John Howard may be remarkably adept at coping with being hard of hearing, but his bout of political tin-ear may just be continuing.
While he was getting all lined up to party like the MV Tampa all over again over the latest bunch of Sri Lankan boat people, nobody except his cabinet colleagues are joining in.
Not Andrew Bolt. He’s busy laying into the ABC and Maxine McKew, in what is, incidentally a lame effort even by his standards. Anita Quigley of the Torygraph, while still finding ways to pick on the minor parties, writes that
The Australian Greens and the Democrats have spent the week banging on in Parliament that any repatriation of them would be â??illegalâ?? and â??outrageousâ??.
They may well be right. Their fears for the menâ??s safety if returned to Sri Lanka, where violence between the Tamil Tigers and government forces is escalating daily, is a valid concern.
Elliptical as it is, it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the government’s actions to date.
And that’s about it. The right-wing dogs of xenophobia don’t seem to be barking this time around.
Instead, it’s been all nuclear power, all the time. The tabloids are full of it, and despite the efforts of the News Limited op-ed cheer squad it seems to be going down like a lead balloon. And Labor are sitting pretty on the topic, from a political point of view. While there may be a time down the road where Labor will face hard decisions on the issue, it’s not going to be between now and the next election (assuming that the fix really is in on ditching the three mines policy). That time will come when carbon charging is introduced and new baseload power stations are needed. Howard, by contrast, faces endless local repetition the question Mark noticed ages ago and that Tim Dunlop has been asking: where are they going to be built? And he’s dug himself so deep on this issue it’s hard to imagine how he can credibly backflip on it by election time.
Fear of the unknown is a potent political weapon. However, at least from its reflection in the media (and, from what I can tell, talkback radio as well), the unknown of nuclear fission is a lot scarier out in punterland than 83 Tamils in a leaky boat.
What is it with those people!!!!! Boy Bolt says he worked for Labor. Twice. I should have known. He is not alone. Other Tory snake oil salesmen with pinko antecedents: Keith Windschuttle, Dave Clarke, Paddy McGuinness, Ron Brunton… any more for any more? Next, someone will tell us that Gerard was once an anarcho-syndicalist shop steward in the postal union.
Howard might be tempted to do a repeat of the Murray-Darling-big-bucket- of-money thing and say to the states…we need 20 of these reactors, four in each state ..you decide where they go. Naturally he’ll get a negative response so for him the problem goes away… for this election.
Robert: a number of Howard’s early wedges bounced off Mark Latham this time three years ago – but, historically speaking, so what?
Sir Henry: it never ceases to amaze me that those who would conserve our Heritage are so eager to admit weary stragglers from the Left. Why do these refugees never stop a while in the house of moderation on their journey from one extreme to t’other? Apart from Frank Devine and Relay Station Albrechtsen, where are the Tories who were born Tory, live Tory lives (and by this I mean no shacking up, no joints, no nudie pics, no homosexuality, church on Sunday) and will die Tory?
I followed the debate at Tim’s site with some interest.
Here are a few excerpts that focus on areas usually ignored in this debate, namely the costs of decommissioning reactors in the future, how will waste be ‘safely’ stored and who will pay for these.
“The UK government (read taxpayers) paid a subsidy of £184m for â??spent fuel liabilitiesâ?? last year to help prop-up British Energy, which they had already bailed out of bankruptcy 3 years ago.”
from Elise
“And if terrorism is not an issue, then why does the UK Sellafield site for nuclear waste have armed guards, day and night? They have estimated the costs for dealing with the waste to be £56 bn to £66 bn, as of last year”
Elise again
“Theyâ??re looking now at something like £200 billion ($497 billion) to decommission those reactors and thatâ??s going to come out of the public purse. ……………….â??
(http://www.antinuclearaustralia.com/)”
X citing Bob Brown
Tim Dunlop is rightly worried about where these reactors would be located [if we allow them to be built].
I am just as worried about where the radioactive waste is going to be ‘stored’ for the next many millenia.
And who will pay for that.
So many questions.
So few answers.
