In Defence of Tony Abbott

This Australia Day, what could be more patriotic than coming out in defence of our glorious prime minister Tony Abbott, captain of Tame Team Australia?

Tony Abbott is a national embarrassment and the worst prime minister, by a long margin, I have had to endure in my entire life. Almost certainly he is Australia's worst prime minister ever.

I've heard it said that he combines the intelligence of George W Bush with the compassion of Margaret Thatcher. I suppose this statement was intended as an insult, but it's actually flattery since he is inferior to both of his role models in these respects.

He is a pathological liar. He is sufficiently bereft of empathy that I suggest he would meet the clinical definition of a psychopath. He doesn't think things through, believing he can make things up on the spot, yet he can't think on his feet either. He is cowardly and violent; an archetypal bully. He is spiteful. He panics easily. He is not suited to wielding any sort of power.

The media banged on and on about Julia Gillard's "lie" (which amounted to a tedious hair-splitting argument about whether an Emissions Trading Scheme counted as a Tax or not). They don't do this about Abbott. This is partly down to media bias, but also because Abbott has told so many lies it's difficult to know where to even begin. If you try to highlight just a few lies, you end up ignoring, and by implication accepting, scores of other equally bad examples of dishonesty. People have had to resort to listing his lies and the lists run into the hundreds. Check out Tracking Abbotts Wreckage; you will notice that the page is very slow to load, presumably because of its length.

His beliefs, in so far as you can tell what they are through the screen of lies and contradictions, are a mixture of the bizarre and frightening. When someone considers it an important reform to bring back knighthoods, or spend $250m putting chaplains in state schools, you really have to wonder what century they think they're living in.

For a while I was wondering whether there was more to his actions than met the eye; that beneath a veneer of jaw-dropping incompetence there was some deep and cunning scheme afoot. After all, it's not a trivial task to become Prime Minister. You surely have to a reasonably high level of brain power to be able to plot and scheme your way right to the top.

For instance, putting refugees in (what amounts to) death camps is totally evil and the sort of thing that should have those responsible up before an international tribunal, charged with crimes against humanity. Even if you had no morals, it's still undesirable in that it's an extremely expensive and inefficient option, which also breaches international law and therefore weakens your hand internationally.

Yet there are logical reasons why an intelligent (if totally unscrupulous) person might still go down this path. It's Fascism 101; if you demonise a group, you can blame them for any of society's problems, and you can appear strong - even heroic - by taking tough action against them. The benefits in this regard might well outweigh the costs.

Similarly, smashing up a government enterprise or destroying an industry might also be a rational decision if your mates can loot the wreckage.

However, the damage being done is too wide-spread for that, and the only possible scheme that seems compatible with his actions is if he were an anarchist/libertarian (or possibly even an agent of some rival power), who is selflessly sacrificing his image to destroy the state apparatus, bring the country to its knees, and tarnish forever the office of prime minister. But this doesn't seem likely; especially the self-sacrificing part.

So when am I going to get on with defending him?

Actually, I did a Tony Abbott here; that is to say, I lied. At least, I'm not going to try to find some creditable aspect of his personality that has hitherto been overlooked, and claim that as a consequence we should think less badly of him. While he may indeed have some positive characteristics (although discovering them would be like panning for gold in a sewage pond in the middle of summer), I am going to make a different point:

By concentrating on how loathsome Tony Abbott is, we run the serious risk of underestimating how bad the rest of his government is.

The destructive and idiotic policies he is trying to implement are in the main part Coalition policies. Abbott is obviously just a tool; a puppet, elevated to his current position by external forces. While some of his most idiotic ideas seem to be of his own making, he is in general following a script laid down by others.

And in this respect, he is typical of the current cabinet. Hearing Joe Hockey speak about how he finds windmills "utterly offensive" and "a blight on the landscape" brought this home to me. Hockey doesn't strike me having any aesthetic sensibilities at all and in reality probably wouldn't even notice a wind farm if he were chauffeured through the middle of one every day. He is obviously just regurgitating words put into his mouth by others.

If, as seems likely, Abbott gets a knife in the back some time soon, we should not be relieved that we have exorcised this demon. Whoever replaces him might quite easily be worse.

Imagine if we got someone who was a little bit cunning; smart enough to hide their intentions a little better and who was able to swallow their pride enough to negotiate with others.

Imagine if Abbott had been able to get Jacqui Lambie on side - and surely it would not be an onerous task for a warmonger to get an ex-military cop on side - he would not now be crippled by a hostile senate and he could get even more nasty legislation passed. In fact, imagine if he'd been able to negotiate with Rob Oakeshott and Tony Windsor (both closer in ideology to the Coalition than Labor) after the previous election - he could have formed government in 2010.

To make an analogy with the Game of Thrones; if Abbott were Joffrey, Scott Morrison would be Ramsay Bolton and Malcolm Turnbull would be Lord Baelish. Julie Bishop might be Cersei. [edit: I was also going to link Peter Dutton to Hordor, but Hordor was strong, good-natured and fulfilled a useful role.]

Swapping one of these for another is hardly cause for celebration.

I've heard it said that they wouldn't dare to replace Abbott after all of outrage they confected when Rudd was "knifed" by Gillard. And especially not by Bishop, who shares many of Gillard's characteristics (unmarried woman, no children, ex-lawyer, etc.) that the media attacked so fiercely. Sympathetic to the coalition though they are, the media wouldn't stand for it.

Like Hell they wouldn't!

They'd do a 180 degree turn so fast that the fillings would fly out of their teeth.

I can just see the Murdoch media now: Abbott would be portrayed as stepping aside gracefully in a statesman-like manner, and Bishop will reluctantly take the helm. It will all be because he was unable to sell his wonderful policies to the ignorant proles who don't understand what's good for them. He will be a martyr. Bishop will be a hero. The word "knifing" will never be uttered. If Rudd and Gillard are mentioned at all, it will only be to contrast the "civilised" and "adult" behaviour of the coalition to the "shambolic" and "vindictive" way the ALP handled a similar situation.

And of course, you'll see the media become ardent feminists overnight; at least in so far as this allows any criticism of Bishop to be written off as a misogynistic attack.

The beauty of the situation, at least from the point of view of the Coalition, is that those in the ALP have virtually no way to use this "knifing" to their advantage. Since the ALP defended Gillard in this same situation, they can't turn around and attack Bishop without having their own words turned against them. They can rail against media double standards of course, but that can simply be dismissed with the remark: "they would say that, wouldn't they".

Anyway, I'm not any good at predicting these things, but I'd be surprised if Abbott doesn't feel the cold steel between his shoulder blades within the next few months. And my money would be on Bishop wielding the knife.

If this happens, don't expect things to get any better; Abbott is merely the symptom, and not the disease.

Terrorists STILL Don't Exist

The same people who brought you "weapons of mass destruction" and Dr Haneef, have done it again. An extraordinary attack on the Muslim community by the media, culminating in theatrical raids by hundreds of police officers.

Do not say that it is an insane overreaction; that is being too generous, because it implies that there was something to react to in the first place.

Every bit of this is based on outright lies. There are no terrorists, no bombs, no plots, nothing. Some innocent people have been arrested in order to further a political agenda.

Clearly, as an individual with no contacts in the security apparatus, I can't know this for sure. But I can't know for sure that you don't have a dragon living in your garage either, and one is as likely as the other. I'll bet you any money that no one arrested was guilty of anything worse than a parking fine, and probably not even that.

That the Murdoch/Abbott coalition is going down this Fascist* path is no surprise, but what is a surprise is that the Labor party and a large chunk of its supporters are goose-stepping along behind them.

[* = I don't user this term lightly, but it legitimately describes the situation.]

What is the point in going along with Murdoch's lies (and anyone in politics must know that this is all a bunch of lies)? You can't appease him; he will always be your enemy and he will always attack you whatever you do. You can't win by out-nastying the nasties (as Rudd tried to do on refugees), because the Coalition will always be perceived to be tougher in this area.

I hear people saying that Shorten is doing the right thing by maintaining a small target and giving Abbott enough rope to hang himself with. "Soon Abbott will go too far", they say. I call bullshit on this.

