Miranda strips down to the gym shorts and pom pom to barrack for Bill |
Further to my disparaging post on the ostentatiously ambitious Bill Shorten, there’s something more than a little suspicious about an aspiring Labor leader who has uber-Tory Miranda Devine on his cheersquad. Of course, in part she’s just gleefully pouring petrol on the Bomber’s funeral pyre, but she really does seem to be a Shorten fan.
I’m not. What has Shorten actually achieved as a union leader in concrete terms? He’s hardly a Bob Hawke in any sense except his ability to manipulate the media to his personal advantage, and his recent tawdry factional manouevrings over pre-selections displayed Labor at its very worst.
If they’re thinking about drafting a potential leader from outside the current federal parliamentary ranks to cover the situation after Beazley’s seemingly inevitable failure (which isn’t a bad idea – the only one of the current crop who I think might have the goods is Lindsay Tanner – I’ve well and truly cooled on Julia Gillard and Rudd’s school prefect/nerd demeanour makes him unelectable), it should be someone with a proven track record of achievement in something more than blatant self-promotion. If PJK is a non-starter (and I accept he’d be carrying an awful lot of excess baggage), how about Peter Beattie? Or Clare Martin? Or even Geoff Gallop if the medication is working. A Labor leader with chronic depression at least won’t have to strive to achieve what may well be a rational state of mind if Dr Troppo is right.
He’s hardly a Bob Hawke in any sense except his ability to manipulate the media to his personal advantage
But that and back-room deals were Hawke’s strengths – he was never much of a policy wonk. Anybody who’s got ahead in the ACTU is no slouch at the back-room stuff, and media manipulation can carry people a long, long way (vide GWB).
And PJK would have to learn self-discipline very late in life (though it’s possible, of course, that his political and personal fall has already taught it).
GWB is really your example of getting ahead via media manipulation? Let us know when you are talking about the world we live in, then!
But I am overlooking something here, or is Shorten’s main appeal the fact that he seems able to say something competent about policy and the economy without immediately doubling over, grabbing his left foot, biting his right ear and contorting his nose? Unlike, er, everyone in else in Labor who starts with ‘How We Differ From Howard’ and then gets onto a policy, when of course the majority of people don’t really differ from Howard that much and have tuned out before the contortionist gets to the positive part?
Sorry about the incoherence.
Umm, I pass on the “gym shorts and pom pom”.
wikify me
The english speaking blogosphere has already spawned a number of slang terms, most notable amongst the pundits being to fisk, coined by detractors of British journalist Robert Fisk in 2001. Naturally, Aussie journalists – and our appalling set of opinion
“Umm, I pass on the “gym shorts and pom pom”
Yea, that’s be Ms Divine you are thinking off, who doubtlessly acts in many fine films…
…I hope, for your sake, at any rate.