Dear co contortionists. Ever tried making sense of the political dialogue in this country? Could be worse. New Zealand just spent millions on designing a new flag, and then didn’t. If you believe in fairies, then you’ve got a better hold on reality than most and possibly posess that one ingredient so lacking in the mind-space of those allegedly elected, Imagination. Lucky then, that at PCbyCP we have another telling insight, from none other than that sage of the sanguine, that luminary of the left-leaning, that oracle from the ossuary, Paddi ‘O’ Caermeda. Let Paddy illuminate us…..and put another half-light upon a non-problem. He opines…
Remarkable as this might seem, the party of the Right in Canada was known from 1942 until 2003 as the Progressive Conservative Party. Bringing to mind the Pushmepullyou of Dr Dolittle fame, it might as a currently unused name be applied to the Coalition government in Australia. After all the National Party is barely that and the Liberal Party hasn’t been as such for some time.
Of course recycling has been something of a topic of late. Continuity and change was revived from a US satirical TV show as an attempt by Malcolm Turnbull to hold together his increasingly fractious party. Former Prime Minister Tony Abbott was loudly proclaiming his view that the government was campaigning on his agenda and record, Turnbull was contorting on TV to try to show how very different he is, and even the trumpeting of a new fund for innovation in clean energy, hailed as a dramatic reversal of an Abbott reversal, was soon revealed as a funding cut from existing energy policies dressed in new clothes.
Even that most Turnbull of phrase ‘Exciting time’ found itself in trouble. It was under threat of a challenge from the Labor party for its appearance in the Innovation Agenda campaign as a political slogan, and was quietly dropped from the advertisements.
George Orwell was all over this. In his famous essay The Politics of the English Language published in 1946 he wryly observed: The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one’s real and one’s declared aims, one turns as it were instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish spurting out ink.
It is hard to see how we are all not going to be covered in cuttlefish ink by the time this very long campaign is over. We need the ink, or Turnbull thinks we do, to disguise the fact that nothing is happening, nothing is changing, that the progressive is really a conservative. His government is a Pushmepullyou, presided over by a Dr Dolittle, a beast that without an anus must surely be full of …..