Bob Ellis considers the Abbott Government's record after its first 50 days in power.
After fifty days in office it is clear Tony Abbott’s is the worst new government in our history.
They have insulted our nearest neighbour, a nation with ten times our population, and brought us near war with them over boats they don’t want back, and hacked phones. They have insulted scientists, who will never now come to Australia, or stay long here. They have insulted a world conference on climate change by refusing to go to it. They have abolished the Ministry of Science, thereby declaring Global Warming will occur, if it does, when Christ returns with a sharp sickle and a box of matches. They have declared bushfires a part of ‘the Australian experience’ and encouraged eight-year-old arsonists to set them.
They will annul, if they can, a thousand gay marriages, distressing two million faithful homosexuals and their four million relatives and driving some to suicide. They will thus affirm Cory Bernardi’s comparison of sodomy with fornication with animals. They have thus affirmed the Prime Minister’s view that his sister will burn a billion years in hell.
And they have declared the deficit no longer an emergency and a surplus not likely before, oh, 2025. They have cheated the WA and Fairfax elections, after a serially cheated election in which their policies were not revealed, or costed, until a day before it.
They have cancelled the school kids’ money, impairing a million educations. They have made it now impossible for a million people now ageing to retire in comfort. They have ruined two politicians for spending public or union money, and spent themselves taxpayers’ money like drunken sailors on football games and weddings.
They have hidden their Prime Minister, already an international joke, and let Mathias Cormann, who sounds like a Nazi torturer, speak for him. They are fighting among themselves over baby money for the rich and selling our biggest entities to the Chinese and the Americans.
And they are saying, in a month of our worst bushfires and the worst cyclones in world history, they have a mandate to let Global Warming rip.
This after fifty days.
I will get back to you after a hundred.
