Groupthink

Posts Tagged Australian politics

What we need

Mar 9

Posted by Ross Sharp in Media, Technology, The Internet | 4 Comments

Whoever it was decided to put a MUTE button on the remote control of a television set is deserving of a Nobel Peace Prize.

The MUTE button has relieved me of the tedium of listening to anything that has been said by Tony Abbott since he began banging on about the Brisbane flood levy from a couple months ago.

The MUTE button did save me from the sad and sorry spectacle of listening to more than about 12 seconds of Senator Mary Jo Fisher’s interpretive dance speech from a week or so ago, after which I switched channels to spare me the visceral horror of the visuals.

The MUTE button is my friend.

The MUTE button may well be proof that there is indeed a God, and that He/She/It is most definitely a compassionate deity.

Praise be to the MUTE button.

But we need another thing.

We need a MUTE button for the internet.

You would set up your internet MUTE button by inputting the names of anyone you could not give a flying fuck about and of whom you are sick and tired of hearing every time you click to a news site (I’m thinking Judy Moran, any Ibrahim brother who gets shot, Charlie fucking Sheen or any other dipshit celebrity having a public meltdown, a whole raft of politicians, pundits, property developers, Harvey Norman, Andrew Bolt, Pauline Hanson, anything even remotely associated with the television series “Underbelly” and so forth). And then, when you click upon a news site to find some actual fucking NEWS about some actual fucking STUFF, your MUTE button would filter any story containing those names from the page.

You could also input by subject. For example, “GREAT BIG NEW TAX!”.

Your very own, highly personalised internet filter, if you will.

I think this is an excellent idea.

Someone go make it.

Please.

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I am a politician

Feb 25

Posted by Ross Sharp in Media, Politics | 6 Comments

Julia Gillard has L!I!E!D! to the people of this great nation!

A CONSPIRACY is afoot!

We are betrayed! The people are revolting!

Millions will suffer in infernal penury as a consequence, the remainder of their wretched lives to be spent sucking rancid spots of special sauce from the discarded wrappers of Happy Meal cheeseburgers, and Alan Jones is appalled, appalled, to have been kept waiting for an interview  with this Lying Red SCUM QUEEN a whole TEN MINUTES after it was scheduled and, by God in Heaven and Christ on the cross and all that is holy on this earth and on the blessedly fluffy hereafter, we cannot have that, no, we cannot!

What does she mean when she says one thing at one point in time and something completely different at another? What does it mean when this Vacuous and Vicious Vile Vomitous Vixen has the audacity to even think she may match wits with the magnificent specimen of manly man that is the marvellous Mr. Jones and keep him waiting?

It means this …

“I am a politician.

“Like every other politician on this earth, regardless of political party or ideology, I will lie to you, I will steal from you, I will profess to giving a damn about you, even though I don’t actually give a flying fuck if you all die of cancer, I will dissemble and connive, I will make shit up and you will believe it, I will engage in all manner of scare campaigns to appeal to the basest natures of those type of squealing fuckwits who listen to commercial radio and think “A Current Affair” is a reliable source of news, I will think you are dumb enough to fall for simple-minded three or four word slogans because you always have before, and that is because a vast number of those people that we, as politicians, represent, whether as a local member, opposition leader or government leader from any political party, a vast number of our constituents are simple-minded retards with barely a brain cell in their cranium, let alone a tooth in their stupid heads.

“Like every other politician on this earth, regardless of political party or ideology, I will profess to care for the underprivileged, the frail of mind and body, the sick, the dying and the diseased, and I will be seen attending events on their behalf and I will speak with compassion and empathy and offer, on behalf of myself and my fellow travellers, our utmost sympathy and understanding to them, even though, in private, we, all of us, regardless of political party or ideology, we’d rather they were all taken out the back of a woodshed somewhere and shot through their useless fucking heads.

