in the background.

Working families. Australian families. You’d be forgiven for thinking that only families are allowed to vote. Oh, and the occasional small business owner. According to the two main parties, the votes of teenagers, twenty-somethings, thirty-somethings and forty-somethings without kids aren’t worth anything.

I’d love to see Julia Gillard go into a wine bar and sit down with a group of half-drunk 30-somethings in Surry Hills or Newtown; Tony Abbott at a music festival trying to talk to recreationally-enhanced 20-somethings; both of them spending an entire Saturday in the soul-destroying rental market so they can understand what it’s like to be desperately trying to find somewhere to live; or at a Centrelink office in regional Australia where there just aren’t any jobs.

Gillard and Abbott don’t dare do anything of these things. Children are safe. They don’t ask curly political questions, or tell them to fuck off, or mock them. Childcare centre visits are boring. And meaningless. We don’t learn anything about what they have planned for Australia’s future when they read a book to a bunch of pre-schoolers. Which is the point, and that’s pathetic. Pfft. I wish they’d grow some fucking balls.

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