From Rousie, in the comments on Nicola rocks on:

Leftism is the perfect ideological cover for base self interest. There is no longer a single sacred cow that trumps personal ambition among this lot.

The modern ALP is a cabal of career careerists whose every waking moment is now spent trying to snuff out any light that might show them for the hollow, hateful, self-serving, incompetents that they are.

Smear your opponents, threaten the private sector & spend billions funding rent-seeking constituencies. Will there be a worse legacy in Australian history?

Exactly right, it seems to me.

Who is this Nicola Roxon and what right does she have to say so much as a word about women given that her only genuine experience seems to be actually being one, a trait shared with half the planet including a certain Mrs Abbott who sees things differently and probably more intelligently. And as far as knowing Tony Abbott is concerned, Mrs Abbott would know Mr Abbott quite a bit better, I would think, as would his daughters.

I have an article at Quadrant on Line which looks at Tony Abbott and the War on Women which is really more of a look at the ALP and its War on Good Government. My conclusion, which I get to after a bit of personal history, some discussion of child raising, Mitt Romney and Roxon’s magical career is this:

Someone with a law degree, a handful of years working as a judge’s associate, a few years in a union, she is now making the law. It makes you angry that a woman with so little true experience of anything, a woman who has done nothing with her life other than occupy various Labor sinecures, can feel the right to say anything based on the shallow and limited experience she has had with life.

You can find the article here.

The International Institute for the Incredibly Incompetent (known as Four-Eyes to us observers from the outside) must have had the ALP amongst its charter members. It is for this reason almost always a depressing experience to pick up The Australian of a morning but to start off the week with three such bizarre examples of our government in action just makes it harder to face the day. First there was the main headline story:

ALP seeks tighter China ties

Carr Plan would put Beijing on similar standing to Washington

And then to add to the carnage, there was this which was the lead story:

We didn’t want carbon tax: AWU

Well who did but you got it anyway along with the rest of us. But the headline that may be the pick of the bunch, even though placed off to the side, read as follows:

Ministers firming on media direction

And it really was about government ministers genuinely intending to direct the media, and not in our interests either but in theirs! I suppose we take it somewhat in our stride because we are used to the Government always choosing to do the wrong thing. But still, this is a bit out of the ordinary although a long time coming. Here is the para that counts:

Communications Minister Stephen Conroy and Wayne Swan are leading a push for a stronger suite of reforms to curb the influence of media organisations, particularly newspapers, according to senior government sources.

At least if this legislation goes through I won’t have to worry about ruining my mornings reading headlines focusing on government incompetence ever again. The incompetence will still be there of course, just not the reporting.

My wife, having had a quite good job at IBM, when she came to having children quit her job and spent the years bringing them up based on the Jackie Kennedy principle, “if you bungle raising your children, I don’t think whatever else you do matters very much”. So to be with the children, she took up childcare and ran the programs wherever they went to school almost till the start of high school. She would have run the program at the ANU if they had had one just to stay close, but eventually she had to let them lead their own lives, and now they are in London so we probably should have kept a closer eye.

Anyway, ever since those early days in childcare she has stayed in the industry and now works a few days a week for a few hours a day just to keep her hand in and for a bit of pocket money which always comes in handy. Which is why I am always therefore pleased to hear Julia promising to raise the wages of childcare workers, not that I can see the economic logic of it, but you know how this self-interest thing works. The changes they have been making have made childcare all but unaffordable but that’s not one of my problems at the moment.

But this is all merely preamble to my contribution to the Nicola Roxon-Margie Abbott debate. Roxon, of course, has made no statement that has not been focus grouped and market tested so what she actually believes we may never know. But the latest form of distraction from the economic mess the ALP has created is to follow the same plot lines as the Democrats in the United States and accuse Abbott of being a soldier in the great War on Women in the same way Romney has had to face the exact same accusation. Neither seems to fit the bill even in the slightest, but the parties of the left are filled with such colossal stupenagels that they swallow the lot on the say so of Gillard and Obama. Evidence, who needs evidence when it is something they positively want to believe since it reinforces every one of their blind and ignorant prejudices. It is so absurd that both Mitt and Tony (a pairing I hope we will have to get used to) find it hard to make public statements to defend themselves against the left since there is nothing they have ever said or done that would make these accusations anything other than beneath their dignity to reply to. But it’s politics and so they must, and to say that you haven’t stopped beating your wife because you never had in the first place is always a difficult proposition to get across.

But childcare has come up both here and in the US as part of the political debate. There is first here in Australia where we find this from an interview in The Herald Sun.

Mrs Abbott, who runs a community based childcare centre . . . .

Well, fancy that. There are many things Tony and myself have in common but who would have thought that one of them would be that our wives both work in childcare.

But it also came up in the United States as well, but in this case it wasn’t Ann Romney who was the childcare worker, but Mitt himself. The only reason it came out was because the Democrats had argued that this plutocrat was obviously too distant from the world of work to understand much of anything about ordinary people, and the example they used was Romney’s own garbageman (ie rubbish collector). But it turns out that Romney had even worked as a garbageman as he explains in this story.

