Bank accounts in Cyprus were raided by the government because it had run out of money. Our superannuation accounts in Australia are being raided because the government has run out of money. I see a parallel here myself, but others apparently do not. This is from Sunday’s Insiders which has been culled from The Australian‘s “Cut & Paste”. They are talking about Tony Abbott having said that the government’s raid on super was “shades of Cyprus” which the Prime Minister, in her own quiet, understated way, had described as “crazy talk”.

FRAN Kelly: Crazy and dangerous.

Lenore Taylor: And she also went on to call him an economic simpleton, just to, you know, hammer home the point. I do think . . .

Kelly: Normally leaders do try to pull back a bit the domestic . . .

Taylor: No sign of that but I do think saying that the super changes had shades of Cyprus about them was an ill-informed thing to say. There is no shade of Cyprus here. There is no raid on anybody’s nest egg here. If there was any shade of Cyprus going on do we really think the superannuation industry would have called off their ad campaign?

Kelly: Shades of Cyprus? A bridge too far?

George Megalogenis: . . . as for the rhetoric, you don’t really want me to take that literally. Look, it’s close to crazy talk.

Kelly: Thank you. Does the Opposition Leader need to be a little bit more careful?

Michael Stutchbury: . . . this is clearly hyperbole which clearly goes too far.

My only point here is that this is an election not yet won. The incredible incompetence of the government plus the certain barracking for the ALP of virtually the entire journalist brigade in Australia will make this a very tough election.

It does get me down to listen to this new proto-Labor meme how Simon Crean is now the defacto leader of the opposition. Simon Crean was one of the architects of the Superannuation Guarantee and so finally drew a line in the sand over this one issue. It may well be true that he cannot stand Julia Gillard but so what. He still votes with her in every Parliamentary division and how he would act if she and the ALP were ahead in the polls you may be sure would be an entirely different matter. As a “leader” of anything he is a washout. His aim in this instance was to save Gillard from a monster level political error that would have dragged Labor even more deeply into the mud. The result on superannuation is an outcome that Labor can take to the election. Had Gillard and Swan’s original intentions been fulfilled, even the densest of Labor supporters would have seen (however dimly) the problems it would have caused (and is still causing) and a few more of them might have drifted away. Instead, disaster averted, they live on to fight another day.

And for Crean, Kelty and Ferguson to go on about Gillard indulging in class war is so ludicrous that it is pathetic that anyone pays the slightest attention to it. Does no one remember the past farther back than the day before yesterday? These are class warriors from the most ancient of days. Unless there has been some kind of conversion, these three former leaders of the ACTU have no love for business other than as a recognised means to wring more money from. It is “the workers”, and only “the workers”, they have ever shown the slightest interest in, however much most of the things they have done make the life of most workers worse than if they had just done nothing at all.

Could it be? I hardly know anyone who votes Lib but then I work at a university and many of my friends are upper middle class. We are still, however, what we are and not quite over the edge. Let it be just like this unless it tilts this way even more.

What does depress me, however, is how quickly the gap does close after widening to what ought to be an unbridgeable chasm. And if the chart is anything to go by, a cut in interest rates is all it takes. So I will be happier when it happens and she and they are gone for good (or for at least six years and maybe nine).

And this should be the message. The Australian community is not an ALP slush fund. But the only way to drive this home is to drive them from office with the must crushing defeat in Commonwealth history.

I tend to think of socialists as the meanest people I ever meet. It seems to be almost the defining characteristic, an uncharitableness that goes right to the bone. They make up for their personal lack of altruism by a feigned show of concern through various aims at redistribution which typically means taking from the productive to give to those who are not quite as good at earning an income as those with more money. Their middleman’s fees are usually quite a rewarding experience as well.

But Julia Gillard is in a class of her own. There is such a morbid inability to see anyone else’s needs or desires other than her own worthy of consideration that it is almost impossible to believe just how selfish she is. Given the havoc she creates around her, the absence of any evidence of even a touch of self-reflection is unique. She is a monster of self regard and self conceit, never feeling those self doubts that anyone in her shoes might feel. She has ploughed through any and all obstacles on her way to whatever she has wanted without a moment of remorse at any single moment.

She and Obama have a similar mentality. Far far left, the incalculable damage they cause merely a necessity on the road to the better world they will create. I think both are rather dull to normal so far as their level of intelligence may go but are as brazen and willing to lie to any extent necessary to have their way. Destructive but never in retreat.

That two such personalities should rise to the top of the political tree in both countries at the same time requires an explanation. And the best I can come up with is the absence of any seriously strident media criticism. Neither ever receives anything other than a momentary rebuke and never more than the absolute minimum and never sustained.

The kind of ear splitting on-going never-ceasing banshee wailing of the media in attacking anything done by someone on the right that can in any way be portrayed as tainted and less than perfect drives the political atmospherics in just about every democratic community where the remains of a free press makes it almost impossible for right of centre parties to thrive. In Australia, it is only Gillard’s complete incompetence that may in the end make the difference since the media will have to at least acknowledge some of it and the community can see it everywhere they turn even though it is not validated through the commentary in the press.

But at the core of it is a woman whose self-regard is so total that it is hard to imagine her ever owning up to a failing of any kind in any circumstance. Shameless and selfish to an extraordinary degree.

What a laughable story that the Greens and Labor have just had a parting of the ways. This is the start of the story in The Australian:

GREENS Leader Christine Milne says Labor has effectively walked away from its minority government alliance with the Greens, and the minor party will operate ‘beyond the agreement’ for the remainder of the current parliament.

Yeah, sure, walked away. Under Gillard, so far as policy has been concerned, the ALP has been blended into the Greens. Gillard is in fact a Green and would have been where Milne now is had things been a bit different in 1995. If there is a difference of any significance on anything, I cannot think what it has been. Global warming, the mining industry, logging, growth, border protection, foreign policy, public spending, taxation, you name it, we have seen our first Green government in Australia. A perfect shambles but that is not the surprise. That no one has recognised who the senior partner has been is the odd part, possibly because most of the journalists who might have been asked to comment are more or less indistinguishable from the Greens themselves.

This separation of convenience in the lead up to the election is necessary for both but particularly for Labor. It must run its own race, be seen to be strong, make faces at Green policies and try to look different. Since some Labor people are actually anti-Green – mining and forestry unions, say – there needs to be a pretence made that for all practical purposes the two are not actually one and the same. It is nothing more than a strategic decision to gather in the highest number of votes for each on their own and for both together.

Of course, some parts of the ALP are so lacking in any appreciation of what just took place that they have actually tried to deny it. From the story:

Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said Senator Milne was only doing a bit of product differentiation.

‘We are the ones who brought in a carbon price successfully and we are the ones who have made major breakthroughs in Tassie forests and the Murray-Darling.’

Exactly so. The ALP are the Greens. Take one, choose the other. Whichever way you go, it’s the same thing, you are picking exactly the right party to ruin this country and darken its future.