I’ve really enjoyed the book, ‘The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing
Reign of Captain Abbott’ by Andrew P Street.
It’s cheeky, irreverent and scathing of the extraordinary few months of
the Abbott Experiment. Of course, it’s
not only Tony who gets the treatment; many of his Cabinet get short shrift as
well, and the Labor side doesn’t do much better. I
would love to quote great chunks of it but I’ll content myself with a couple of
paragraphs from the final chapters.
‘It’s easy to pretend that there was a golden era of
Australian politics when we had real
leaders and people were concerned about nation-building
and Australian values and forging a national identity and other
meaningless phrases that are all but spoken in italics. Conservative Australian
types get misty-eyed about the Robert Menzies epoch, while lefties canonise
Gough Whitlam, and both are endlessly cited as periods when Australia was led
by men of vision and principle, unlike the sorry specimens we have before us
today.
And it’s arse.
Politics in Australia – as in every country – has always and
forever been a slippery dance conducted by manipulative snakes, utopian
idealists, hardline ideologues and power-hungry careerists looking to exert
power and/or line their pockets, mixed in with dedicated, principled people
genuinely interested in making a positive contribution to their country. And right now, with Australia’s two major
parties basically offering a choice between more of the same and a bit less of
the same, the citizenry could be forgiven for thinking that these are the only
choices on offer’.
He goes on to outline his vision for better governance but I
think he has missed the point that we, the people, have already woken up to the
2-party system and are starting to vote for something else. Sadly, the extreme
Right have been quickest off the mark and are grabbing the protest vote but we
can only hope that some other more moderate voices start to fill the void.
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