Hans Lovejoy
Tony Abbott was the unpopular school dunce who got a job everyone thought was uncool and unimportant at the time.
But then we found out it was a super important job, because he and his other idiot mates went about setting fire to everything.
Our social fabric got scorched and we all paid the price. As captain of Team Titanic, Abbott’s legacy is an embarrassing part of our history, much like when Trevor Chappell bowled underarm to that Kiwi batsman in 1981.
And while it’s refreshing that Turnbull stepped in with lengthier slogans and words placed in the right order, he still carries a similar hard-right agenda that aims to further widen the gap of inequality and ruin the atmosphere.
His recent cuts to the science budget at CSIRO complement Abbott’s legacy of education and health cuts while ignoring the much-needed clamp down on tax havens.
Yet interestingly, Turnbull is self-made and enjoys those tax havens. Let’s just let that sink in. Few politicians generate wealth; they mostly just manage our debt.
Minister for Goldman Sachs
While entrepreneurs are rare in politics, let’s not get carried away. Turnbull is no Elon Musk or Richard Branson – his wealth came from developing supermarkets and then setting up his own merchant bank.
He also headed Australia’s division of Goldman Sachs, the ungoverned US vulture capitalist corporation that later helped to create the 2008 global financial crash and then was given a US taxpayer bailout.
Even as the member for Goldman Sachs, he gave great hope to anyone who wasn’t a right-wing extremist; his achievements in his early years include the famous court case win against the Thatcher government in 1986 defending former MI5 spy Peter Wright.
As a former Liberal opposition leader, he supported a carbon price and a republic and thus was instantly loathed by half the party.
Since Turnbull declared the Liberal Party mutiny, he has had to dumb himself down and hold on to a few troglodytes for political reasons. We still seem to be going nowhere.
Abbott of course stacked the place with his own kind – homophobic, xenophobic, misogynistic and highly religious bigots who deny climate science.
They eagerly suckle on the teat of evilcorp and enjoy selling the nation’s sovereignty (land) to overseas interests.
So which Abbott dregs will be banished after Turnbull wins this year’s election?
Those to go may include the Bronwyn Bishop wax museum exhibit, Christoper Pyne (who is rapidly losing popularity in his SA seat) and hopefully the sinister James Bond villain, George Brandis (Brisbane-based, upper house).
Let’s have a look at one who will stay and one who most likely go in this club of fools.
The treasurer of terror and misery
Who can resist the charms of a man responsible for human death and suffering?
It’s like Scott Morrison enjoys it. Empathy is clearly for losers, and refusing to answer basic questions on transparency and human rights got ScoMo straight into the second biggest job: treasury.
Though to be fair, Joe Hockey proved that any gorilla stuffed in a suit can do the job, even if it was for a short time.
ScoMo’s achievements as minister for Immigration, Hell, Fire and Brimstone (Border Security) included allegations he used taxpayer money to pay for boats, which were given to the very demons we are supposed to vilify: people smugglers.
In a post-ethical world, anything is on the table.
And if you constrict the information flow and create legislation to jail whistleblowers, you can achieve much.
Where and how many persecuted souls were turned back to face almost certain death is unknown, except that we know from Crikey some of our closest neighbours were caught in that net – a number of West Papuans allegedly fleeing Indonesian genocide are also stuck in limbo.
Even John Howard gave West Papuans passage to escape their horrors, but not this pitbull and his black shirts.
So far, his new gig as treasurer has been underwhelming as he umm and arrs over how to convince us that the super wealthy shouldn’t pay their fair share while the poor should suffer more.
The minister for incompetence
Why or how Peter Dutton is still in politics is anyone’s guess. It’s unlikely he will last post election, so it’s worth profiling his non achievements.
As health minister, he tried to introduce an added fee of $7 for visits to the GP.
It failed, and probably contributed to his being voted – by a poll – as the worst health minister in 35 years in the Australian Doctor magazine.
His gaffes alone should exclude this ex-Brisbane drug cop from ever taking to a microphone again; he managed to offend Australia’s Pacific neighbours in one fell swoop by joking about the effect of climate change on Pacific islands.
He didn’t know a boom mic was overhead and said, ‘Time doesn’t mean anything when you’re about to have water lapping at your door.’
And then he displayed a lack of basic text messaging skills by firing off ‘she’s a mad fucking witch’ to the journo he was describing.
Most importantly, he lied to the public over whether a woman raped in our concentration camps wanted an abortion. He said she didn’t, yet a freedom of information document said yes.
The stench from the front bench
Getting rid of such a stench from the front bench will require much bleaching, and possibly a follow up psychic smudging could assist in releasing the Liberal party demons.
Tony Abbott was the prime minister for Australia. Therefore if he was the school dunce there is not much hope for the rest of us becoming the PM of Australia.