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Insights from Quadrant
Green energy
good and hard
good and hard
The voters of Warringah have spoken: they’re all for renewables and, not being hypocrites, will undoubtedly wish to be seen leading the way to that clean, green future we keep hearing about. Hence the petition which seeks to dot the Manly foreshore and other locations with arrays of wind turbines. You can sign it here, and do make a point to tell ’em Zali sent you.
Once those wind turbines are in place, the 35,477 voters who declared Ms Steggall their first preference will be eager to begin work on Stage Two: a giant incinerator and chimney for generating even more clean, green Gaia-friendly energy from rubbish trucked-in from all over Sydney.
No doubt somewhat down in the dumps that the beastly Coalition was returned to the government benches despite all polls and expectations to the contrary, Warringah voters need cheering up. What better way to lift their spirits than helping them to live by and with the schemes they’re so keen to impose on everyone else?
Insights from Quadrant
Reflections on May 18
Christopher Carr, Quadrant contributor, shares some thoughts on Saturday’s result:
Whilst getting the broad outcome of the Federal election right in my May piece for Quadrant Online, “The Comfort of History“, I was sadly wrong in my prediction Tony Abbott would retain Warringah, although I did point to some ominous signs:
The richly funded GetUp campaign is unusually concentrated in the affluent suburbs within Tony Abbott’s electorate of Warringah, where we see a large contingent of affluent professionals, plus the university-educated children of the affluent middle class, spurning the ‘carbon economy’ basis of their own wealth.
I went on:
I believe Tony Abbott will win the battle to retain his seat, but the campaign underscores both the effect of the Left’s march through the institutions and a partial breakdown of the old socioeconomic alignment in Australian politics.
I underestimated the extent of the frivolous virtue-signalling of all too many well-heeled voters in Mosman and Beauty Point etc, simultaneously being reminded of William F. Buckley’s famous quote, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
There is certainly more common sense among the battlers in Dickson and Longman than among all too many of the doctors wives, bankers and high paid economists in the exclusive suburbs in Warringah, Kooyong and Higgins. In the two Melbourne seats, the Liberals survived largely because their opponents were stark raving bonkers. In Kooyong, Greens candidate and multimillionaire Julian Burnside openly advocated the reintroduction of death duties. Presumably, his 21.38% vote included a fair number of the upper crust.
Lenin is quoted as saying, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. It seems quite a few upper class twits are happy to donate the rope.
Back in Warringah, Zali Steggall sort of pretended that she was a Liberal on all but climate change. In reality, as emerged during her campaign, she had been a Greens elitist all her voting life. As for the rest of Australia, her supposed idealism requires the poor, especially, to feel the pain of higher electricity prices. In the hour of her triumph on Saturday night, you could sense among her crowd of Anglo, private school educated, affluent supporters that smug, condescending, morally superior, “we know best attitude” which was such a turn off to the rest of Australia.
We should be worried about the rot among our socio-economic elite. But for now, we should be happy that ordinary Australians — “the normals”, as they might be called — have told the elitists to toddle off and have a latte.
Insights from Quadrant
At your throat
or at your feet
or at your feet
There are many misconceptions about the Left, whose louder advocates can strike those not of their tribe as being possessed by a hectoring absolutism. Don’t agree with what they say? You’re worse than wrong, you’re evil! That’s apt to be the take-home impression of any conservative who has survived a Northcote barbecue or Newtown soiree, but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t always true. Sometimes our Left-inclined fellow citizens can be the very essence of conciliation, good manners and empathy, extending much love and respect to those on the other side of politics.
This happens whenever they lose an election, as TV personality Lisa Wilkinson has just demonstrated. No sooner had it become apparent Labor couldn’t win on May 18 than she was pouring her broken, gentle heart into an open letter to once and future PM Scott Morrison.
“It might be good to start with some healing,” she begins, observing that “we” are all feeling “just a little broken right now”. We? According to the Australian Electoral Commission, some 52 per cent of the voting population has been pretty chipper for the past two days or so. Ms Wilkinson continues:
… broken-hearted in fact, at how toxic the Australian body politic has become — and a return to basic civility in public discourse would be a great start to that healing.
What follows is a laundry list of issues and obsessions parties on the port side of politics put to the electorate as in dire need of fixing: climate doom, gender pay gaps, oppressed indigenes, homeless street-sleepers, suicidal teens, domestic violence, childcare. Islamophobia fails to crack a mention, but Ms Wilkinson’s good manners no doubt decreed that topic be left to Channel 10 stablemate Waleed Aly.
