Scotty from Marketing is not up to the job of leading this nation through the current crisis, writes investigations editor Ross Jones.
THIS IS BULLSHIT. We have an advertising failure running what should be wartime crisis economy.
Big mistakes have been made and there is no undoing them. Unnecessary pain is being inflicted on business, both small and big end of town.
Check Centrelink, with its uncontrolled queues of impoverished supplicants lining up cheek-by-jowl, incubating and spreading as they beg for a handout.
We are led by a politician who believes in fairies and thinks speaking to them in tongues is perfectly reasonable. Clear, unambiguous advice is as rare as a three-legged magpie.
If we persist in allowing neoliberals and their nut-bag hangers-on to define our response to this existential crisis as a problem about the economy or the (now irrelevant) share-market, there is only one outcome — and it is not good.
The problem is, how do we get rid of them without creating a leadership vacuum?
Australia is in the grip of the greatest collective anxiety since the first colonists nearly starved to death just before slaughtering the Indigenous population.
We need leadership, maybe a single overarching, empowered authority, but this is not the time for discussion, this is time for informed decision. And control.
Jesus, is this issue fraught with problems?
But when you see Morrison wooing the media and see those publishing idiots who still think clickbait is a thing, you just know something has to be done soon to avert the onset of an anarchic zeitgeist. With all its consequences.
I am asking all MPs, of all parties, to stand up for Australia, shed your partisan commitment, drop party allegiances and bicamerally, with no political prejudice, choose from one of your own a person who can stand up and make sober, informed decisions then devise and execute a strategy to stave off the worst excesses of what is looming as a very trying time.
Not someone who waves his arms in the air in faux-rapture. Nor, for that matter, someone who delights in locking people up.
You can change the leadership. Cross the floor if you have to.
As a note to all MPs, it’s the end the world as you know it (apologies to REM). Capitalism as we knew it is finished. Kaput. That’s it.
Long gone are the days of donating saucepans to make Spitfire wings to waste the Bosch. WW2 was a time when recovery and restoration of normality were just over the horizon. Attainable.
Bleak prospects at times, but always possible.
Now, no aspect of wealth is worth a pinch. And it never will be again, not in your lifetime anyway.
Everyone’s dreams are shattered, gone like fairy dust, leaving only a stunned populous completely unsure of what to do.
This is a dangerous place.
To avoid complete societal breakdown, until this thing is over Australia must:
- pay all its unemployed a living wage or risk millions of starving poor;
- freeze the sharemarket or see the previously wealthy join the starving poor;
- suspend all commercial contracts;
- suspend all commercial and personal debt repayments; and
- waive residential rents.
And probably a lot more — these necessities would be only a part of what needs to be done. And that is to basically freeze everything to do with money until the crisis can be considered effectively dealt with.
Nominate a date, say 7 March 2020, lock everything in amber, just as it was on that date — until this thing is over.
What can be considered over? I don’t know, I am not an epidemiologist, but it should be an epidemiologist who decides when it is, not a politician.
We are all of us in this together. If we go down we go down together. If we recover, we recover together.
A virus pays no heed to who you are and if the neolibs aren’t careful they’ll find themselves on the bottom of the poverty pile on the other side of this horror.
It is the duty of all Australian politicians to stand up. Now.
Empower someone (plural or not) with a brain willing to take on and, crucially, understand the greatest threat Australia has ever faced.
You must do this.
But, of course, you won’t. Cowards.
On the bright side, I don’t care about apostrophe’s anymore.
Investigations editor Ross Jones is a licensed private enquiry agent and the author of 'Ashbygate: The Plot to Destroy Australia's Speaker'. You can follow Ross on Twitter @RPZJones.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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