During my campaign for governor, I decided to spend a day every few weeks doing the jobs of other people in Massachusetts. Among other jobs, I cooked sausages at Fenway Park, worked on asphalt paving crew, stacked bales of hay on a farm, volunteered in an emergency room, served food at a nursing home, and worked as a child-care assistant. I’m often asked which was the hardest job — it’s child care, by a mile.

Childcare the hardest job. I can believe that. After that, being president will be a complete breeze. As for Nicola Roxon, what she knows about real work you could fit into a thimble. This is from her Wikipedia entry that covers what constitutes her entire working career such as it was:

Between 1992 [ie when she was 25] and 1994, Roxon was employed as a judge’s associate to High Court Justice Mary Gaudron. She then became involved with the trade union movement, joining the National Union of Workers as an organiser. Roxon was also an industrial lawyer and senior associate with the law firm Maurice Blackburn and Co. from 1996 to 1998.

And from there into Parliament and now attorney-general. Someone with a law degree, a handful of years working as a judge’s associate and few years in a union and now making the law. It makes you angry that a woman with so little true experience of anything, who has done nothing with her life other than fill spots in a succession of various Labor sinecures, can feel the right to say anything based on the shallow and limited experience she has had with life.

The left may think of themselves in a positive light as defenders of the faith or something, but their disgusting behaviour over Alan Jones is beyond contempt and genuinely a matter for serious concern. This is from The Age.

Macquarie Radio Network executive chairman Russell Tate said ‘the nature, tone and volume of the reaction to Jones’ remarks, and in particular the threats being made through social media to companies advertising in Jones’ program and the disruption being caused to their businesses, have made it necessary for MRN to call some “time out”.’

‘Some simple facts need to be acknowledged.

‘There is almost universal agreement that Jones’ remarks were unacceptable, wrong and inexcusable. Alan himself acknowledged that from the moment he first advised me of them. He immediately arranged a media conference to state that publicly and apologise to the Prime Minister,’ he said.

‘Although the remarks were not made on 2GB, our position from the outset has been that a personal, unconditional apology was a necessary and appropriate response. I encouraged Alan to repeat the apology on 2GB when he first returned to air last Tuesday morning following his media conference. His apology was unambiguous and unconditional.’

Mr Tate said the threats to boycott Jones show were coming ‘almost entirely from people who do not listen to Alan Jones or 2GB at all – probably never have done and never will.’

What 2GB will now do is run Alan Jones without ads until further notice. Jones did still have advertisers but Macquarie is going to shield them from the derangement that is the specific province of the left. The leaders of the Union of Soviet SOCIALIST Republics and the members of the National SOCIALIST German Workers’ Party were all made up of these very types.

It is, I suppose, the role of a Government to find someone to blame when it oversees a wreck largely of its own making, but it’s not the public’s role to believe it just because the Government says it. The Australian economy has been kept on course through the highest terms of trade on record and a commodity boom made in China, but with it coming apart at the seams they are down to congratulating themselves on a fine performance in getting interest rates to fall when the reason for the fall is the rapidly softening economy they have so incompetently taken down.

But what has cheered me some has been watching the Alan Jones business unfold because it does appear that this ALP meme has been comprehensively rejected on the right side of the divide in spite of the tremendous media beat up. This is part of what I think is a larger story in which the ancestral media are no longer able to call the shots in the way they once did. It was a private meeting, the comment was universally recognised as beyond the pale, Jones is not a spokesman for the Liberal Party and he apologised as soon as he heard himself saying what he said. No one defended Jones’ comment, least of all Tony Abbott.

There were a couple of letters to the editor in The Australian that I thought captured the difference. These followed an article by Janet Albrechtsen headlined, “Selective moral outrage of the media”, an interesting piece to find within the media itself:

THANK you for Janet Albrechtsen’s counter-balancing piece. I was starting to worry I was the only one who could see through it all. The hypocrisy of the Labor mouthpieces and the ABC’s manufactured outrage has been breathtaking.

I disagreed with what Alan Jones said, too. But in view of the generally nasty level of rhetoric from Labor, I sometimes wish the conservatives would get some gumption and throw a bit back occasionally. After all, it’s only politics, isn’t it?

And then this:

A MAN is publicly crucified for days over one poorly chosen word in an hour-long speech to Liberal university students at a private function. Aren’t universities the places where people speak out?

Yes, the remark was over the top, but it should be considered in context. Did the hurt come from a private comment to a small and contained audience or its public disclosure?

On the premise that any publicity is good publicity, a radio station may well have gained listeners and its advertisers increased customers. And the public attention may just encourage more Australians to give serious thought to our future government.

The power of the press has been a tide on its way out for quite a while, going back to the universal backing of the republican cause having had no obvious effect on the outcome. The Government does, of course, hate to see its failings brought to the attention of the nation, but the reason such reports are so devastating is because almost everywhere you point your torch you find that what the Government has does has almost invariably made matters worse.