Sparkling cynicism from the party of Muldoon, Boag and Luxon
One particular aspect of going on The Panel that could really grind my gears was the hazard of Michelle Boag. In the field of Reckons Show Jumping, no-one can do a Gish Gallop like her.
The Gish Gallop is the technique of filling your ten, sixty, or ninety seconds of burble with as many separate assertions, bad faith arguments, misstatements, and misrepresentations as possible, rendering a response to each in the same space of time quite impossible.
What would also get my damn goat was her enthusiastic embrace of the well-known National Party practice of coming around to the right position twenty years after the rest of us and then acting like it’s your discovery. Rhapsodising over Nelson Mandela, for instance. Embracing nuclear-free, for instance.
I am getting the same feeling watch this prime minister vow to lift our super game.
If you have a dairy that got ram-raided six times by the same kids and then they turned up one day outside asking everyone to contribute to help make the dairy good again, then you’ll know what it feels like to hear National pledge to make our super savings as good as Australia’s.
I especially note the way they propose to use your money and your employer’s money alone to make this happen. Their chiseling down of the yearly government carrot from just over a thousand to half of that, and then half that again, remains in effect.
I also note that a large factor in the vigorous growth of Australians’ saving for retirement was the altogether more modest promise of state support at the end of your working life. I.e. you’d better get cracking, sport. They went one way, we went the other way thanks to a calamitous Muldoon election bribe. (Muldoon, R.D., National)
I also note that the Labour party is offering two most excellent new candidates: Gary Payinda and Craig Renney. A parliament full of people as good as them would be bloody splendid.
I like leaders with great ideas. I do not care for ones who sneer and scoff at them and spend thirty years undermining them before they finally get a clue then brandish it as their own.