The ALP have been saying the same thing ever since Abbott became Leader of the Opposition in December 2009. "He's so obviously a brain-dead thug that soon he will do something so stupid that even Murdoch won't be able cover for him," was the theory.

Meanwhile, over the subsequent five years, Abbott has made disastrous blunder after disastrous blunder. Rarely has anyone called him on it, and always the media have covered things up or spun them to his advantage. If there was any theoretical line which could have been described a "going too far", he has long ago crossed it.

To complete the metaphor; Abbott has, with the aid of Murdoch, used the rope he was given to hog-tie the ALP.

You need to use different tactics because what you are doing at the moment isn't working.

The ALP only has a 1% lead in the polls at the moment. Given the absolute train-wreck the Murdoch/Abbott government has become, this should be at least 10%; even factoring in the mass of disengaged (and outright knuckle-headed) voters.

And then there is this insanity about going back to war in Iraq.

The Vietnam War spelled out in agonising detail just how stupid and counter productive it was to go around invading other countries. Do I need to point out the extraordinary human, environmental, financial and even political cost of this disaster? The cost was unbelievable and the benefits none.

You would have thought people would have learned from this, yet they happily marched off to repeat exactly the same mistake in Iraq (with, if anything, even worse motives and not even any clear idea of what they hoped to achieve).

The same lesson was therefore repeated; this time with the aid of glove puppets and slowly spelled out in words of one syllable.

If you don't get by now that it was a really really bad idea, you cannot be thinking at even a kindergarten level. To repeat this mistake before the blood is even dry from last time is something I find difficult to comprehend.

Please, could we just dial the idiocy back down to 11?

Terrorists Don't Exist

Let's qualify that by saying that we're talking about Australia here. Other places, maybe there are some around, but over here a terrorist attack is only marginally more likely than getting gored by a unicorn.

Consider this. The last terrorist attack in Australia was the Sydney Hilton bombing outside the venue of the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. This happened in 1978. Let us discount the theory that the bomb was planted by security forces, and assume that it was in fact a deliberate terrorist attack (by people unknown and for motives that are still a mystery).

That was a long time ago. Nearly half* of the people in Australia were not even born when this happened, yet if those in power were truly concerned about terror attacks, you would think they would do their utmost to ensure that subsequent conferences of this type were secure.

[* = median age of the Australian population is 37 years as per the last census and the event happened 36 years ago.]

Yet in 2007 the Chaser team easily managed to infiltrate the APEC summit in Sydney, with one guy dressed as Osama bin Laden, and all wearing fake passes, with printed on them in red "It's pretty obvious this is not a real pass". We're talking here about an economic summit with representatives of 21 nations, including even G W Bush, being present. The mind boggles; you'd have better security at a school social.

To me this was a real smoking gun. It shows that those in charge of our security are not even slightly interested in security. They know it's just a farce.

OK, if you've been paying attention, you'll know all this already.

But some people who must realise this (and I am talking about the majority of the federal ALP) are not pulling their weight in countering the deluge of Abbott-Murdoch hysteria that's yet again flooding the media.

So let me offer some advice for you to ignore.

If legislation is proposed for the purposes of countering terrorism, don't say: "This legislation is open to being abused" - that is conceding too much. You can assume that the purpose of the legislation was only to allow the abuses to occur.

We are not talking about side-effects of an otherwise worthwhile objective, we are talking about straight-out lying to justify something that is straight-out unacceptable.

Similarly, do not criticise such legislation as being ineffective in achieving its stated goal (and I admit that I have been guilty of this). If you say "That's silly, a terrorist could easily get around it by doing X", you have already been tricked.

When we are debating what a "terrorist" would or would not do, we are implicitly admitting that terrorists a) actually exist and b) are worth worrying about. We are letting the opponent set the terms of the debate; which means we have conceded ground and are half-way to losing before we've even started.

Moreover saying this sort of thing carries the risk that those in power will say "OK, then we'll ban X too". This is what happened when some genius realised that the explosive TATP could be manufactured from relatively innocuous liquid ingredients, and led to the absolutely retarded ban on taking liquids on board aircraft. The fact that actually manufacturing the simple chemical TATP (let alone anything more sophisticated) on board an aircraft is ludicrously impractical* didn't seem to concern anyone.

