Yesterday, I was at my local sportsgound bowling cricket balls when I got into conversation with a another old curmudgeon. We had a conversation which veered from the abundance of sportsgrounds in Perth compared with other Australian cities to the joys of finally having a Labor Government. He had been born in Keir Hardie country a long time ago. Yes, That was Glasgow.
We talked about secession and how Western Australia was almost a different country to the rest of Australia.
He then developed an idea which has me thinking about my place in the world.
I have always been comfortable with Perth being so far from anywhere. Bali is closer to Perth than Adelaide. There is a huge sparsely populated stretch of land between Perth and any other major settled area in Australia.
My chance-met mate started talking about Morrison’s (remember him?) major war of words with China. How that relationship is becoming more and more difficult and how even our new PM may not be able to sort out that particular problem. That China was looking to have control over as much of the Pacific and Indian Oceans as possible. While India and Indonesia may be a little large to simply take over, Australia is very much a gnat compared with the China fly-swatter.
We Aussies may look on our resource sales to China as a conversation between equals yet there will always be a sense in the background that if we do not give them what they want, they simply need to take it from us.
Then came the words which continue to concern me.
If China wants to make a real point with Australia. The sort we cannot refuse, they have the perfect way!
Not the method Russia has taken with the Ukraine where everything Ukranian is being destroyed.
Perth is so remote from the rest of the world, so far from everything China wants from Australia, that one simple little nuclear bomb on top of Perth would damage nothing China wants! The fallout will not damage any major assets and the people China want to talk with will still be in their comfortable Sydney, Melbourne or Canberra offices.
Just that one small nuclear weapon would certainly get the attention of our leaders.
And the thought of it is disturbing what used to be my fairly comfortable 3am thoughts!
The Peter principle states that a person who is competent at their job will earn a promotion to a position that requires different skills. If the promoted person lacks the skills required for the new role, they will be incompetent at the new level, and will not be promoted again.
If the person is competent in the new role, they will be promoted again and will continue to be promoted until reaching a level at which they are incompetent.
Being incompetent, the individual will not qualify for promotion again, and so will remain stuck at this final placement.
This outcome is inevitable, given enough time and enough positions in the hierarchy to which competent employees may be promoted.
The Peter principle is therefore expressed as: “In a hierarchy, every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence.”
More importantly, this leads to Peter’s corollary: “In time, every post tends to be occupied by an employee who is incompetent to carry out its duties. (All from Wikipedia)
This would not be a Curmudgeon’s post without a reference to Australian politics. So here goes.
If we look at the 1940’s founded Liberal Party, we see the business conservatism which formed the basis of its existence. People being promoted until they could no longer perform their assigned duties. The only path for them was to leave, most commonly with a golden handshake or a sideways appointment into the Diplomatic corps.
In the past decade what has become apparent is that ALL Liberal Parliamentary and Party positions are finally filled with people who may well have been competent one step lower, yet are now occupied by those who have reached their level of incompetence. The standard business model accepts this as a natural part of business life and the best people still reach the top.
At least until there are no more best people. Or there is someone named ‘Peter’.
The ALP, on the other hand, founded in a battle with the Bosses back in the 1800’s, continues with its brutal and bloodthirsty habits. Any hint of weakness in its ranks is cut out without a second thought. To reach the top of the ALP requires ruthlessness and an acceptance of the Darwinian dictum of survival of the fittest.
No room for sympathy. Each day is a battle to hold your position.
The media love these battles because they are great theatre and can be used to prove how unsuitable these internally battling ALP members are for the leadership of Government.
There is no word given in the morning paper/TV news show of the growing incompetence inherent in the stable and predictable Liberal Party system, just a hailstorm of criticism of the training field for successful leadership which is the ever-renewing ALP.
Scott Morrison is often said to have done nothing through his reign as PM, yet that is simplistic.
He may have done little to benefit the Nation yet he DID do one very important thing.
