Between hopelessness and headaches, the eternity of our discontent
Bill Shorten on the government in his news conference, yesterday:
This mob is bloody hopeless. They’re keeping Australian taxpayers ... spending their money as this government tries to do its day job. This is a massive waste of time of taxpayer money. The government should be getting on with its day job looking after Australians; instead they are making incompetence a fine art and this government is truly incompetent.
Labor MP Nick Champion addressing journalists, yesterday:
What we’ve got is a government which is completely at odds with itself. We have a series of Liberal-lite parties who can’t agree among themselves either. It is perilous for the country. For every person that is out there looking at the nation’s parliament today, what they would see is the Senate with a show-off in charge, a Senate which is profoundly dysfunctional, a Senate which is not doing the nation any good.
The unhappiness came from many angles. Tony Abbott on 2GB with Ben Fordham, yesterday:
Ministers in government should spend less time trying to trash critics and get on with government.
But what does he really think? Headline on a Bob Katter media release, yesterday:
Productivity Commission a cancer upon the economic soul of Australia.
Katter’s release continues:
The Productivity Commission has their sympathisers in the Liberal Party and the ALP ‘puppets on an AWU string’. And of course the AWU needing site coverage are ‘puppets on the Wilmar string’. In any event the ALP and LNP are the political wing of the Productivity Commission, PC and they are a cancer on the economic soul of Australia.
Plus ca change. The then member for Fremantle, William Watson, in federal parliament, September 18, 1928:
I think that Australia is saying, “My head is aching. and my feet are sore, and I want so much to get relief. I have tried all these remedies before, and they have never cured me, so I am beginning to doubt whether they will on this occasion.”
Still, there is some hope. Senator Barry O’Sullivan giving his all when asking a Dorothy Dixer in the Senate, Thursday:
Brace yourselves over there because this is a bobby-dazzler of a question. My question is to the Minister for Regional Development, Senator Nash. Now listen up. Can the minister update the Senate on what the Coalition government has achieved for regional Australia since the last election? She will not fit it all in; she only has a couple of minutes!
Giselle Au-Nhien Nguyen starting out with joy in her heart in Fairfax’s Daily Life section, Thursday:
I love Disney. A lot. I have gone to countless films on the day of release to emerge at the end, jittery with joy. I do a killer rendition of A Whole New World (both parts, obviously). There truly is no happier place on earth to me than Disneyland.
Can this last? Nguyen pushes on:
As I grew older and more politically aware, I began to notice glaring issues in the films I’d grown up loving. None more so than Beauty and the Beast, essentially a bestial tale of emotional abuse behind the pretty yellow ball gowns and twee, sentient crockery.
Furthermore:
The Beast’s interest in worldly pursuits makes him, in many ways, a more believable abuser — someone who can speak the language of his victim to create a sense of rapport and security.
But perhaps Nguyen is right to mete out tough love to her cherished film company. Walt Disney, 1957:
You may not realise it when it happens, but a kick in the teeth may be the best thing in the world for you.