I’m sure you’re all familiar with Ctrl-Z, the “Undo” command on most computers. I use it ever day when I do something I didn’t mean to do.
Tony Abbott has moved into the Prime Minister’s office and has basically been going “Undo undo undo” on everything that the last government did. The new coalition is entirely devoid of new or constructive ideas, all they can do is remove things they’ve decided they don’t like. Or, more likely, that their corporate donors have decided they don’t like. Rupert Murdoch apparently hates the NBN, it being a threat to his Foxtel business. Undo undo undo. The big miners don’t like the mining tax – or the mineral resources tax to give it it’s full title. Undo undo. Some percentage of the ordinary Australian population have been persuaded that Climate Change, or to give it the name that they don’t like to use, Global Warming, is not real. So a big Undo on the Carbon Emissions Pricing scheme, otherwise known as the carbon tax. I wonder how they then explain that the Arctic will soon be free of ice in the summer for the first time ever? Perhaps we should pop Tony on an iceberg and see how long that lasts.
And they’ve decided to do away with the school kids bonus – an undo that will eat up whatever savings are passed on to families via repealing the carbon tax.
And then there was the charming tightening of eligibility for disaster relief for those affected by the unprecedented bushfires around Sydney in October. Rules that were changed while the fires were burning. Undo undo undo indeed. They then went through the farce of saying that climate change wasn’t a contributor to the fire, despite the Department of Environment website saying as much. Here’s a tip folks, Ctrl-H is the command for “find and replace”.
Christopher Pyne is still bitter about his days as a student politician, so the Student Unions are going to become voluntary again. He also had the genius idea of privatizing HECS debts – which will put us back into the early 1970’s in terms of paying for University. Undo undo undo.
Financing energy efficiency through the Clean Energy Finance Corporation is apparently a bad idea, even though it could be argued this fits into their “policy” of direct action on climate change. Undo. And while we’re on the subject, they clearly don’t need independent advice on the subject, so no more funding for the Climate Commission. They had the last laugh, however, resurrecting themselves as a non-profit that I have donated to.
And then of course there was the budget crisis, a pile of lies they created themselves. That vanished within seconds of them gaining office. I bet they’d like to to a big fat Ctrl-Z on the last three years of statements by the people in their economic portfolios. This suffered the same fate as the debt crisis, another of their inventions. What did they do? Raise the debt ceiling by an unprecedented 33%.
Then they gutted the CSIRO. One can only assume they have no need for science, which would explain why they didn’t appoint a science minister. Clearly they can find out what they need from the Wikipedia.
Undo undo.
Oh, and who can forget the repealing of those parts of the Racial Discrimination Act that caught out Andrew Bolt a few years ago. Undo! Clearly political correctness has gone too far. By the way, anyone who starts a statement with “Political correctness has gone too far…” is about to make a racist, misogynist or otherwise discriminatory statement. If you’re lucky it’ll be racist, misogynist and homophobic all at the same time. This is the worst undo of all, because it serves absolutely no useful purpose. Of all the things they could have been concerning themselves with in the two or so months since they were elected, they chose to go after a small part of one act that protects peoples rights. A very mean undo.
I have yet to hear them articulate one new idea of any kind, not one proposal that isn’t a reaction to something the stinking lefty Labor government has done.
The shitty thing is a lot of this stuff took years and years to put into place. It took loads of hard work by dedicated people, and genuinely bold decisions by successive governments to get them going. And now will have to start over, which may take a decade or more. Here we are, once again, looking like a large coal mine masquerading as a nation. A banana republic, a weenie nation of no importance on the bottom of the world. We have an ignorant fool as our prime minister, we now have an image we project to the world – pedaling backwards at the behest of Tony’s rich mates.