king bast said:
I don't pay much attention to Australian politics, but a few snippets Ive heard on the radio just made me roll my eyes at how much of a dickhead Bill Shorten is.
First was the proposed changes to citizenship criteria - nothing too draconian it seems, the main point being they need to speak English. That'd be hard to argue with, I thought. Wrong! Bill Shorten opposes it.
The next was pauline Hanson saying that Autistic kids shouldnt be in mainstream classes becasue their presence disrupts and affects the other kids. That'd be hard to argue with, I thought. Wrong! Bill Shorten opposes it.
Does this fucking idiot do anything but oppose reasonable ideas? How about doing something constructive, instead of shitting on anything and everything, just for the sake of it. I never had any time for Turnbull, but he's a breath of fresh air compared to Shorten.
Shorten is a classic late-union-degeneration leftie, all about politics over principle. This characteristic makes him dangerous to be your ally and an unanchored coward as a Prime Minister.
Shorten is basically the apotheosis of a strategy taken up by the union movement at large in the late eighties/early nineties after Howard got in and started formalising and legalising how industrial relations worked Federally. This will take a few paragraphs to explain, so bear with me.
Basically, Howard lawyered up the industrial relations system. He took its focus from negotiation and compromise to regulation. The union movement started getting its arse handed to it in the courts, and bully-boy 1970s tactics were no longer working for it. They looked at Bob Hawke and Paul Keating's records in government and thought that the best way to generate more of them was to trawl the universities.
This was a bad miscalculation because Hawke and Keating were aberrations: Hawke retained the common touch in spite of his law degree and Rhodes Scholarship, and he was the best negotiator and industrial advocate the industrial relations commissions had ever seen. He was also President of the ACTU from a fairly young age, a pretty damn significant bit of on-the-job training for a guy who has to make disparate interests stay happy. Keating had bombed out of high school but could sledge better than probably any MP since around Federation, which endeared him to Labor's base. Not to mention that their records were burnished by the economy going through a boom period at least until the late Keating days. Most university-educated folks of Shorten's vintage don't have a lot of experience of being working class, they're all lower middle class at best and generally got their university educations for almost free before HECS was introduced.
Shorten has the university education, but he's not as bright as Hawke. He was educated at private schools, so he never got to punch it out in a schoolyard with an Aboriginal or similar and unlike Hawke he doesn't quite have the same common touch. Hawke transcended being part of the political class. Shorten is consumed by it. His memberships of unions have been brief and relentlessly focused on getting to as high a position in the organisation as possible as quickly as possible.
Hawke was a pragmatist: his role model was John Curtin, i.e. the only PM with sufficient guts to say "Fuck you" to Churchill and recall troops to PNG during World War 2.
Shorten is not a pragmatist, but he's not a leftie ideologue either. Worse: he is a factional ideologue. Shorten reckons he's a Republican, for example, but if the factions that supported him tomorrow came out and said they preferred the monarchy he'd be licking Elizabeth II's cunt within days. The man has the record of knifing not one but two sitting Prime Ministers in the back in the hope of a few poll points. At best this is horrible judgment. At worst it's fucking Machiavellian coldness. That's the sort of man he is, and that's a dangerous sort of man to have as your Prime Minister.