“Like every other politician on this earth, regardless of political party or ideology, I will try not to be too obvious about any of this, and you out there, the great unwashed masses of unthinking tuckshop-armed bogans and bowlegged boofheads in faded beer and b.o. branded t-shirts whose entire lives amount to little more than flitting from one childish, paralysing fear to another in screeching outraged hysteria because you all have the attention span of a bowl of fucking goldfish and there’s someone moved in down the street who has a deeply suspicious tan, you stupid cunts whom I have to pretend to be one with, to suck on your fucking sausage sandwiches at some crappy fete in some flyblown bumfuck town every goddamn election cycle, you stupid cunts come election time, you’ll vote for whoever the fuck promises to line your pockets with a little gold, no matter how little or how much, because you think it’s all about you, don’t you?

“Well, it isn’t.

“Because I am a politician, and like every politician on this earth, regardless of political party or ideology, it’s all about me, it’s all about us, whatever name we choose to brand ourselves with, so fuck you with the sharp end of a stick, thank you very much.

“But what I won’t do, what I definitely will not do, like that other guy, and the ones who preceded him, like this guy, is kowtow to that fat cunt with a voice like a middle-aged castrato gargling sand who goes by the name of Alan fucking Jones and who thinks he’s the centre of the known and unknown fucking universe. Fuck him and fuck the gonorrhoeal donkey he rode in on.

“Because I am a politician, and like every other politician on this earth, regardless of political party or ideology, sometimes even we have limits to the things we’re expected to do in the course of carrying out our work.

“So you can take that sausage sandwich and suck the living fuck out it for all I care, darling.”

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Brain dumping on defining politics

Jan 17

Posted by thewetmale in Media, Politics, Society | 1 Comment

Cross posted from my Tumblr and my personal institute

Politics, that word has many different meanings. The one many are most familiar with relates to party politics and trying to get elected. Under that definition we get talk of Labor v Coalition, polling, and endless horse-race journalism etc etc. But ultimately, what party apparatchiks have been forgetting for so long, and what we now see the political journosphere has also forgotten, is that the point of politics, and for most the point of government, is to try and change society in some way for the better.

Clearly people have different opinions about what that means but I’m pretty sure one thing we could all agree on is that helping people in a natural disaster like the Queensland floods is priority number one for anyone involved in politics or governance. Even for the most hardened party hack, who could only see the NBN or the stimulus spending as part of a re-election strategy, even that person would surely see this kind of tragedy, this scale of tragedy, as a time when their first role in life, their first instinct, is to help others.

In that context I find it incredibly sad that people can respond to Annabel Crabb’s latest and say “oh well, she only does politics/political analysis.” How is it not the job of someone who writes about politics and government to mention more about Anna Bligh’s efforts than the half sentence fourteen words here

Prime Minister Julia Gillard has suffered this week for two reasons; first, she was compared to an extremely useful colleague (Anna Bligh, whose ability to convey public information tautly and effectively made her indispensable), and second, she was unable to come up with much by way of national reassurance beyond the usual platitudes about hearts going out and so on.

Seriously, how caught up in the false construction that is the game of Federal Politics would you have to be to talk about a disaster as something that can be “buggered up?” How can someone write this piece and not pause halfway to think, hey, maybe there’s more to life right now than who wins the next federal election.

I don’t want to appear naive, I understand that Federal Politics is a game played 24/7 blah blah blah, and that politicians probably are thinking about their electoral prospects as this is playing out, but i really can’t comprehend how someone who doesn’t have to worry about such matters could bang out a column where they think about nothing but these kind of issues. There HAS to be more to life and political culture than who’s winning elections otherwise there is literally no point in the exercise.

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What a swell Party that was

Aug 25

Posted by Ross Sharp in Federal election 2010, Politics | 9 Comments

I was thirteen years old when Gough Whitlam was elected Prime Minister in 1972.

The first Whitlam ministry comprised two men, Whitlam and his deputy Lance Barnard.

