GO FOR IT! … with John McNamee
Don’t look now, but are you getting the impression someone’s trying to run the country?
Believe me, I’m the last one to place any faith in our country’s leaders.
But over the past few months, and particularly since the so-called horror Federal Budget, the Government seems to be getting on with confronting those day-to-day complexities which languished in the too-hard basket of previous regimes.
There was nothing more frustrating for people who value their democratic rights at election time to see the Governments of the day chasing after those running hares which are only peripheral to our nation’s wellbeing.
How many reams of newsprint, how many hours of prime TV news time went into the sensationalist reporting of for example, the gay marriage issue (not that there’s anything wrong with that, as Seinfeld famously said), claim and counter claim of misogyny, gender bias, poisonous leadership wrangles, carbon emissions, and the seemingly unstoppable flood of illegal immigrants?
Most are noble principles in their own way but while previous governments were trying to implement policies to please the non-majority, foolishly placing too much credence on the intelligence and know-how of media flacks, the country was going to Hell in a handcart.
Speaking of the Budget, even in his blundering, cigar-chomping Falstaffian manner, Treasurer Joe Hockey has tackled head-on the festering sore of welfare fraud. Good on him!
Let’s also take the so-called “asylum seekers” who fall prey to the rapacious people smugglers and finish up in our territorial waters sinking in leaky fishing boats.
Politicians and pressure groupers from all persuasions were up on their hind legs every day in the media railing and condemning the lack of action in trying to solve this mounting humanitarian crisis.
Previous ministers were reluctant to take any hard stand for fear of alienating the fringe groups vital to their fragile parliamentary power base.
I’m not taking sides here, believe me, but the current Immigration Minister, Scott Morrison, seems to be the Invisible Man compared to his ineffectually strident predecessors.
So how come we rarely see him these days? He’s embroiled in one of the hottest political issues of the era, one with world-wide implicatoons. Maybe’s he’s doing something right.
The Abbott Government is claiming now shat the boats have all but stopped coming and the piratical stranglehold of the people smugglers has been broken.
I can only presume that Mr Morrison has just got on with the job. And he hasn’t had it any easier that those who were tackling the problem for the past 10 years.
I never thought I’d get around to handing out even qualified praise to a politician, let alone a senior government minister.
They say a week’s a long time in politics and as I write, there’s not only rumblings that Mr Morrison is going to be kicked upstairs into the Defense portfolio, but the shock jocks are weighing into “Mr Broadband” Malcolm Turnbull for allegedly plotting a leadership overthrow…
But I’ll have more to say on that subject on another day…..