Let’s try a thought experiment: imagine the Rudd government had, within a few short months of being elected, fallen significantly behind Brendan Nelson’s opposition in the polls; imagine that it had produced a budget universally panned as unfair, one that it struggled to get through the Senate, that Cabinet was leaking like a sieve without any wire mesh, that treasurer Wayne Swan had made repeated gaffes and been forced to apologise and was widely regarded as a growing liability, that corruption in the NSW Labor Party had forced a Labor minister to stand aside within months of being sworn in, that Kevin Rudd had consistently negative personal ratings and at times fell behind Nelson as preferred PM, that Rudd was so unpopular, state Labor leaders preferred he kept away from them during their election campaigns, that Labor had announced it was doubling the budget deficit, and if it was reliant on a political freak show of independent and minor party senators to secure passage of its bills.
And imagine if the Rudd government had resorted to national security in an effort to take the focus off its domestic woes, and it had failed to restore its fortunes, leaving it still trailing the Coalition?
Now imagine how all that would have been reported — and not just by the Coalition cheerleaders at News Corp, but by the entire media? You wouldn’t have been able to click on a news website without seeing “debacle”, “crisis”, “fiasco” and “Whitlamesque” in every political story.
It’s true that in some areas, Labor gets the benefit of the doubt from the media — for example, journalists are hyper-sensitive to any statement from Tony Abbott regarding gender issues, in a way that they aren’t for Labor or other figures — witness the relatively mild criticism Clive Palmer drew for his personal smear of Peta Credlin, versus the likely reaction if Abbott had said something similar about an opponent’s childlessness. But it’s impossible to imagine that, if Labor were in a similar position a little over a year into its first term to what the Coalition is in now, the media atmosphere would not be far more febrile.
And it would be more febrile still if a minor party and key swing-vote senator had gone rogue and declared she wouldn’t pass any government legislation unless her demands were met, as Tasmanian PUP Senator Jacqui Lambie threatened today (imagine if she’d been a Greens senator!). “Labor hostage to rogue senator,” the headlines would have screamed. Lambie has, right from her election, looked the most likely PUP candidate to go off the reservation — indeed, the PUP is now marked more by people leaving its ranks than joining them, as Clive Palmer’s electoral popularity begins to slide. Now she threatens the government’s legislative agenda just when it has worked out a way to deal with Palmer himself.
This week continued the run of bad news for the government. Someone in cabinet leaked not once but twice — first on Monday to Phil Coorey on how Joe Hockey and Andrew Robb had (correctly) argued in favour of joining the Chinese-led development bank, only to be headed off by Abbott and Bishop — and then to Dennis Shanahan on Abbott telling his ministers to get their act together and stop jockeying (geddit?) for position. Despite the government going full kitchen sink on national security, Newspoll showed a worsening in its position — indeed the result was so bad it was consigned to page 2 of The Australian. Hockey produced another trademark howler, on tertiary education. The issue of jailing journalists over revealing Special Intelligence Operations continues to dog the government.
As has been the usual case this year, international matters will be a welcome distraction for the government, with APEC in Beijing next week, followed by the G20 meetings in Fortress Brisbane, allowing Abbott to mingle with world leaders and keep the focus off his government’s domestic woes — although hopefully without discussions straying onto climate change. Even then, however, Abbott has made life unnecessarily difficult for himself with his “shirt-front” rhetoric about Vladimir Putin, which voters thoroughly enjoyed but which requires some form of follow-through beyond a post-meeting “we had a robust exchange of views”. What are the odds Abbott seeks to manufacture a Lathamesque handshake with the Russian kleptocrat in front of the cameras?
Then again, Kevin Rudd’s and Julia Gillard’s international performances were subjected to similar microscopic examination by the media, with every stumble, literal or otherwise, endlessly analysed. Let’s see if Abbott’s performance over the next 10 days gets similar scrutiny.
52 thoughts on “‘Ditch toxic Tony!’ — and other headlines you’ll never read”
Graeski
November 7, 2014 at 3:57 pmCan I have some of what Tamas is smoking?
zut alors
November 7, 2014 at 4:15 pmSurely Tamas posted these remarks as the result of a dare.
JMNO
November 7, 2014 at 4:24 pmIt is interesting isn’t it? The likes of Peter Hartcher and Michelle Grattan provide a reasonable critique of the Government’s performance but where is the hysteria and condemnation they flung at Gillard every time they put pen to paper or fingers on the keyboard? Not there.
Gillard said ‘carbon price but no tax’ and Michelle Grattan couldn’t write her name without attaching ‘carbon tax broken promise’. Abbott has broken or tried to break every promise he made apart from the promises he shouldn’t have made (carbon and mining taxes and stop the boats with Hitleresque policies). Where’s the outrage?
And I read in the Saturday Paper a more extensive report by Paul Bongiorno on what Shorten said to the Christian Lobby. It was a good speech. Was it reported? Only the bit about supporting gay marriage.
Understand that Murdoch news is Liberal but what about Fairfax?
Dogs breakfast
November 7, 2014 at 4:30 pmJMNO – exactly.
Whitlam changed Australia from a backwards loooking backwater, amid chaos.
Tony is just a re-constituted Billy McMahon. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, worst post-war government by a long way.
Peter Hartcher’s kid gloves treatment of TA compared to Gillard is particularly galling.
