Tony Failure: Mistakes Were Made

By Pearl Bullivant on April 27, 2015 in Other

There are times in our lives when we make ill-informed decisions and pay the consequences for years to come. Take, for instance, my shortsighted decision to become a yoga guru, swapping tinea and chunky runners’ thighs for a purple mat and elegant Luluemon leggings; a stupid and dangerous decision that deprived my readers of my words of wisdom, words that could have saved them from making erroneous decisions of their own; a decision motivated purely by vanity (the desire to have sculptured biceps) that unfortunately landed me in bed for a month with a sports injury far worse than anything sustained pounding the pavement in my Mizunos.

So readers, poor Pearl was stuck in bed last month, panicking that Tony Abbott’s likely eviction from the Lodge would deprive her of much needed column material, but knowing full well that Our Mal was far too left wing to suit the nutty ideology of his peers and Mr Abbott would likely be replaced by someone of his own ilk, a hardliner sans the scungies. The yoga-induced bed rest provided ample time to ponder mistakes that resulted in painful economic consequences, like the Australian public’s decision to vote Tony Abbott into power in the first place.

‘Tony Failure: Mistakes Were Made’ – alas, if Australians actually took an interest in politics beyond one-issue catch cries, Pearl wouldn’t be plagiarising the title of a children’s book to take the piss out of the dire situation we find ourselves in. Instead, Australians would have seen an ever-growing and dangerous conservative force in this country where the ALP has shifted to the right and the LNP is so far from centre that it is slipping off the flat Earth that its neo-conservative members still believe in. Tony Abbott isn’t the problem; it’s the LNP as a whole. They are hell bent on recreating Australia in the US vision, where the interests of big business outweigh that of its citizens, and where government’s only role is to collect taxes and hand them over to a deregulated private enterprise to run the country.

What did voters really expect from Tony? The masses joined with Abbott in booing Gillard over a mining tax and we actually swallowed his accusations against Labor of ‘class warfare’, not bothering to question whether the wealthy were actually in danger from low wage earners, pensioners and welfare recipients. Surplus budgets had to be accomplished somehow and there was no way a Liberal government was going to raid the coffers of big business, despite obscene yearly profits and overly generous remunerations thrown at senior management.

Instead, the Liberals attacked those most at need, delivering what Joe Hockey deemed the “right thing to do” by cutting public services, raising the cost of university fees and healthcare, and cutting grants to agencies and NFPs, all while getting rid of the ATO’s tax auditors and relying instead on profit-driven enterprises to self-assess out of the good of their hearts!

Australians as a whole are acting like spoilt brats over their decision to elect Tony Abbott. He gave them what they wanted and more. My desire for Lululemon biceps had far fewer consequences!