So, guns were fired near children on a leaky boat we turned back to Indonesia — which did not want it.
And this was an “on-water activity” Scott Morrison won’t discuss lest it please the “enemy” in his “war”. He is behaving like a Somalian pirate now and his sanity should be investigated. He is behaving, some would say, like George W Bush.
Grounds now exist for lawyers to look into the sacking of this government.
They are bringing us near a shooting war with Indonesia. They are threatening to sell the ABC. They are ending the possibility of a calm and comfortable old age for those now fifty. They are declaring war on science, and history. In the hottest weather we have ever had, they are proposing to end the one thing we have done to cool it down.
They are shooting guns near children on the high seas.
Their deeds are part of a pattern the Right has been in for years.
They admit no mistakes. They flaunt their disasters as victories. Vietnam was a ‘noble cause’. The Surge ‘worked’. Iraq, now in its ‘birth-pangs’, is nonetheless better off than it was in 2002 — although every shopping mall and religious festival may be blown into flying chunks of meat by suicide bombers. Fukushima should not slow down our ‘progress’ to nuclear power. Though saving Holden would have saved us from recession, saving Holden was a horrible idea. Afghanistan, though a strategic catastrophe and a waste of Australian lives, was ‘bitter-sweet’.
So...if a policy fails, we keep on doing it. If it succeeds, like the Burke-Rudd Niugini Solution, we abandon it.
The Right believes in a national crisis, infinitely prolonged.
If the Niugini plan works, we must revert at once to ‘turning back the boats’, which does not work. If a simple tax rise would preserve the good things we want to keep, we must not try it. We are not here to fix things, but swell the impression of crisis, debacle, catastrophe. Though our economy was envied worldwide, it was a shameful, disastrous failure. Though ABC radio is the best such entity on earth, it must be sold off, urgently. The job of government is not to govern, but to stand at the salute while the Free Market goes thundering by.
It is time the Senate numbers examined this government’s lies, backfires, backflips and foolish policies and lawyers told them their options. An election, held now, would landslide Labor in. An election held after the ABC is sold and more and more information hidden – like Morrison’s, lately – would be much more chancy.
The time is now.
We should move, now.
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The originals of John Graham's art, featured in this piece as well as elsewhere on IA, are available for purchase by contacting the editor at editor@independentaustralia.net.