Tamas Calderwood
November 7, 2014 at 4:44 pmI’m actually quite serious guys, but I had a laugh at some of your comments too.
1) Stopping the boats is a big deal. 50,000 illegal immigrants were a big deal. 1200 dead people was a big deal. The billions and billions in detention costs were a big deal. Yet all of this will simply fade away now because the problem is solved.
2) The world hasn’t warmed for 18 years, so it looks like we didn’t need that carbon tax!
I think you guys need to get used to Abbott, because I’m tipping him to win the next election. I know that will confuse you all, but maybe boats and deficits and wasteful spending matter to a majority of Australians.
max
November 7, 2014 at 4:52 pmThere you have it, Tamas is a climate change denier that thinks we’re somehow spending less on immigration today than we were under Labour. You are the epitome of delusion.
klewso
November 7, 2014 at 4:58 pmSuper theory.
max
November 7, 2014 at 5:06 pm“Each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850. The period from 1983 to 2012 was likely the warmest 30-year period of the last 1400 years in the Northern Hemisphere, where such assessment is possible (medium confidence). The globally averaged combined land and ocean surface temperature data as calculated by a linear trend, show a warming of 0.85 [0.65 to 1.06] °C2 over the period 1880 to 2012, when multiple independently produced datasets exist (Figure SPM.1a). {1.1.1, Figure 1.1}
In addition to robust multi-decadal warming, the globally averaged surface temperature exhibits substantial decadal and interannual variability (Figure SPM.1a). Due to this natural variability, trends based on short records are very sensitive to the beginning and end dates and do not in general reflect long-term climate trends. As one example, the rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998–2012; 0.05 [–0.05 to 0.15] °C per decade), which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951 (1951–2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 0.14] °C per decade). {1.1.1, Box 1.1}
Ocean warming dominates the increase in energy stored in the climate system, accounting for more than 90% of the energy accumulated between 1971 and 2010 (high confidence), with only about 1% stored in the atmosphere. On a global scale, the ocean warming is largest near the surface, and the upper 75 m warmed by 0.11 [0.09 to 0.13] °C per decade over the period 1971 to 2010. It is virtually certain that the upper ocean (0−700 m) warmed from 1971 to 2010, and it likely warmed between the 1870s and 1971. {1.1.2, Figure 1.2}”
An excerpt from the IPCC’s latest report that directly challenges the “no warming for 18 years” theory.
tonyfunnywalker
November 7, 2014 at 5:22 pmNoted was the Rudd Gillard snub at the Whitlam memorial service but not the bad mannered snub by Abbott the Noel Pearson memorial speech.
The Abbott government is in chaos there is jockeying everywhere for the leadership with Bishop and Morrison both fighting for the inside barrier.
I agree the softly softly of the press is sickening more prepared to attack Shorten and Plibersek than Abbott on trivia.
I am regularly censored by Fairfax by trying to redress the balance with references to other parts of the Life of Brian which is becoming a parady on Abbott– ” He is not the Messiah he claimed to be — he is just the Naughty Boy”.
The Messiah syndrone of narcissism and the distructive synchophantic praise from the Murdoch press remains.
This government is a failure and unlike Whitlam it has acheived absolutely nothing of note.
The carbon tax/ mining tax/ and even stopping the boats dredged the sewers of poor parliamentary practice in their execution.
The fuel levy and the financial planners charter — were acts of political cowardise and the secrecy and deceipt regarding the meta data retention again smacks of a government afraid to face its critics for fear of being ” found out “.
Note that the savage critics and the attack dogs are mute on the corruption surrounding political donations and donations for questions.
If the Fairfax Press is to be believed the NSW Liberals are leaving in droves as the rank and file are ignored by the power of vested interests and again the odium of branch stacking and political donantions remains even as ICAC is sitting.
For the NSW Government to ” lose ” 9 sitting members to the odium of corruption pales the Union Royal Commission into insignificance where the revalations so far were all known in the first place or contrived as a witch hunt and may still be an “own goal” for the Liberals if illegal collusion is found to be the case with the emplotyers during the establishment of the slush Funds.
What would happen if the Unions covering the East West Link were entertained at the best restaurants and given the best spots at the Melbourne Cup. The Union is pilloried but and the silence from the Napthine Government and the Victorian Media is deafening and the decision maker keeps his job. The NSW premier resigned over a $3000 bottle of Grange –so where is the difference.
Where does Hockey go now — his tax avoidance stance — now we know who the culprits are I await the “punishment promise’.
Will Hockey? Abbott have the guts to put the tax payer funded East / West project out for re tendered now we know that Lend Lease has been involved in tax minimisation?
When will Hockey/ Abbott sack Peter Costello — the Future Fund is a government instrumentality headed up by former LNP Treasurer =- can things get worse for the Liberals I wonder?
James O'Neill
November 7, 2014 at 5:45 pmAccording to my dictionary “kleptocrat” means either a thief or an exploiter. If you have evidence that Mr Putin is either you should present it. Otherwise it is simply another cheap smear against one of the most effective and (within his own country) popular Presidents in the world today.
Why doesn’t Crikey have an honest appraisal of modern Russia; the events in Ukraine; what really happened with MH17; and the hugely important developments with BRICS, the SCO and the closer co-operation between Russia and China on oil, gas and infrastructure developments? Cheap slurs only put you in the same class as the Murdoch rags.