I don’t know about that analysis actually. I think there’s still a wedge element out there waiting to be exploited.
Are you serious, Andrew E, or has the wicketkeeper behind picked up some nuance that’s passed me by? Most of the tories I know enjoy quite a few of those things, if not all of them. They’d enjoy them simultaneously, if they could.
Andrew E: quite true. But one of Johnny’s favourite tools in the arsenal – xenophobia – isn’t getting traction this time round, and he’s clearly tried to use it again. And, politically speaking, his devotion to pushing the nuclear option noisily is quite mystifying.
Hannah: I wasn’t arguing the merits or otherwise of a nuclear program in the post, just the politics. Your points are interesting, and deserve a fuller discussion than we can have here – suffice for now to say that the headline number is a bit misleading, and generalizing the British experience, with reactors designed in the 1950s first and foremost as bomb factories, is not comparable to what new-generation reactors would cost to decommission here.
Ratty’s Zardoz persona is now revealed.
Nah, a bit like Keating and the republic. Zero opposition on his own side while teh Other is riven through. Garrett is right to re-wedge nuclear back at Howard (uses a heck of a lot of water, major terrorism target, not in my backyard).
This is my experience too DD, but I hung with the moderates who didn’t try to preach their way out of a hangover.
Yes, Andrew, quite so. Occasionally, an awkward moment must crop up however, when the past brushes up against the present. Imagine a Beltway cocktail party, Chris Hitchens and Henry Kissinger both working a room…
Sir Henry,
Funny how many that were left become Right, but so few (I’m not aware of many) that were Right become Left.
Why is this so??
Buggered if I know Razor. Any ideas? Are you an ex hardline Stalinist too, who saw the light, Razor? It’s only a small step from justifying GULAGs to justifying GITMO…
*ka ching!*
From Willie Wiki,
“Zardoz: The gun is good. The penis is evil. The penis shoots seeds, and makes new life to poison the earth with a plague of men, as once it was. But the gun shoots death, and purifies the earth of the filth of brutals. Go forth… and kill! [Zardoz proceeds to vomit a torrent of rifles and ammunition for his followers to use].”
Stud Nelson, V.C., at a Canberra doorstop earlier today:
“The 50 M1A1 Abrams Tanks that Zardoz sold us are the best thing Australia has in the Global War On Terror. Shame we didn’t have them at Kokoda.”
“where are the Tories who were born Tory, live Tory lives (and by this I mean no shacking up, no joints, no nudie pics, no homosexuality, church on Sunday) and will die Tory?”
Wandering around garden centres in the Eastern suburbs of Melbourne, wearing a beige cardigan and despairing of finding a beige secatur.
These people exist, but Murdoch won’t employ them as columnists – he knows that propaganda is useless if the punters can’t get past the first para without falling asleep.
Robert, seriously, you oughta meet some qualified, paid-up Tories, they’re a lot more fun than you seem to imagine. Who would you prefer to spend quality drinking time with, Boris Johnson or any given New Labourite? Amanda Vanstone or any given ALP apparatchik?
I rest my case (on a coaster, naturally, so as not to stain the lacquer).
Qualified paid up Tories are indeed lots of fun. Some of their money is spent employing people to write things to convince people that a world where the rich and free have a lot of fun, and the rest have a lot of work and worry, is the best of all possible worlds, and that there is no alternative, or rather, that any alternative would be worse than what ‘is’.. Lot’s of people like writing, and they like being paid to do something they like. It is quite simple, and not very hard to understand. The only difficult thing is why anybody is surprised that that is the way it works?
Razor:
People are a lot like fruit. They go rotten. There is no reversing of that. I think that’s the reason why you don’t see right wingers going leftward.
As for tories, my late uncle summed it for me years back: “The Liberal Party still hasn’t got the stench of the First Fleet off itself.”
Robert writes:
“The right-wing dogs of xenophobia don’t seem to be barking this time around”
No. They’re in the dog-house licking their dicks like the onanistic flea-bags they always were.
No doubt they’ll all be out for their Uncle Bens at chow time, though.