Cheap gotcha’s in politics – insufferable and time wasting

 

Just as I had written about my hope that politics seemed to be turning towards more adult and serious things, driven by the various global crises, such as the pandemic, looming financial downturn, and the war in Ukraine, reality, who is wont to cut down one at their most hopeful, hits me in the face with a brick in a sock.

 

As the Australian federal election looms, the headlines are again being hijacked by gotcha’s, rather than substantive things. The most boring is perhaps the mountain made of the molehill of the word choice Scott Morrison made, during the election debate, when he responded to a mother with a child with autism asking about his government’s plans for the National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS).

 

In trying to sympathise with the mother, Morrison said that ‘Jenny and I have been blessed, we’ve got two children that don’t – that haven’t had to go through that. And, so, for parents with children who are disabled, I can only try and understand your aspirations for those children.’

 

For using the word ‘blessed’, he was roundly attacked by the Labor party, and on social media.

 

I’m certain that it would strike most sane people that one would not wish for their children to have disabilities. And this natural feeling does not diminish in any way the dignity, worth, and rights of people with disabilities.

 

Indeed, the reason we have a taxpayer funded NDIS is precisely our society’s sympathy of the hardships that disabilities often impose, as well as its willingness to help reduce this burden that can strike families often by the sheer whims of nature. This insight and tradition has much of its roots in Fabianism and the Left, the descendants of which now act as if they have completely forgotten the wisdom of their forebears.

 

What’s more, in saying that he is thankful that his children do not have disabilities, Morrison is surely in no way gloating, as implied by some of his accusers. But what they do reveal is either an extraordinary aptitude for being insulted, or their insincerity and hypocrisy – the Labor party still has not given an honest accounting of the serious accusations of bullying, made by its own members, against its senior MPs. But they, including Kristina Keneally and Katy Gallagher, two of the main perpetrators accused of bullying, are very happy to pounce on an ill-chosen word with all the fake moral outrage they can muster.

 

It’s surely more insulting that Labor leader Anthony Albanese, a man vying for the top job in the country, does not seem to know what the unemployment rate or the RBA cash rate are, especially given that he is attacking the incumbent government on economy. It is also not decent when a truculent Adam Bandt, leader of the Australian Greens, is celebrated when ‘hitting back’ at a journalist who simply asked if he knew what the Wage Price Index was (which he obviously didn’t).

 

Most insidious of all is the deliberate myopia of the headlines. It does not seem to me to be hitting the nail on the head when headlines surrounding the Liberal candidate for Warringah, Katherine Deves, are about the tone of her old tweets, where she used some inflammatory analogies, whereas the issue at hand upon which she is commenting upon, that of transgender athletes in girls’ sports, is largely ignored.

 

This is particularly concerning because this issue, which affects tens of thousands of girls in Australia, is apparently something that is only allowed to brew in the margins of the media and politics across the Western world. Public critics of the push for transgenderism to be in every realm of life, including girls’ sports, such as Joe Rogan, Abigail Shrier, Dave Chappelle, Germaine Greer, J.K. Rowling, and Caitlyn Jenner, herself a trans woman, and many female athletes, all face terrific backlash for defending female identify, rights, and spaces, and for stating what everyone knew to be true mere moments ago.  

 

If you’ve gotten this far, you might have noticed that this piece is not meant to be a defense of Morrison. By all means attack him and his ideas – the media and the public have every right and duty to do so. But attack him on something that actually matters. Lamentably, the addiction to cheap and shallow gotcha moments means that the so-called mainstream media actually stands in the way of the public to get to the heart of things.

 

The late Christopher Hitchens said that he became a journalist because he did not wish to rely on newspapers for information. This observation is perhaps more salient than ever.