[* = The owner of that site, Nick B Possum (no relation) tends to venture more deeply into the land of conspiracy theories than me, however as far as I have been able to verify, what he writes on this particular subject is technically accurate.]

If someone uses the "T" word to justify anything, the onus is on them to prove there is a problem that needs to be solved. And they won't be able to do it because there isn't one. If they say "there is a real threat, but we can't tell you for security reasons", they are asking you to take the words of a known liar, with a vested interest, on trust alone. This should be rejected as a gross insult to the intelligence.

Let's call this nonsense out for the bullshit it is.

Who will rid us of this troublesome Abbott?

Peta Credlin and her amazing evil monkey puppet
source

This post is a little unconventional as far as blog posts go because I'm not trying to reveal my deep inside knowledge and incredible insights to an adoring audience of millions (that was sarcasm, by the way), but instead I'm posing a question, because I'm having difficulties in coming to grips with exactly how best to approach the horrifying situation this country finds itself in.

With my previous post on this subject (of only five months ago, but it seems like longer) I thought it was worthwhile to list the actions and policies of the Abbott government with which I disagreed. It was a long list and I ended up having to generalise, but I thought it was worth doing; partly to raise awareness amongst those who hadn't been paying attention, and partly to dispute the assumption that "all politicians are as bad as each other and there's nothing you can do about it". [OK, I don't have any audience worth speaking of, so this was arguably a waste of time. Nevertheless, you never know who'll get here via an obscure search, or what might suddenly go viral and if we all do our bit to fight the bad memes etc. etc. ]

But now it seems things have got worse to the extent that there doesn't seem to be any benefit in listing policies or explaining why they are wrong. All but the wilfully blind can see what is happening, and all but the wilfully ignorant (or those who hope to benefit from what is essentially systematic wrecking of the country) can see that it's bad.

A couple of examples from personal experience:

A few months after the election I was working in a Northern Territory town. I won't be naming any names. This town is a red-necked place where, until recently, Aboriginal people were openly referred to by many as "coons" (now they use the word "indigenous" with an ironic wink, which is not much of an improvement) and where Rudd's Apology was greeted with foaming-at-the-mouth rage.

Two workers were trading banter and one retorted "Next you'll be saying I voted for Tony Abbott!". This, apparently, was the worst possible insult that he could imagine.

At another work-site in the North of Queensland (not quite as red-necked but hardly a hot bed of left-wing radicals), a feeling of resentment against the government seemed to hang over the place like a toxic cloud. In the past, during the worst parts of the media campaign against Gillard, you'd hear a few people sounding off here and there, but it was nothing like that this time. This time a feeling of depression and suppressed anger seemed to fill every single person in the place.

There was a worker there who rides a Harley. He is dead-set against the current fire-arms laws and desires a return to the Gold Standard (which is the identifying mark of a libertarian). I wouldn't be surprised if he had a Confederate flag flying outside of the caravan in which he lives. [I should in fairness point out that he's a really good person to work with: easy to get along with, highly skilled and willing to go to considerable personal inconvenience to do a job right. Stereotypes only go so far.]

Politically speaking, you would think he would be a natural Abbott supporter, but he is irate at the Abbott government. His opinion is that their handling of the country is so bad that they should be executed for treason. He had never said anything like this about Rudd or Gillard.

And that was before the budget came out...

So there doesn't seem to be any point in banging on about how loathsome Abbott and his partners in crime are, and why what they are doing is so disastrous. It's like an outbreak of the Black Plague; everyone gets that it's bad, and most important thing is working out what can we do about it.

So what can we do about it?

It seems to me that there is only one reason that Abbott is currently in power: the vicious, unrelenting and totally one-sided press campaign against Labor. In my entire life (and bear in mind that I've lived through the greater part of the Cold War) I have never seen such blatant bias and outright lying by such an overwhelming majority of the mainstream media.

