Winston Churchill… lucky to be Winston and his want-to-be imitators aren’t remotely close.
John Griffiths.
And thus is born the mindset of the Young Liberal. A mindset then nurtured by the ghost of Winston Churchill who saved the world by being right when everyone else was wrong.
The problem being that all those bright young boys in Australian schools are not Winston Churchill circa 1940. They’re not the last flowering of a globe-spanning empire with years of experience in the real world, they have not been hardened in war and they have not been raised at the very height of a global aristocracy.
Winston was damn lucky to be Winston and his want-to-be imitators aren’t remotely close.
Which brings us to the alarmed masses of pundits and politicians wittering that Australia is in danger of becoming ungovernable.
Parties that lie about their policies at elections get turfed out the next time we get to vote. Somehow this is a failing of the electorate, we have been led to believe in recent weeks.
For a moment let us drop the slipper into Labor. The idea that one could massively overhaul education funding ala Gonski, move disability into a golden era and put every house on a continent into a government high-speed internet scheme, while engaged in counter-cyclical pump-priming and remotely balance the books was delusional.
Engineers have a saying: “Better, faster, cheaper. Pick any two.” Government is about choices.
But returning our attention to the Liberal Government (because they get the VIP jet flights right now), Tony Abbott was elected on a very specific and direct promise of not being Kevin or Julia and having no intention to mess with the rest of the Australian social contract.
To then scrap billions of dollars in taxes on the big end of town (mining and carbon) and rock up on Budget night telling us that fiscal responsibility would entail gouging benefits from the most vulnerable in society is to go cruising for a bruising.
It’s not that you haven’t sold the message well. It’s not that we the people are too thick to get the message. The problem is that we understand exactly what you’re doing and we’re not having a bar of it.
Here in the ACT, local Liberals bellyache endlessly that the idiot voters of Canberra aren’t interested in their policies.
This forgets that the ACT has one of the highest average levels of education in the world. Market-tested slogans aren’t enough. We’d like peer-reviewed research from significant samples, thank you very much.
It doesn’t matter how smart you were in high school, or even at Sydney Uni’s Law School. This teeming world of billions is a beast so complicated no human being can understand all of it.
The political class are complaining that an ever more connected and educated society is “not capable of being governed, guided, or restrained,” by them.
This could be the most exciting news we’ve ever had.
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