“Is there some change you need to see, or is this another distraction?”

Well, it certainly has been a while. How have you been? I’ve been fine.

There have been plenty of occasions on which I’ve been tempted to blog about something, but never quite got around to it. Well, today, I’m actually going through with it.

And wouldn’t you know, the topic is one again insanity from the far right. Here’s the opening paragraph of a piece written by none other than “gay, church-y loser” (his daughter’s words, not mine) Tony Abbott in The Australian. It’s entitled The Choice will be Clear-Cut, and carries the by-line, “We must make the case for reform.”

MY former boss, John Hewson, once told his staff that he could live with losing an election but not with failing to adopt policies that would change Australia for the better. In this, the former opposition leader had discerned a great truth: what’s the point of winning elections if you don’t make a difference? Although his policy ambitions turned out to exceed his ability as a political marketer, his Fightback manifesto was a sign of the Liberal Party’s readiness to put the long-term good of the country ahead of short-term political gain.

I’m sorry — is this the same Tony Abbott who capitalised on uninformed climate change scepticism in his party to overthrow his own leader? That Tony Abbott? The hypocrisy is so potent that it might as well materialise, so overpowering is the rejection of reality it requires. It would probably weigh 100kg to the cubic centimetre and unlock the secret to faster-than-light travel.

Let’s consider a series of propositions.

• His alternative to a carbon trading scheme (a “market solution” that would force big polluters themselves to foot the bill of making the country “carbon neutral”) is huge government investment in green projects that creates no incentive for the polluters to cease polluting to any extent.
• Now, the money for this has to come from somewhere, and selling Medibank Private won’t be a big enough windfall; it would implicate either higher taxes, service cuts elsewhere, or a combination of the two.
• How can this be reconciled with his saying in the very same article that his “Liberal Party is for […] smaller government, [and] lower taxes”? This isn’t a question of whether you can both have cake and eat it, but how to afford the cake in the first place — especially with Barnaby flailing his arms and suggesting that Australia can’t repay its sovereign debt as it is (though at least he was berated by Treasury).
• More to the point, Abbott has repeatedly quipped that a carbon trading scheme would be a “great big new tax on everything” for all Australians (and he didn’t fail to squeeze it into this article) because of the greater costs consumers would initially pay for electricity, etc. So who is going to foot the bill of the regime he has conceived of to reduce carbon emissions?

I’m not pro-Labor or anti-Liberal as a rule — and please don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to write propaganda —  but the opposition has been a farce ever since Turnbull was kicked from the top position (and I know I’m not the only one of that opinion, since he was very well loved by the Q&A audience the other week). What surprises me is that people are lapping up everything Abbott says.

Rudd supposedly makes an sexist statement about female uni students pursuing postgraduate studies to avoid settling down and starting a family; it gets a lot of attention and gives fodder to the comments that he’s two-faced, insincere, has a dreadful true persona hidden under the layers upon layers of façades forged by working in bureaucracy, etc. Abbott says in no uncertain terms in an interview that he believes virginity is a “gift” a woman can give to her husband, and the commentariat either just roll their eyes and wave it away, or apologetically explain that they would also want their daughters to be careful when it comes to sex (purposefully failing to address the palpable misogyny).

But it’s bizarre for no one except ABC journalists to point out the obvious fact that the Liberal party not supporting a “market solution” when it comes to reduction of carbon emissions just makes no sense. Abbott’s scare-mongering in this regard isn’t “good policy”, it truly is absolutist opposition to government policy purely and only because one is in opposition.

An attitude which he wrote this piece in The Australian to say that he didn’t have.

Well, have I got it wrong? Do you have some other perception? Perhaps a witty observation about something tangentially related? Even if not, leave a comment!

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