From the day he was elected the lead his party, he concentrated on being re-elected.
And he taught his followers well!
So we Aussies have had a year of electioneering leading up to the 2019 election and since then we have had three years of electioneering.
FOUR YEARS of Electioneering without a break.
From Ballet School where looking ridiculous is a minor matter as long as the photo is used by the press.
All quite believable if you ignore the tummy flattening corset which is apparent in the second pic.
To welding school where he remembered the most important thing about electioneering. Get your face into the pics. Even if it means losing a part of your eyesight!
Now that the Morrison party has been thrown into opposition by a weary electorate, Morrison’s successors have immediately moved into doing the only thing they can remember from his time as electioneer-in-chief.
They have gone straight back into election mode.
The landmines left by the previous – umm – let’s call it a Government for the sake of non-libellous conversation – incumbents of the Treasury benches are exploding a little early.
So listening to the ‘New’ opposition, it sounds as though the election was a year ago and all this economic debt and deficit has been under a long ALP regime.
Watching, listening and reading of the pronouncements of the new shadow ministers, nothing that happened under the LNP can possibly have any effect on the current situation.
With absolutely straight faces they gaslight the electorate with the multiple weaknesses of the long-term Ablo Government and completely ignore any accidental questions about the NINE YEARS of LNP incompetence we all can now forget about because it never happened and anything you think you remember will soon be washed away in our new reality.
The so-called ‘Hung Parliament we are about to endure may be a figment of hope among the despairing Right Wing of Australian politics. A figment leapt upon by the adoring hyena packs who pass as the media in Australia.
Sadly for them, this vague hope is fatally flawed.
In the past, Australian politics was a two-party system and the loss of seats by one party automatically meant a gaining of those seats by the other. That old system has gradually changed this century. Now there is a major segment of the electorate which is choosing to vote for candidates who do not belong to either of the traditional groupings.
The long term ‘Coalition’ of the Liberal Party and the National/Country/Whatnever Party has been in existence for so long they have almost merged into a single Party. A single Party where the strength has now firmly swung to the lesser of the two groups.
In the early years of this century, the Greens began taking votes from the ALP while the Pauline Hanson horror scored some votes from the Right. The outcome was that the ALP lost a few seats, mainly in the Senate and the Coalition lost some seats, again, mainly in the Senate.
Since then while the Right Wing personnel has changed in name but not aim, the left has been fairly stable.
Now, in 2022, nearly a quarter of the way through the century, there is a new factor at work.
Due to the complete ineptness, coupled with its apparent corporate corruption, the Coalition has lost the confidence of many of its lay members. Now there is a new ‘grouping’ of candidates. Not new parties aiming to take seats from both sides of the Parliament but a new breed of candidate, unaligned but with similar aims and a single colour; teal. And the candidates are the women who should have been pre-selected by the Right-wing parties
The effect will be to take the votes of the disaffected Coalition voters.
Should the voting go the way the polls are indicating, those in the general population seem likely to take a minimum of seven seats from the Right to give the Left an outright majority in the House of Representatives.
It is what happens on the Right which becomes really interesting. The seats the Teal candidates win will all be taken from the Coalition which will become severely weakened. Even if the Left only picks up three or four seats from the badly disaffected electorate the seats lost to the Teals will leave the Right as the lesser of the two majors.
The best the Coalition can hope for is a hung Parliament. The best for the Left will be an outright majority. The worst which can happen for the ALP is a hung Parliament.
The Left showed a decade ago that it is skilled enough at Parliamentary politics to manage a hung Parliament. The same cannot be said for the Right who have had all sorts of problems with its own members during this current series of Governments.
No wonder Scott Morrison is so terrified of a hung Parliament. He knows it will lead to a change of Government with its concomitant very toothy ICAC.
It will be a reminder to the Electorate that Governments, like babies, should be changed regularly. And for the same reason!
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