Sunday, February 02, 2014

Haters gunna hate and shoot it out with other haters ...



(Above: relax it's just a New Yorker cartoon and a spoof doing the Facebook rounds)

As for Tony Abbott's attempts to embrace indigenous folk and to do something on their behalf?

It was always tokenism of the most offensive kind. Do a quick tour of north Queensland with Noel Pearson, promise grand initiatives and then sit on the MAMIL clad-bum was the standard form in opposition.

Now with various wars launched on various fronts - against Gonski, Indonesia, boat people, democracy in Nauru, unions, industry free-loaders and welfare for starters - the rhetoric has been cranked back, and practical initiatives are invisible.

Compounding the problem for Abbott is the way his supporters have turned on him.

Haters are gunna hate, and is there any better hater than the Bolter?

Already his epic bit of HUN hatred, I am, you are, we are Australian, has passed into folklore, wrapped in a tattered Australian flag, the first refuge of the scoundrel:



And so on, and on, at tedious length. Let's not bother with all the boring details of the attention-seeking and grand-standing, of a kind you'd expect from a Grange-sipping, opera loving right wing zealot anxious to prove that he's more with it than Geert Wilders.

As is always the way, the rhetoric of a Bolter in this sort of situation turns to the apocalyptic and apoplectic:

Abbott insists he will not endorse any change that will have that practical effect in the courts. He means to treat the Constitution in this matter as if it were just a history book, not the foundation of our law. 
But once he concedes the principle he concedes everything. 
He will not get the “reconciliation” he imagines, some shiny day when we all hug each other in happy tears. 
He will instead license demands from people, particularly race industry professionals, who will in some cases be satisfied with nothing less than apartheid.

Yes, yes, the sky is falling in. Apartheid in Australia! Hitler! Godwin's Law!

Quick, Chicken Little, alert the people ...

It goes without saying that the Bolter himself is a race industry professional. He's long made a career of kicking up a fuss about race and using race-based issues to bait people.

Naturally the baited bit back, in responses like Andrew Bolt, Indigenous Australian? Come off it.

But that's to be expected. The real issue is how Tony Abbott deals with the Bolter's challenge:

Stop now. Say no to racism. Say no to racial division. Say no to changing our Constitution.

You see, in the usual way, it's not just the Bolter. The whole pack of Murdoch neocons are alert and alarmed.

This very day, the Sunday Terror, the weekend adjunct of the least trusted newspaper in Australia, tackled all the seminal issues head on:


Oh sorry the pond doesn't know how that Teigen tummy a perfect ten photobombed poor old Akker Dakker and his penetrating, fearful PM must tear up any thoughts of a treaty.

Amazingly the paranoid ranting and raving Akker Dakker leapt from what might well have been a minor adjustment, a preamble to the constitution, to an anxiety attack about Abbott delivering a full blown treaty. You know, like the one the Maoris copped, which has seen New Zealand reduced to rubble and possibly explains the earthquakes (how strange they still export dairy products to China).

Yes he did, he did:


And so Abbott is hung out to dry because Warren Mundine mentioned treaties, and immediately got other Aboriginal people offside, as you can read in Central Land Council rejects Warren Mundine's Indigenous treaty proposal.

Who'd have thunk that the Central Land Council and Akker Dakker were of like mind?

But back to the Chicken Little routine:

Finding a formal wording which will not lay the ground for a lawyer's picnic will be difficult but is essential. Any hint of a judgmental sentiment will see Labor and the Greens, always anxious to parade their populist pieties, baying for more and the debate will spin out of control. 
Mundine's notion of treaties, also ventilated on Australia Day, was given cautious consideration by indigenous Affairs Minister Nigel Scullion, but is clearly a step too far. 
Scullion said the word "treaty" scared people but admitted there was merit in exploring the idea. No, there's not. If the inclusion of an acknowledgment of Aboriginal habitation is meant to strengthen and unify Australia, the very question of treaties is sheer madness. 
Nations make treaties with other nations, they don't make treaties with themselves and to make a treaty with an entity within Australia would bring the lawyers out like maggots on rotting roadside roo. 

You have to hand it to Akker Dakker. He's always moderate in his language, what with talk of 'sheer madness' and 'maggots' ...

And here's the rub Akker Dakker offers to the feeble Abbott rhetoric:

Any proposed wording must be concise and precise or Abbott will fracture his own conservative support base... 
...Abbott must be careful he doesn't waste his capital taking the nation down a never-ending and unrewarding road.

And there you have it. The Bolter and Akker Dakker have spoken.

Abbott has already disappointed the ABC crowd, the NBN lovers, people who want a bit of sanity and humanity in the treatment of asylum seekers, military personnel serving in dangerous places, supporters of Australian manufacturing and ...

Sorry, must stop there, the list goes on and on, and in such a short time frame.

It's a Herculean effort, and very shortly, Abbott is going to disappoint the Aboriginal people who have decided to fellow travel with his government, perhaps on the basis that shaking down guilty conservatives is sometimes more rewarding than trying to shake down a Labor government full of people with short memories ...

Abbott began the year with weasel words about 'starting a conversation': (Abbott to start 'conversation' on Indigenous recognition in 2014).

Last week he offered up September as the magical date for an 'appropriate wording' (Tony Abbott promises to recognise Aborigines as nation's first people), but by then the weasel words and the equivocations were in full flow. He was already foreshadowing that he might well botch the job.

So why's he so ginger? Why's he unlikely, this great hero and comforter of indigenous people, unlikely even to be able to deliver a modest form of words, which can then be voted on?

Well as a right wing head kicker and thug from wayback, Abbott knows he's vulnerable to a good head kicking from the right, and the Bolter and others in the Murdochian neocon conspiracy are determined to give him a good old Pauline Hanson racist fire fight.

The Bolter now has an issue he can trawl and use for click bait which will stir up the ugliest and lowliest sentiments in his already debased and ugly readership, and the sort of sentiments on view in Abbott insults conservatives on his racial "crusade" will now keep streaming out until whatever Abbott comes up with in September ...

The Bolter will stop at nothing, distorting and misrepresenting history, and somehow seeking to pretend that there was very little discrimination against the blacks in the good old days.

The ABC, the republic, boat people, unions, climate science, and the eternal hostility to blacks are on the playlist, rotated over and over like a rock station with an audience of dummies, and so Abbott should stand by for the rest of the year for lots of frothing, as the head kicker kicks the head kicker ...

Strangely, the Bolter doesn't think he froths, as in I "froth", senior Liberals merely have "concerns":



Is it timely to remind any stray reader that if they pay for any Murdoch publication or watch the Ten network they help pay the Bolter's salary? Yes, you, the one who reads The Australian for the literary section ...

Never mind, perhaps Laurie Oakes deserves the reprimand.

You see Mr Oakes, the Bolter doesn't just froth, he also foams, and the scum bubbles to the surface, and verbiage of a hate-laden kind also spumes and oozes, resulting in exudations, emissions and discharges, as he rants and he raves ... and his readers match him, as you can find in the Twitter highlights of the pick of the crazies here ...



And on a good cloudless night, there's every chance the lot of them howl at the moon ...

(Below: and more New Yorker cartoons here)




1 comment:

  1. Griffith bye election pic - where is Margie?

    ReplyDelete

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