ONE imagines that written on the walls of the pyramids one can find many complaints common to our era.
“The children today just don’t respect their elders.”
“Music was better in my day.”
John Griffiths.
While these complaints are as old as civilisation, and no doubt were grizzled around campfires for millennia before that, the current crop of public leaders do nothing to encourage more enthusiasm than their predecessors.
On the one hand, it’s tempting to say the recent scandal-ridden entitlement claims really aren’t that big a deal.
Why do we apparently care more about a $5000 helicopter ride than such things as stripping young people of unemployment benefits or indigenous disadvantage or rape and murder in immigration detention?
On the other hand, the ordinary worker, paying for the largesse, does not get to live in this custom. We can’t even get a tax deduction on the cost of getting to work, let alone have our social transport costs paid in full.
Then, last week, we had the spectacle of Dyson Heydon agreeing to speak at a Liberal Party fundraiser while presiding over an already dangerously political royal commission into trade unions.
I understand the invitation to give the Sir Garfield Barwick oration was made before the retired High Court judge took up the task of invigilating the union movement and that its fund-raising status was something of a technicality.
It remains astonishing that a man of such intellect could not have foreseen this would be a problem, or that those who had invited him would not have been able to see some considerable embarrassment was about to ensue.
As for the entitlements, I’m honestly surprised no flack in the Prime Minister’s army of spinners has ever been given the job of looking over the entitlement returns and pre-emptively applying the “sniff test”.
These highly paid advisers are supposed to have back-pocket briefs to cover every eventuality.
Given that not a term of parliament passes without an entitlements scandal it’s positively bizarre they let these scandals outflank them time and time again.
What vexes me the most is not the waste, or the entitlement mentality, or even greed and mendacity.
What fills me with rage is the sheer bone-headed stupidity of these scandals and a political class that is so snout-down-in-the-trough as to be incapable of looking out for their own best interests, let alone the interests of the wider community.
The latest entitlements scandal in what is, let us remember, a very long line, was not brought on by hidden cameras, or leaked documents. That sort of journalism is almost impossible in this country with our defamation laws.
These titans of politics are being brought down by the expense claims publicly lodged in a register, there for all to see.
In an ideal world, I’d like to have a decent and honest political class.
But I’d settle for competent blackhearts over these grasping idiots.
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