I have decided there’s no longer any point trying to write these columns while we have a government as truly mad as this one. What’s the point of trying to think up witty ways to mock this bunch of heartless, cruel, out-of-touch, poor-hating, Tory scum if their leader just wanders about doing bat shit insane things like “knighting” Prince Philip?
I should have seen this coming. After all, even the phrase “the Australian prime minister gave a knighthood to” is itself beyond absurd in the 21st century, let alone when the fucking recipient is a foreign royal parasite whose sole contribution to society is a stream of bigoted comments so long that The Independent marked his 90th birthday in 2011 with a list of one — frequently racist — gaffe for every year he'd been alive.
You couldn't write something this bizarre. If you were a political analyst and tried predicting such a thing in advance, it would have been grounds to have you committed. Yet our prime minister actually does it and no one even thinks to break out a straight jacket.
You have to give Abbott some credit, though. He's managed to pull a move literally no one else supports. Even monarchists seemed deeply embarrassed, and Christ knows what Prince Philip himself thinks, presuming anyone has bothered wasting his time by telling him. If they did, presumably his response was, “why the fuck is some hack in a colony knighting me? I'm their fucking prince!”
Abbott justified the decision by calling it a “captain's pick”. And to apply the sporting analogy, this makes as much sense as Steve Smith using his “captain's pick” to have a wombat open the bowling in Australia's next One Day International.
Smith could then justify the move in a post-match press conference with the perfectly true statement that, while he understands “not everyone agrees” with the call, wombats have contributed just as much to Australian cricket as Prince Philip has to any aspect of Australian society at all.
It is so illogical it has baffled everyone as to how Abbott could make such a decision. The only way it makes any sense is to imagine that Abbott has taken a good, hard look at the polls, concluded he was basically dead in the water and figured he might as well have a bit of fun while he can. Much in the same way a man told he has a terminal illness might decide to sky dive naked into the middle of peak hour traffic for a laugh because why the fuck not?
And here it is important to realise why his polls are so bad, and why a decision like knighting Prince Philip is viewed as a potentially fatal move.
It comes after Abbott's long string of anti-poor policies have managed to both anger most people while at the same time often failing to actually get past the Senate anyway, so millions have been pissed off for no gain at all.
In this context, it really doesn't help to have a seemingly endless bout of gaffes proving how out of touch the government truly is.
It is not just that Abbott knighted Prince Philip, it is that days earlier he had justified plans to strip low-paid workers of badly needed penalty rates with a statement even Marie “let them eat cake” Antoinette would have balked at as a touch insensitive.
“If you don't want to work weekends,” was the prime minister's profound advice to the nation's army of low-paid casual workers, “then don't.”
Presumably Abbott thinks a low-paid casualised worker with rent due and bills to pay wakes up on a Sunday and thinks to themselves: “What shall I do today? Maybe sleep in? Or go for a walk? Perhaps watch a film or read a book or go visit friends or go fishing or take an art class or just sit all afternoon in a pub and drink myself into oblivion...
“Or shit, of course! I know! How about I go do a 10-hour shift at some shitty job in hospitality where rich pricks can abuse me while I serve them overpriced food for fuck-all pay. Yeah, that sounds nice.”
Like the article? Subscribe to Green Left now! You can also like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter.