Nothing better illustrates the disgusting unity ticket of swan diving living Aussie standards than Fake Trump, Peter Dutton.
We have already pointed out the lunacy of his nuclear fantasy, his incredibly corrupt and useless gas policy, his grovelling to an autocratic China, his bizarre liquid lunch tax education lieu of tax reform, his phony Australia First gambit, his double-dealing on immigration targets, not to mention house prices, and, today, we can add farcical cost-cutting to the mounting pile of ersatz trash.
Crikey has a hilarious anecdote about fake “hard man” Peter Dutton.
…a journalist pointing out that in appointing Jacinta Nampijinpa Price to a new government efficiency role, Dutton appeared to have forgotten that he’d already appointed South Australian MP James Stevens as “shadow assistant minister for government waste reduction”. That’s understandable as, apart from the occasional Sky News story on taxpayer money being “wasted” on Welcome to Country ceremonies, Stevens is invisible.
Dutton devoted 280 words to not answering the journalist, explaining, “There’s so much waste in the system … there are many other aspects of government waste that we need to address and Jacinta Price, I think, as she demonstrated during the course of the Voice, has a great capacity not just to get across detail but to understand what is a better path forward.”
Presumably unlike Stevens. Although he was, Dutton added, “doing an excellent job”.
The journalist pressed Dutton again. He replied, “I just think that the amount of waste — you’ve got a foreign affairs minister and a shadow and a junior foreign affairs minister as well. You’ve got a finance minister and you’ve got a treasurer and an assistant treasurer. There are many roles within government where there’s more than one person doing that task, and I think that’s entirely appropriate on Foreign Affairs.”
…Apart from repeating Trump’s mistake of appointing two people to lead a war on inefficiency — unsurprising, given Dutton’s reflexive copycatting of the mad king — Dutton threw in a drive-by on Bob Hawke and Paul Keating, declaring that having a dynamic duo tackling waste instead of just one shadow minister was “an extension of what happened in the Howard years after they came in, when Paul Keating and Bob Hawke had destroyed the economy then as well”.
Perhaps Dutton’s too young to remember, but Bob Hawke hadn’t been in politics for over four years when John Howard came to office. And it used to be pro forma for the Coalition to insist that they supported the Hawke-Keating economic reform program (in fact, they opposed large slabs of it, like superannuation, tax reform, Medicare and national competition policy). Now, under Dutton — an LNP leader, not a Liberal leader — the Coalition line is that Hawke and Keating “destroyed the economy”.
The federal government has expanded the public service headcount by about 36,000 since taking office in May 2022. The Coalition contends that these positions are not needed, and it has flagged massive job cuts if it wins the upcoming election.
At MB, are all for slashing and burning Canberra dills.
But we also have to ask, given the uncertainty around Dutton’s immigration cuts, how are the remaining 90% of dills going to deliver services to a still-growing population?
Still, we think it is worth a try. We can’t see how enriching Canberra’s uber-toxic bourgeois serves the nation. If nothing else, it will deliver a hammer blow to the Canberra property market so we can all laugh along with schadenfreude and a beer as these poisonous fake Australians cop an asset price shock.
Then again, it will probably just lead to a 36,000 shift from the public sector to consultants, and prices will go up!
Where are fake Trump Dutton’s commitments to smash immigration, liberate AI, break vested interests, kill energy prices, and lift wages?
Nowhere. It is all fake.
