Thursday 25th of April 2024
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row, row, row your boat gently down the stream, If you see a crocodile, don't forget to scream!!...

boat

Like all new prime ministers — and we are in a position in Australia to make lots of comparisons — Scott Morrison has been rifling about for some of those "cut through" phrases that will help both define him to voters and define the task the Government faces to its members.

It's a bit like the verbal equivalent of the Prime Minister's move to give everybody a coat pin with the Australian flag on it.

This went a bit south as a gesture this week when quite a lot of his ministers didn't wear them, and when Mr Morrison himself wore his pin upside down.

As experts on flags know, upside down flags are an international distress signal.

Columnists were running pin counts in Question Time.

Look, yes, this is all SO trivial and distracting. And that's exactly what the Prime Minister's message to his troops was about during this first parliamentary fortnight.

In pep talks to MPs, Mr Morrison asked them to consider, before they went out in public to air their views, "does this make the boat go faster?".

 

Read more:

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-09-22/scott-morrison-urging-mps-to-make-the-boat-go-faster

a trophy boat given by morrison...

Scott Morrison gave a model of an asylum-seeker boat emblazoned with the words “We stopped these” to Roman Quaedvlieg as a thank-you gift for his work on the Coalition’s border protection policy, Quaedvlieg has said.

The gift was a replica of one that Morrison said was a gift from a constituent, with the words “I stopped these”, referring to the fishing boats used to transport asylum seekers – mainly via Indonesia – to Australia to seek refuge.

...

Quaedvlieg has increasingly spoken out against members of government, including the home affairs minister, Peter Dutton, in relation to the au pairs scandal, and is currently seeking redress through the parliament after Dutton spoke under privilege to accuse him of “grooming” a younger woman.

Quaedvlieg has also indicated he was unhappy with the policies regarding medical transfers of ill detainees, and delays in resettlement, but otherwise has defended his role at the head of the border force.

Read more:

https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2018/sep/22/we-stopped-these-...

a raw display of upside down lapel pins...

Far from healing the divisions rending the Party, the sickness at the heart of the modern Liberal Party has been on raw display through Scott Morrison's first three week's as PM.

IN HIS FIRST WEEK as Prime Minister, Scott Morrison announced, with a homely love of nation and just the right touch of jingoism, that he had given all his MPs an Australian flag lapel pin, "to remind us of whose side we’re on". Just in case they forgot.

In his second week, he took his flag-wearing MPs to Albury, where Robert Menzies had gathered the fledgling Liberal party in 1944 — perhaps to remind them which party they’re in. Certainly, the dysfunctional, divided, Liberal Party of today bears little resemblance to Menzies’ vision of a party made up of several disparate groups united by their anti-Labor positions into a single political force.

It has been an uneasy alliance of post-war idealists, individualists and free-traders ever since. As a Party defined more by what it is against – the Labor Party – than by what it is for, the Liberal Party has been held together by strong leaders such as Menzies, Fraser and Howard, and always prone to splintering into its constituent parts at other times.

By his third week, Morrison was presiding over a Party rent by ideological division, personal hatreds and no longer trying to disguise it, despite his best efforts to move on from the obvious question of why Turnbull had been replaced and why he was now Prime Minister. Leaks were appearing daily, helpfully provided by the vanquished, lapel flags were scarce and, during Question Time, the distracted Prime Minister’s own flag appeared upside down.

Read more:

https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/bullying-betr...

 

Idiots...