December 23, 2014

• Written by: Rossleig

A few months before the 2013 Election, I posted what (I hope) is the main image for this post. It was called Liberal Excuses Bingo, and while it could be debated that the card is full, we certainly have enough of them in row to shout “Bingo”!

Not that this a good thing.

But I notice that one of the first acts of the new SS Minister, Mr Morrison, is to cut funding to homeless groups. But we should be fair here. Obviously this has been in the pipeline for some time and it’s merely been announced now because – three days before Christmas – this is the appropriate time. After all, the Christmas narrative does involve a man, a pregnant woman and an ass who found there was no room at the inn and if it was good enough for Jesus to be homeless surely it should be good enough for you!

Mr Morrison declared his Christian beliefs with his maiden speech to Parliament and I suspect he’s trying to make many of us more of like Jesus. Or else he thinks we’re more like the ass. Whichever, he’s an “extremely decent man”, Mr Abbott assured us. After all, he “has two children”, which is a sure sign of decency. Although Mr Abbott also said that Mr Morrison knew what it was like to struggle with a mortgage, which suggests to me that a certain lack of financial acumen. After all, we all need to live between our means and not go “putting things on the credit card”, and the word “struggle” suggests that he may have borrowed more than he should have. (While some may argue that a mortgage isn’t the same thing as putting things on the credit card, they’re probably the same ones who argue that when governments borrow money at 3% that’s not the same as putting something on the credit card.)

Whatever, the Cabinet re-shuffle is a work of genius! I know this because I read it in the paper somewhere. By changing a handful of positions, the government should function much better.

As someone else said, 2014 was Abbott’s year of a horrible anus – or something like that. It began to go badly sometime around the time that the Liberals started to realise that they were, in fact, governing the country and that they’d have to start making some decisions.

The first decision was to remind us that only some promises could be kept because, well, you can’t do everything. And, although some people had tried to scaremonger before the election by pointing out that you couldn’t get rid of the Carbon Tax(?)/Price Signal(?), while keeping the tax breaks and compensation, this scaremongering did have a grain of truth to it, so they might as well get down to business and declare that they would boldly go where Labor didn’t: The Liberals had three main promises and we were to judge them on these:

1. They would stop the boats by turning them around. When people pointed out that this would breach several conventions and possibly international law, they overlooked just how little regard the current mob of “traditionalists” had for such petty red tape. They did this anyway.
2. They would repeal the Carbon Tax and Mining Tax. The Carbon tax was a great big, enormous tax on everything raising billions for the government and now they were back in charge they had no need for so much revenue because they’d have the economy booming in no time. The Mining Tax was simultaneous hardly raising anything, while being an enormous burden on mining companies. It therefore had to go for two reasons, which would seem to the economically ignorant to contradict each other.
3. Getting the Budget back in Surplus. This, of course, was the biggie. The Article of Faith. This was the justification for ignoring all those “no cuts” to this or that promises, the co-payments, levies and price signals, because the ONE thing that Australians had elected this government for, according to Abbott himself, was to get the Budget back in the black. And they will. Unlike Wayne Swan, however, who promised a surplus in 2013, the Liberals did no such thing. They merely suggested that they’d get it back in their first year, but changed that to their first term, then 2018, followed by sometime after they introduce their PPL, but, well, given the changing economic circumstances who can put a time line on any of it, hey, it’s not like we were specific about a time, just that we’d do it, and we will, just as soon as the Senate let’s abolish all those payments to people who don’t really need it like the unemployed and the sick.

Whatever, I’m content in the knowlege that when they said “no cuts”, what they claerly meant was “no cuts” before they were elected, and that they’re a party who doesn’t make promises that they won’t be able to keep, and that one day they’ll have the Budget back in the black because that was one of the major promises. You know, one of the ones that counted.

By the way, in the Liberal Christmas pantomime, who gets to play the ass?

Just in case it’s missing. (Click on image to enlarge)