Bernard's on the money

Bernard Keane is a bit of an odd fish, but sometimes he seems right on the money.  His column yesterday is just excellent, and here are some extracts:

...this dissonance between what the Coalition said in opposition and what it now says isn’t merely about being mugged by reality, or even about breaking promises. The weekend’s silliness about freezing MPs’ pay, announced triumphantly in a drop to News Corp papers, was highly symbolic. The Rudd government had done precisely the same thing — but who should have railed against that but Tony Abbott himself, who labelled it a “populist stunt” while, apparently, living hand-to-mouth on his post-2007 salary. It demonstrated how, on virtually any issue, from climate change to paid parental leave to the economy to taxation to political consistency itself, it is straightforward to find a quote in which Tony Abbott has declared, hand on heart, entirely the opposite to his current position.

And:

“I’m not playing word games,” Hockey averred, hilariously, to Laurie Oakes during one such discussion. Indeed, it’s less like playing word games and more like waterboarding the English language. It’s beyond casuistry; it makes John Howard’s legendary parsing of his own statements look epistemologically rigorous.

 And this, which is, I think, a fair summary of the state of modern politics:

Some, like John Quiggin, argue that a lack of interest in facts is increasingly a characteristic of the Right — that it’s in the Liberals’ DNA, so to speak — which overlooks that relativism has been a defining characteristic of much of the scholarship from the cultural Left from the 1970s onward and is still to be found adorning identity politics. It is true, however, that progressive parties like Labor, especially, in Australia, and the Democrats in the US, have struggled to find a way to counter how politicians of the Right have freed themselves from the shackles of consistency and evidence. But for now, the most sound analytical approach is to ignore what the Coalition says and focus entirely on who benefits from its use of power. That will provide the most basic test of its first budget.