Where is Tony Abbott and what has he achieved since becoming prime minister? He’s been in France skiing and done very little besides, says Rodney E. Lever.
WHERE HAS TONY ABBOTT BEEN and what has he achieved so far as Prime Minister of Australia in his first four months of power and a free holiday?
For the rest of us, all we had was weeks of blazing heat followed by a pattern of raging bushfires exceeding anything in the past and which may herald a likely future for our country — the flames surely encouraged by Abbott’s promise to scrub the carbon tax.
He disappeared altogether in December to enjoy a European holiday with his family, I believe. How much of that holiday was at the Australian taxpayers’ expense is something we may never know.
Compare this with Gough Whitlam.
Just twelve hours after counting had proved his victory he was in Canberra with Lance Barnard organising his office and preparing legislation, including one piece that would immediately bring home the Australian troops and conscripts from Vietnam, a war that was already lost, anyway.
After Tony Abbott returned from his holiday in France ‒ a sojourn in the snow that must have cost a heap ‒ he presented himself for interviews with a few favoured radio shock-jock millionaires, who peppered him with soppy questions that Dorothy Dix might have written; then he turned up on the breakfast program of the (Lachlan) Murdoch-owned Channel Ten network, where the questioning appeared to be pre-scripted, so he could answer them without those long pauses and the weird, menacing stare that he saves for real interviews by real reporters.
The audience for Channel Ten, I understand, is restricted to people who don’t read newspapers (because most of them can’t read anyway) and is slowly going broke.
He has made no more promises and appears to have forgotten entirely the promises he made in 2013.
Of course, that was last year. This year is different. The election is over.
There is no evidence that he visited any of the sites of the most extreme bushfire experienced in Australia’s entire history. No one was there to shake the hands of the firemen risking their lives.
I seem to remember that the Melbourne Herald-Sun once destroyed the career of a Victorian police commissioner, who went out to dinner with friends one evening - shock-horror - while a bushfire was raging in that state.
While Abbott was continuing to enjoy all the perks of his current job without appearing to bother with any of the work that a prime minister is expected to do, his immigration chief, Scott Morrison, was seeming to be about to launch a war on our nearest neighbour, Indonesia, using gunfire to deter asylum seekers and to hell with the Indonesian rights in their own oceanic perimeters.
Morrison blames all this on the Australian navy, whose members must be writhing in fury at the suggestion that they could not navigate their warships accurately in the Timor Sea, where the locals manage to do so expertly every day in tiny fishing boats.
The somewhat uncomfortable army general who was also forced to apologise was the very model of carefully restrained fury.
So far, the Abbott Government seems to have a script that harks back to those old black and white cowboy and indian movies that Australian kids enjoyed for sixpence on a Saturday afternoon.
Except that these cowboys now represent the government of Australia.
We are not even at the end of January. It does not bode well for the year 2014.
What will February bring?
Hopefully, at least, a defeat for the Liberals in Griffith, as the fury of the voters there reflects the feelings of the rest of the country.
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.
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