IT’S HARD TO IMAGINE a worse week for any Australian Prime Minister.
Fifty thousand Holden workers to lose their jobs and his Cabinet splitting over it. Qantas credit at junk level after Abbott refused it help, remarking, presumably, ‘Shit happens’. Boat people cooking lobster undetected on an Australian beach. Mandela’s obsequies recalling the ‘Hang Mandela’ T-shirts one or two of his cabinet bought in Brighton in 1987. Bishop shouted at in China, and shouting back. Bishop and Bambang uncertain which deal they signed, to spy or not to spy. The navy telling us tow-backs are illegal. And now, gays marrying at midnight in Canberra.
This last may prove his worst misfortune yet. Film of rejoicing brides whose marriages he plans, like Henry VIII, to annul will lose him, overnight, a million votes he will not retrieve and the High Court decision to uphold these marriages – or abolish them – half a million more. And that will be on the hundredth day of his government, or nearly.
How has it all gone so wrong? Well, the dignity he lost in Opposition is part of it. The run from the chamber. The stare. The over-flaunted hairy chest. The eye-rolling, lip-smacking, leering and smirking evasive pauses. The boastful admission he can’t be trusted to keep his word. The framing of Slipper. The getting of Thomson. The lesbian sister, burning in hell. And when the fires and typhoons came and Morrison refused to answer any questions, and Pyne ripped nine-tenths of the promised money off schoolkids, they looked like a pack of loons.
And they are, pretty much. Unhousetrained Gibsonite Papists who think global warming is what follows Christ’s return. A tongue-speaking fool who regards boat people as expendable heathens. A lunatic, Bernardi, who equates gay love with bestiality. A prime minister who refuses to apologise to a president for peeking at his wife.
I’m surprised that Tony Abbott, whom I hold in some regard, has so stuffed up. And I’m surprised that Malcolm Turnbull, with whom I once shared three women, and have liked and esteemed for thirty-five years, has not yet contrived a mutinous overthrow of the man who beat him to the leadership by only one vote and is now execrated by the O’Farrell-Napthine-Marshall wing of the party for proposing the ruin of car workers, schoolkids and, through the new Korean deal, all other surviving local industry. He has not moved yet, but Turnbull, I think, will not want to appear in Wikipedia as part of the vilest government in our history and may strike soon.
It may well be that this government will go past Thursday and the Senate will not move against it, denying supply. It may well be that Morrison will not be asked to resign for acts of diabolical incompetence that pushed us near war with Indonesia. It may well be that Pyne’s theft of nine tenths of the money promised to school kids will not be noted, or punished.
But a big summer storm is coming and not all of them will survive it.
Prove that I lie.
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