It Makes You Proud to be Australian

I seldom pause to reflect on how fortunate I am to live in Australia.  Even our self destructive idiocies are less harmful than elsewhere.  In Britain Theresa May is attempting to push a Brexit solution so wretched that the Europeans actually agreed to it and in the United States Donald Trump is using on would be immigrants the sort of crowd control techniques that are normally only available to citizens.  Meanwhile in Australia our government lurches from crisis to crisis, largely of its own making without it seeming to have too much impact on the country at large.

I hesitate to comment on what is currently going on with our government as by the time I finish this sentence whatever I say will be out of date.  So I won't.  Suffice it to say in the past couple of months our government has changed its leader, lost its majority, seen its counterpart in one state annihilated at an election, lost even more of its non existent majority and decided that the next election will be a popularity contest between whoever is leading the party at that point and the opposition leader.

Meanwhile everybody else in the country keeps puttering on living their lives, doing their jobs and generally behaving as though the actions of our political leaders aren't actually terribly important.  In a way they're absolutely right.  While the introduction of bills and the enacting of laws is (or at least can be) very important and certainly the way our nations leaders interact with the leaders of other nations can have an impact on our lives how the political parties handle their own affairs is a monument to triviality.

As I've watched our government unravel over the last couple of years I often catch myself wondering why this all seems familiar.  Part of the reason, of course, is that the previous Labor government did exactly the same thing but there's more to it than that.  More and more I was getting a feeling of deja vu.  It took me a while before I realised the answer.

The outrageous posturing, the flamboyant manoeuvres, the ridiculous, unbelievable storylines and a whole cast of idiotic freakshows for the crowd to cheer and boo as it pleases?  The Australian government is channelling World Wrestling Entertainment.  It can't be too long before someone is hit with a chair.  It would, of course, be utterly irresponsible of me to indicate which of our venerated lawmakers I wish to see hit with a chair but on a completely unrelated note I see that Peter Dutton is currently on "I hurt myself" leave after injuring himself trying to mend a fence.  It's probably the first and last time he will ever attempt fence mending.

At the end of the last battle royale Malcolm Turnbull was tipped over the top rope but just as Peter Dutton was reaching for the belt Scott Morrison slithered into the ring and blindsided him with the bell while the defeated Turnbull clung onto Tony Abbott's leg to stop him getting in to help.

Since that moment the government has spent its time braying about how competent it is while simultaneously losing its majority in parliament and tanking in the opinion polls.  It’s nice to see they got back to normal so quickly.

I’ve long been of the opinion that one of the great benefits of our system of government has been that it occupies the time and energy of people you don’t want wandering around loose but can’t quite justify locking up.  Meanwhile up in the Senate one senator accused another of slut-shaming her and her party leader got tossed out for calling said slut shamer a pig.  In the midst of all this apparently some laws got passed which is proof that our politicians still have too much time on their hands.