If it was wasn't for that, there's no way Abbott could have won. He has an obnoxious personality, his political views are extremist and out of step with perhaps 90% of the population, and his party didn't go to the election with any real policies (three-word slogans don't count). In any remotely fair contest, the Coalition would have been decimated.

The fact that the media is specifically biased in favour of the Coalition (rather than, say, just being right-wing in general), is most clearly indicated by the behaviour of the Coalition itself. They seem confident to tell obvious lies and contradict themselves in the most blatant manner. The only way that they would this is if they know the media will always cover for them.

And when I say "media", I am of course talking about Rupert Murdoch.

Now, the book Coup d'Etat - A Practical Handbook [Edward Luttwak 1968] - which is a sort of 20th Century version of Machiavelli's The Prince - has the following to say:

"If a political entity is actually controlled by a group which is not structured politically, then obviously political methods cannot be used to seize power. This is the case of a country dominated by a business unit. Imagine, for example, that General Motors did control the USA, in the sense that the Presidency and Congress acted as its stooges. If that were the case, power would have to be seized in Detroit, not Washington."

So it would seem that rather than worrying about Abbott, a better strategy would be to concentrate on Murdoch. It makes more sense to destroy Sauron than waste your effort fighting his orcs and trolls.

But how can this be done?

As Luttwak has pointed out, the normal political tools - protests, petitions and so on - aren't of any use.

Boycott his papers? Maybe, but they make a loss anyway. Their purpose is to influence people and not to make money.

I'll be damned if I want to wait around for him to die off; he could hang around for another decade or more, and cause an extraordinary amount of damage in the process.

Any suggestions? Anyone?

Help, please!

Ditch the Drongo!

I went to the March in March last Sunday. This is the first protest march I have attended in quite possibly as long as 20 years. I was what you could probably describe as riled up, and not just about the "ultimate conservationists" comment I posted about last time - although that rendered me almost speechless, in the scheme of things it was simply another layer of diarrhea icing on a very large shit cake.

My apologies to any other drongos out there

 
A problem I had on the march - and I am facing a similar problem writing this blog entry - is that I didn't make a sign, because any sign that listed all of the things that were wrong with the Abbott government, would either have to use an unreadably small font or been too large to carry.

I'll try to briefly summarise how much the current government has achieved in just 6 months. To simplify things, I'll break it down into different categories of bastardry.

War on Science

• No science minister. Seriously? This is the 21^st century, and perhaps I should emphasise that this is the 21^st century AD.
• Mass sackings at the CSIRO.
• Deliberate trashing of the NBN. 
• Multiple statements to the effect that climate change isn't happening. On par with announcing the earth is flat. 

War on the Environment

• No minister for Climate Change, but has a Minister for Sport.
• Abolishing the Climate Commission [this also counts as part of the War on Science].
• Seeking to repeal the carbon price. Abbott seems to have some crazed obsession with this scheme - a relatively simple and logical measure which has been adopted by many other countries without drama - to extent of blaming every possible economic problem on it. Multiple times he had blamed the shutdown of one business or other on the dreaded Carbon Tax, only to be contradicted by the actual company involved.
• Sending a bunch of yahoos to the Warsaw Climate Change Conference to disrupt it and block progress in general.
• Appointing Dick Warburton, a climate "sceptic" to head a review into the renewable energy target.
• De-funding the Environmental Defenders Office.
• Scrapping the Home Energy Saver Scheme.
• Cutting all aid programs for environmental purposes.
• Supporting the insane shark "cull" in WA. [This one is so stupid it also counts as part of the War on Science.]
• Bullying the Great Barrier Reef authority to reverse their stand on the Abbott Point coal terminal. Just what we need; export more coal even faster, and dump 3 M tonnes of sediment on the Great Barrier Reef in order to do so.
• Green-lighting the Galilee Basin mine. An extraordinarily large coal mine in the middle of a nature reserve.
• Seeking to de-list world heritage forests in Tasmania.
• Allowing grazing in alpine national parks. This had been banned for decades for good reason.
• Removing the Standing Council on Environment and Water.
• Scrapping the Critically Endangered listing of the Murray Darling basin to allow irrigators free reign. A serious ongoing environmental problem about to get worse.