For 14 days, these two men made roughly 40 decisions on how the country would be governed and dragged it kicking and screaming into the 20th century after a little too long in grey flannel suit and felt hat land …

The withdrawal of troops from Vietnam.
An inquiry into indigenous land rights.
Recognition of China.

Some progressive thinking took place, some innovation, some ideas, some big ideas, and you didn’t need to be an “adult” or particularly politically aware to sense something very, very different was going on. Of course, it all ended in tears a few short years later, but … c’est la guerre …

Most 13 year olds aren’t much interested in politics, and I was no exception. My major concerns and interests at that time were dealing with school, skipping school whenever I could (which was often until the day I got nabbed farting about in the storm water drains near the train tracks by the cops and escorted back to school), reading science fiction and pulling myself silly. That’s what 13 year old boys do, and anyone who says different is …

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Australian politics is not the West Wing

Jul 7

Posted by David in Politics | 10 Comments

I follow a lot of people on Twitter who are very politically aware to the point of being a bit nerdy. They’ll defy a hangover to get up and watch Insiders and tweet about it; QandA is the highlight of their week and they mourn the retirement of good politicians like normal people do when football stars hang up their boots. I admire their passion, which I share to a point. However, I note their political romanticism seems to cloud the reality that politics is severely hampered by politics. Australian politics is not something that flows along and inspires like an Aaron Sorkin script. There is no wonderful oration, wunderkind political aids who are there to do the right thing for the country, or an intelligent media to keep the public properly informed. It isn’t about idealism and good ideas, it’s about reacting to what agendas are set by unpredictable events and ensuring one gets the rhetoric right.

There is no better example of the absurdity of Australian politics than the asylum seeker issue. The facts are clear. Australia has a relatively small number of people seeking asylum. The number is a fraction of Australia’s migration intake. There is a trickle of asylum seekers not a flood. And the situation is being well managed, though it could be better handled if the government wasn’t afraid to use detention centres on the mainland to process refugee applications. It shouldn’t be as big an issue, but it is because the Liberal Party has made an art form of turning it into a border security problem; while pandering to those concerned that the skin colour of those arriving allows for further fears about the impact on Australian culture. This bullshit could have been nipped in the bud a long time ago. Instead it has been allowed to fester because we have a media organisations that by and large doesn’t question such claims, but happily reports them to suit their own agendas.

What results is a chicken-egg situation where one side of politics thinks it has traction on a particular issue and runs with it. The media whips it up verbatim with little analysis apart from op-Eds that usually preach to the converted. The public is then made to think it’s a big issue and then add their own emotional comment further inflating the supposed importance. The politicians and media then turn around say this is an issue of great public importance. So, how can we expect a government to make decisions that do not have to take all this into account?

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Compare and contrast

Jul 5

Posted by Spock... in Politics | 3 Comments

People

People

Cockroaches

Cockroaches

See? They are quite different. So can we please, please, PLEASE stop talk about them as if they are the same thing?

Thank you in advance,

Spock…

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Moron of the week attacks Australian of the year

Feb 10

Posted by David F in Politics | 7 Comments

When I was approached to contribute to this blog, I was asked to avoid the low-lying fruit. I can see the rationale for that, but I couldn’t resist commenting on this venomous little piece of spittle. It appears at the new (and ‘leading’) blog for centre-right Australians, called Menzies House. When they’re not live-blogging the Young Libs’ conference, or spruiking the virtues of free markets and virginity, some of them are attacking asylum seekers.

Patrick McGorry is a youth psychiatrist in Melbourne, who was named Australian of the Year for 2010. He made some criticisms, earlier in the years, of the Government’s policies regarding detention for asylum seekers, pointing out (not unreasonably) that they are likely to exacerbate mental illness.

Enter Menzies warrior James Darby.

Professor Patrick McGorry, newly appointed Australian Of The Year has said asylum seekers had experienced severe torture and trauma in their home countries and that people in detention needed to be processed quicker and while living in the community.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, it’s all downhill from here.

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