Opinion: Era of entitlement continues with Albo’s second term

With Albo safe in The Lodge it’s only be a matter of time before every weekend is declared a long weekend, writes Mike O’Connor. VOTE IN OUR POLL

A great sigh swept across the land as the population emerged from another long weekend to the dreadful realisation that there would not be another three-day break until October.

How to cope with working five days in succession, wondered Bazza, shaking his head at the burden of toil borne by the Aussie worker.

True, there’d be the Ekka public holiday in August to allow people to go the show that fewer and fewer people attended, but it was always on a Wednesday. One day off was useless. You needed three, but you could always chuck in a couple of sickies and stretch that into a five-day break.

Anyway, with Albo’s feet tucked under the dining room table at The Lodge for another three years, it would only be a matter of time, he reasoned, before every weekend was declared a long weekend the better to enjoy the golden days that lay ahead.

In the meantime, just kick back and watch the cost-of-living pressures disappear like cold beer at a barbie and the price of electricity plummet.

“If only Dutton had promised to make every weekend a long weekend he might have stood a better chance,” Bazza mused as he slipped off his thongs and tried and failed to count the number of weekends between now and October on his toes.

He had wondered, however briefly, what it was exactly that Albo and his crew had been doing for the past three years, and how suddenly everything was going to be fixed in the next three.

Still, Bazza reckoned that he stood a better chance of getting paid more for working less under Albo than the other mob, and who could blame him for following the bunch of carrots that had been dangled before him all the way to the voting booth.

He’d been conditioned by the political process to see the world through the prism of self-interest. It wasn’t what worked for the country, but what worked for him. This was the central message. We must be doing a great job, because we have given you stuff and to prove that we will continue to do a great job we will give you more stuff so just sit back and take it easy.

Everything is under control. Don’t worry. You’ll only give yourself a headache.

No one had attempted to appeal to his sense of national pride or to say that it was important for him to look to the future and the state of the nation that his children and their children would inherit.

The image that was projected before him was one of immediate solutions. The health system crisis would be solved by waving a Medicare card and the housing crisis by simply building more houses. It was so obvious that it was a wonder that nobody had thought of it before.

He’d had a lot of big numbers with a dollar sign in front of them thrown at him, none of which he truly understood but the message seemed to be that everything was sweet. There was talk of deficits and surpluses but it was obvious that there was plenty of money for everything.

In any case, he was making good money, so why worry? After all, who’s ever heard of a country going broke?

If a politician had said to him that they weren’t going to make any promises about handouts because the country could not afford them, would he have listened?

There’s been talk of productivity, whatever that was, but things didn’t seem to be too bad, so why worry?

If a politician had said to him that instead of spending on handouts and grants to special interest groups, the money had to directed to our defence forces that were ill-equipped and understrength and incapable of providing any meaningful degree of sovereign security, would that have given him pause for thought?

Probably not, for wars were things that were fought in other countries and appeared briefly on television news bulletins. They just didn’t happen here, so why worry?

He’d done the right thing and voted, and so that was it for another three years.

Would Bazza and his mates have stopped and listened to someone who told them that there’s no such thing as a free lunch, and that somebody somewhere always has to pay?

We’ll never know, because no politician had the courage to tell them.