War on the Refugees

I wouldn't have thought it would have been possible to actually make the situation here any worse than it already was (putting children in concentration camps is not the action of a civilised country), however the Abbott government has somehow managed it.

• Navy personnel "allegedly" torturing people by forcing their hands onto the exhaust pipe of a boat, and then turning the boat around to Indonesia without giving medical treatment.
• Sticking people indefinitely in a hell-hole in PNG where they get bashed and even murdered.
• Separating new-born babies from their mothers.
• Plus masses of other bastardry that makes me sick to even think about.

When things get to a stage where you have to have a media blackout to prevent the bogans (many of who are quite open about wanting the refugees shot on sight) from finding out what's going on, and when even China complains about your human rights abuses, you have achieved something really remarkable.

War on the Economy

For some reason, the coalition have a reputation as good economic mangers (not, in my opinion, borne out by the facts), so you'd think they'd at least do a little better in this area, but apparently not.

• Start off by ham-stringing the economy by crippling the NBN.
• Create uncertainty about what will happen with the carbon price.
• Repeal the (already watered down) resources rental tax so that excess profits from mining go overseas rather than benefiting the economy.
• Piss off our trading partners, especially Indonesia, but also India and China.
• Then say goodbye to Holden
• and goodbye to Toyota
• and goodbye to SPC
• Hello highest unemployment in 10 years. Quite an achievement considering that Labor did better during the entire Global Financial Crisis.
• Then there's the sinister TPP (Trans-Pacific Partnership) deal. I'm not sure what to say about this one since it's a completely secret process. In so far as any information is available it appears to be the sort of agreement that a corrupt third-world dictator would sign to sell out their country for a wad of money under the table, before making a run for it. It's likely to be devastating for the economy, unless by "economy", you mean "foreign-owned multinationals".
• And that's not even counting the economic effects of trashing the environment (e.g. tourism in Tasmania accounts for 5x as many jobs as forestry, so let's assist the latter at the expense of the former).

War on Women

• Abbott taking on the job of Minister for Women. I mean, seriously, that's just insulting. If it hadn't actually happened, you'd think it was a heavy-handed satire. Even his supporters call him a Man's Man. It is so obvious that he doesn't know or care anything about women, that this has to be a calculated attack.
• His explanation for appointing only one woman in his cabinet was that the appointments were made "on merit". Given that he gave cabinet posts to the likes Peter Dutton - someone who has roughly the intelligence (and general usefulness) of a termite-riddled fence post - this would also have to be a calculated insult.

War on the Indigenous

Howard's "intervention" (which Labor, to their shame, did nothing to wind back) was already such a blow to Aboriginal Australians that it would be difficult to make things worse. Pretty much every bad thing that could have been done, already had been done. Nevertheless, Abbott managed to find a way.

• Savagely cutting the budget of the National Congress of Australia’s First Peoples, such that they had to sack a third of their staff.
• Cutting Indigenous legal services by $13.4 million, while at the same time providing $2.2 million in legal aid for farmers and miners to fight native title claims.

Miscellaneous Bastardry

• Overriding ACT law on gay marriages - and not just doing this to appease some dinosaur like Fielding (which would be evil but at least understandable in political terms), but because he is actually against the idea himself. Moreover, Abbott condones the incredibly reactionary statements of Cory Bernardi, whose views on "non-traditional" families are remarkably close to those of Vladimir Putin (except that most likely Putin is doing it for cynical political motives, whereas Bernadi actually believes what he is saying).
• Abolishing AusAID. Huge cut backs in international aid generally.
• Cutting compensation for bushfire victims. Just after a big bushfire.
• Attempting to block funding to organisations who refuse corporate sponsorship on ethical grounds. Even from tobacco companies.
• An absolute extravaganza of royal commissions into even the most trivial actions of the previous government.
• An orgy of union-bashing and attempts to reduce working conditions, even going as far as introducing legislation to allow people to work for half of the minimum wage, and be exempt from health and safety laws.
• Multiple acts of bastardry against the unemployed, students, the disabled, and the less well off in general. This even goes so far as cutting the welfare payments to the orphans of soldiers.

