The power of positive thinking Yesterday Defence Minister Peter Dutton pulled his own take on the Scott Morrison school of verbal judo. Just as anyone who thinks Morrison looks like a right berk when he plays a uke is actually mocking everyday Australians, anyone who thinks the government has done an unforgivably shoddy job of responding to the floods in NSW and Queensland is actually having a go at our brave ADF.
“I’m not going to cop criticism of the ADF,” Dutton told Sunrise. He then told the ABC that people really ought to look on the bright side: “I know there’s a lot of activity on Twitter and the rest of it, but I would look at the positives of what’s happening on the ground, in horrific circumstances.”
But his performance was left in the dust by Sarina Russo. Russo, who runs a giant private job service provider that has received hundreds of millions in public funds, is staying chipper in the face of floods. Her advice to anyone affected: take a jog.
Pacing like a big cat on a Brisbane boardwalk, gesturing like a tree in a gale, following her thoughts hither and yon, Russo delivers a speech about… I don’t know, fitness? It’s completely helpful and inoffensive to anyone who’s lost everything, I’m sure, to be told they “can’t buy these endorphins, these natural endorphins in a pharmacy …” But honestly, transcribing the lines wouldn’t do the flow of consciousness style justice — you just have to watch.
IWD There was a relatively muted response from the federal government to International Women’s Day this year. Minister for Women Marise Payne put out a video message launching the Women With Disabilities Australia Leadership Statement, and IWD came up, usually as a kicker, in the day’s interviews, primarily about Ukraine and the floods. Which is still more vocal than we’ve come to expect. Minister for Families Anne Ruston was more active, and in her enthusiasm she very briefly retweeted Opposition Leader Anthony Albanese’s video on the matter. And Liberal MP Nicolle Flint took time out from complaining about gender-based bullying to approvingly retweet a plug for a social media network that uses AI to exclude trans women.
By the standards he’s set in previous years, given his inability to address issues around women without accidentally biting one of his feet clean off at the ankle, the prime minister did OK — a reference to the brave women in the ADF during his address to the AFR Business Summit was very on brand, to which he added some stats about women participation. Luckily no one appeared to deem it necessary to ask Payne or Morrison during their interviews about the government rejecting a recommendation from their own Retirement Income Review Commission that women receive superannuation on paid parental leave while banging on about how much they’re improving women’s material conditions.
That’s swell If the first casualty of war is the truth, then the first casualty of a culture war is logic, which gets stretched and beaten beyond all recognition. Senator James McGrath, for example, is apparently furious that the National Gallery is setting gender-based quotas for the art it displays, including 20% for non-binary artists — despite the war in Ukraine. “The Ukraine is having the #%&@ bombed out of it by a war criminal while our taxpayer funded National Gallery is now choosing art on the basis of gender,” he fulminates.
McGrath has a rock-solid point: why is the National Gallery faffing about with non-binary scribblers when it should be focusing on its core business: expelling Russian forces from Ukraine? Seriously, senator, what on earth does one of these things have to do with the other?
Benson hedges “I’ll be more Howard, less Shorten,” says Albanese, according to a report on the text of his speech in Sydney, dropped to The Australian’s Simon Benson… except the speech mentions neither John Howard nor Bill Shorten. Albanese says he “agrees” with a “former Liberal prime minister” that economic reform is a finish line you never reach, which … doesn’t seem like quite the same thing?
