Steve Waterson*
Begging your indulgence, I’d like to revisit an old theme this week. At the height of the Covid interregnum, when governments abrogated their duty to act in the interests of the Australian population and instead handed control of our borders, schools, aged-care homes, lives and freedoms to unelected bureaucrats and medical “experts”, I took some bitter comfort in mocking the clueless politicians who pretended to be in charge.
There were others who joined me, but I believed we’d left the stage until a headline in this newspaper on budget day surprised me. “Tax Creep Will Eat Your Budget Handout,” it said, above a picture of the Treasurer. That’s the spirit, I thought, a bold and appropriately disrespectful title for Dr Chalmers. In fact it’s a fair descriptor of government ministers in any portfolio, particularly our Energy Creep and Immigration Creep, all the way up to the Prime Creep; charlatans all, who misdiagnose maladies then apply the wrong remedy.
Ultimately pointless, I know, but it’s hard not to be judgmental about our political representatives. The American sage Jack Handey, whose works are a blueprint for life, advises restraint. Before judging someone, he says, you should walk a mile in their shoes (in the pollies’ case, slip-ons; you wouldn’t trust them to do up their own laces). “That way,” Handey says, “when you criticise them you’re a mile away, and you have their shoes.”
Happily I’m many miles from Canberra, and have my own shoes – “Too many, Imelda,” says my wife – but even at this distance I can spot utter incompetence, and grow tired of hearing our politicians are “doing their best”. I would “do my best” if forced to remove your appendix or land a passenger jet, but no one in their right mind would entrust those tasks to me, because it would result in catastrophic failure.
Yet this is what we tolerate in government: unqualified buffoons who issue permits to dig up coal and iron ore they’ve forbidden us to use, so China can turn them into ridiculous cars, windmills and solar panels to sell back to us at a succulent profit.
But where the climate’s involved, says the minister, “the cost of inaction will always outweigh the cost of action”, a facile mantra that’s hard to test, because the claimed cost of inaction is as high as best serves your zealotry, while the cost of action is stamped top secret and will never be revealed.
Meanwhile their mastery is on show in other areas of responsibility: a trillion dollars in debt; an immigration policy that is the envy of the (third) world; runaway rorting of NDIS and welfare payments; medieval antisemitism; Indigenous people worse off than their distant ancestors, despite the billions spent; kids leaving school with minimal education, but who cares, because there will be no jobs for them in our atrophied economy. And the pension-padded architects of this chaos smugly grin and tease each other for media soundbites across the parliamentary chambers.
I hoped we had hit the bottom of the barrel of government stupidity during Covid, but no, the shameless malfeasance and ineptitude, brazen lies and arrogant obfuscation continue to burrow away at the nation’s foundations, undermining our future while the politicians congratulate themselves on their brilliant achievements. Sadly, self-delusion remains the only field of endeavour in which they display any imagination or enthusiasm.
“If it weren’t so sad it would be funny,” people say, but of course it actually is funny. Our formerly serious, sensible, substantial country is being turned into a preposterous joke by an ugly mob of grasping, unprincipled, talentless clowns. If we don’t have the stomach to do anything about them, we should at least join in the fake laughter.
*Steve Waterson, Associate Editor, The Australian (published by permission)
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