You can see that at this point I've started to lose patience (it's like cataloguing individual turds in a giant sewage pit) and been lumping things together that deserve to be spelled out individually. But hopefully you can see why I consider this to be by far the worst Australian government ever. Even Bjelke-Petersen didn't manage to do as much damage as quickly, and his damage was limited to only one state.

Anonymous are taking up the fight, but, like in V for Vendetta, we will all need to help. 

However, the real problem we have here is not Tony Abbott.

Abbott is not a hereditary monarch, nor did he seize power by a coup d'etat. He was democratically elected by the voters of this country.

Democracy is often treated like a gift bestowed upon a people, like having a good climate or fertile soil, but with the additional advantage that it somehow makes you morally superior as well. In fact, democracy is a responsibility, or even a burden, imposed on a people. You get the right to choose, but it doesn't work unless you put in the effort to choose well.

It seems that people put more effort into decorating their living rooms, or even preparing for the Zombie Apocalypse, than choosing their government. People do sudoku or cryptic crosswords for fun, but aren't willing to fill in the senate ballot paper below the line. We are now reaping the results. And don't give me that "whoever you vote for, a bastard gets in" bullshit. Some politicians are demonstrably less bad than others; try voting for them for a change and see what happens.

Maybe I should expand on this last point. The process whereby politicians are elected is exactly like the process of natural selection. The environment dictates the nature of the animals within it. Those individuals who most suit the environment prosper, whereas those who are unsuited die out.

But the important point here is that natural selection works slowly. A giraffe does not spring fully-formed into the world, instead an environment which favours long-necked grazing animals gradually pushes evolution in that direction.

And so it is with politics. You can't expect a politician who is perfect in every way to stand up for election; instead you have a number of people to choose from, all of whom have various flaws. What you need to do is rank the available candidates in order of desirability and cast your vote accordingly (fortunately we have a preferential voting system which allows us to do this). If you create an environment that favours the better politician, you will get better and better politicians each time. Even if every candidate is unacceptably bad, you can still choose the least bad one. Casting a vote in this situation is not futile; in fact it is critically important. If you continuously maintain the selective pressure in the right direction you will eventually get your giraffe. If you stop applying pressure, it will be even worse next time.

If you punish a better candidate out of spite for not being perfect, you are applying selective pressure in favour of a worse candidate.

If you let your vote be dictated by biased mainstream media, you are applying selective pressure in favour of Rupert Murdoch's interests - and almost certainly against your own.

So everyone; next time you vote; take this important task seriously, invest a little bit of time and energy and don't be a fucking idiot.

He who lives by the chainsaw...

Recently, in a breathtaking piece of doublespeak, Tony Abbott has praised loggers as being the "ultimate conservationists".

Let me tell you about some of these "ultimate conservationists".

In the Victorian Central Highlands lives the Leadbeater's Possum, an incredibly cute native animal related to the Sugar Glider. It is currently listed as Endangered, a classification under consideration of being upgraded to Critically Endangered.

A Leadbeater's Possum [Photo from Healesville Sanctuary site] 
What kind of monster would want to hurt this animal?

Unfortunately, this possum requires trees of a certain age to provide nesting hollows. This puts it in conflict with loggers (VicForests in this case) who wish to cut these trees down. The usual story.

However, where things become really nasty is that VicForests are not merely damaging Leadbeater's Possum habitat incidentally, but deliberately and systematically going out of their way to destroy it, in a calculated effort to wipe out the Leadbeater's Possum. The logic being that when the possum is extinct, there will no longer be any impediment to widespread logging.

One trick was bulldozing wide and unnecessary fire breaks directly through prime Leadbeater's Possum habitat (and in fact even bulldozing monitoring stations constructed for the possums in the process). This happened in 2007 and extensively in 2009. Another good trick is "accidentally" logging the wrong area; usually the damage is done before anyone notices and the remarkably compliant DPI merely shrugs their shoulders. According to an insider, regulations are regularly flouted with impunity.

MyEnvironment has specific details on much of this, but even they don't have the full story.