Kathrine Murphy makes the point everyone understands, whether they be on the Left or Right:
This morning, on the wireless, I heard the finance minister, Mathias Cormann, say the government wasn’t making cuts to the ABC.I had missed the bit where Abbott now claimed the Clean Energy Finance Corporation as his own. Has he changed policy on that? Or is it just another example where he tells whichever audience before him what he thinks they want to hear? I think we all can guess which is most likely, can't we?
The day before, I heard the communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, say Tony Abbott hadn’t actually promised before last September’s election not to cut the budgets of the ABC and SBS. If Abbott had said something like that, then he didn’t mean it; and more
likely, we’d all just misunderstood what the prime minister had said.
Also on Wednesday, I heard the prime minister tell the French president, Francois Hollande, that part of the Australian government’s policy arsenal to combat the risks associated with climate change involved funding an agency called the Clean Energy Finance Corporation.
What he didn’t tell the French president was the government intends to abolish the CEFC.
In politics at the present time, we are drowning in nonsense. The nonsense waves are not only lapping, elegantly, at our ankles, they are picking us all up and dumping us head first into the sand.
The Abbott government is performing so many contortions, and running so rhetorically ragged, it’s hard to see if anything coherent is actually going on.
It might be the other way Steve. Abbott doesn't really care about what Aussies think of him, he now considers himself a world leader and is probably more concerned about what other world leaders think of him.
ReplyDeleteThe situation has now become ridiculous. We are living in a fantasy land of Liars and Lies. I read that article this morning and saw Turnbull's and Cormann's pathetic attempts to turn a lie into truth.
Um, yeah - the world leaders are the "other audience", compared to the Australian public. The puzzling thing about Abbott is that he seems to never realise that saying different things to different audiences is now always recorded and going to come out.
ReplyDeleteI wrote about this today.
ReplyDeleteWhat gets people goat up is the reference of having not broken a promise.
They treat the people like Catallaxy readers
It's not puzzling Steve, Abbott is losing cognition. Stress can the final trigger to increase neurodegeneration to dangerous levels. This change in Abbott has happened since he became PM. The preconditions were there, from boxing, the stress of the job, especially combined with lack of sleep are finishing his neurons off.
ReplyDeleteWell, when we see him being dragged off to the nursing home, readers will be able to say they heard it first at Opinion Dominion. :)
ReplyDelete(Mind you, Reagan kept going in office with early Alzheimers.)
In We Are Our Brains the neuroscientist Dick Swaab notes that as early as 1984 Reagan showed clear signs of cognitive decline. Abbott is far worse. That book is a good read, very good introduction to some recent findings in neuroscience.
ReplyDeleteLots of people are now seeing this issue with Abbott Steve. My background in studying the long consequences associated with mild brain injury made it very obvious but now anyone can see it.
BTW. Read the comments on this. Aussies are giving Pyne merry hell over starting an online petition to stop closure of the ABC operations in Adelaide. Great fun.
http://www.change.org/p/chairman-james-spigelman-ac-qc-and-the-board-of-the-australian-broadcasting-corporation-abc-the-abc-must-not-close-its-production-house-in-adelaide