A Man for Our Times

By Pearl Bullivant on January 19, 2022 in Satire

The baby maker. photo: Martin Handford

The Ancient Greeks had Socrates, the Protestants had Wesley and New South Wales has Dominic Perrottet – a man who embodies the greed, individualism, hypocrisy and religious fervour that threatens to pervade Australian society during the COVID crisis.
Dom is a man who relishes taking up too much space in an overcrowded and under-resourced world; one who proudly brandishes his large family as the cornerstone of a functioning society, encouraging others to participate in his zeal for overpopulation (unless one is from Mount Druitt, a suburb that is not on the premier’s popularity list due to its residents’ apparent penchant for single motherhood).
Dom is a man of randomness, whose inane Ayn Randian statements can only be explained by either recreational drug use, ‘doing it for the memes’, elitist entitlement or utter disdain for the electorate. How else can we explain his bizarre linkage of welfare payments to infertility, divorce and declining birth rates, and his belief that Centrelink benefits act “as a substitute for family”? To suggest that the age pension would figure in one’s decision to have children is incredulous.
But Dom has made it resoundingly clear to the New South Wales populace that cause and effect is not his gig, so these inanities should come as no surprise. For Dom, the function of government is “to manage opportunity rather than risk”, to provide the masses with equal opportunity rather than equal outcomes. Only a politician shirking their “personal responsibility” would fail to link the abandonment of mask wearing and other hygiene practices to an increase in COVID, but perhaps Dom is providing everyone with an equal opportunity to go to an early grave, and not just the welfare bludging pensioners he is so keen to pop off.
Dom is a man who praised Trump’s 2016 election, claiming it a victory for those “taken for granted by the elites”, conveniently forgetting that his own private schooling, law degree, white skin and LNP pedigree wedges him firmly in the evil elitist corner, by Mount Druitt (and Pearl’s) standards.
Perrottet believes government exists to enhance one’s “personal potential” at the same time as supporting the vile “sport” of greyhound racing because it is “important for many communities in New South Wales”, ignoring the racing-gambling addiction-divorce-depression linkage. Dom was the nasty architect of iCare, the workers compensation scheme that only cared about the welfare and wealth of the private contractors the scheme was farmed out to. He is a man who hates on historic public buildings, as an excuse to tear them down and replace them with shoddily constructed “signature skyscrapers”. And, this is the man who has ceased providing information to the hearing impaired by reducing the number of Auslan interpreters at press briefings. Perhaps that’s what a large family is for – to provide a personal Auslan interpreter for hearing impaired family members.
Dear Beast readers, when you go to the polls on March 23, 2023, let us ensure that Dom is not a “man for all seasons”. The unexamined politician is not worth your valuable vote.