In order to achieve that “healing” for which Ms Wilkinson has been yearning since Saturday night, all the Morrison government need do is implement the very same slate of Left policies which the electorate rejected. Funny how that works.
Less amusing is the Left’s rather more insistent attitude when their side wins, as might be recalled by those who heard ALPBC radio compere Jon Faine’s on-air quizzing of the Herald Sun‘s editor after Labor’s 2007 victory. No yearning for “healing” back then; rather, the need was for “cleansing” News Corp’s cadre of columnists of those who don’t see the world as it appears from Ultimo and Southbank (emphasis added).
“I’m going to talk in particular about columnists … and … you have some notorious ones of your own.
“It kind of represents the thinking that’s out of step with the result of the election … You’re not going through a cleansing process?“
The lesson: if conservatives wish to encourage civility in progressives, they need to thrash them and then thrash them again. After this latest Coalition victory, history suggests at least some will eschew abusing and maligning their ideological foes until, well, Thursday or so.
— roger franklin
Insights from Quadrant
Green energy
good and hard
good and hard
The voters of Warringah have spoken: they’re all for renewables and, not being hypocrites, will undoubtedly wish to be seen leading the way to that clean, green future we keep hearing about. Hence the petition which seeks to dot the Manly foreshore and other locations with arrays of wind turbines. You can sign it here, and do make a point to tell ’em Zali sent you.
Once those wind turbines are in place, the 35,477 voters who declared Ms Steggall their first preference will be eager to begin work on Stage Two: a giant incinerator and chimney for generating even more clean, green Gaia-friendly energy from rubbish trucked-in from all over Sydney.
No doubt somewhat down in the dumps that the beastly Coalition was returned to the government benches despite all polls and expectations to the contrary, Warringah voters need cheering up. What better way to lift their spirits than helping them to live by and with the schemes they’re so keen to impose on everyone else?
Insights from Quadrant
Reflections on May 18
Christopher Carr, Quadrant contributor, shares some thoughts on Saturday’s result:
Whilst getting the broad outcome of the Federal election right in my May piece for Quadrant Online, “The Comfort of History“, I was sadly wrong in my prediction Tony Abbott would retain Warringah, although I did point to some ominous signs:
The richly funded GetUp campaign is unusually concentrated in the affluent suburbs within Tony Abbott’s electorate of Warringah, where we see a large contingent of affluent professionals, plus the university-educated children of the affluent middle class, spurning the ‘carbon economy’ basis of their own wealth.
I went on:
I believe Tony Abbott will win the battle to retain his seat, but the campaign underscores both the effect of the Left’s march through the institutions and a partial breakdown of the old socioeconomic alignment in Australian politics.
I underestimated the extent of the frivolous virtue-signalling of all too many well-heeled voters in Mosman and Beauty Point etc, simultaneously being reminded of William F. Buckley’s famous quote, “I’d rather entrust the government of the United States to the first 400 people listed in the Boston telephone directory than to the faculty of Harvard University.”
There is certainly more common sense among the battlers in Dickson and Longman than among all too many of the doctors wives, bankers and high paid economists in the exclusive suburbs in Warringah, Kooyong and Higgins. In the two Melbourne seats, the Liberals survived largely because their opponents were stark raving bonkers. In Kooyong, Greens candidate and multimillionaire Julian Burnside openly advocated the reintroduction of death duties. Presumably, his 21.38% vote included a fair number of the upper crust.
Lenin is quoted as saying, “the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them”. It seems quite a few upper class twits are happy to donate the rope.
Back in Warringah, Zali Steggall sort of pretended that she was a Liberal on all but climate change. In reality, as emerged during her campaign, she had been a Greens elitist all her voting life. As for the rest of Australia, her supposed idealism requires the poor, especially, to feel the pain of higher electricity prices. In the hour of her triumph on Saturday night, you could sense among her crowd of Anglo, private school educated, affluent supporters that smug, condescending, morally superior, “we know best attitude” which was such a turn off to the rest of Australia.
We should be worried about the rot among our socio-economic elite. But for now, we should be happy that ordinary Australians — “the normals”, as they might be called — have told the elitists to toddle off and have a latte.
Insights from Quadrant
At your throat
or at your feet
or at your feet
There are many misconceptions about the Left, whose louder advocates can strike those not of their tribe as being possessed by a hectoring absolutism. Don’t agree with what they say? You’re worse than wrong, you’re evil! That’s apt to be the take-home impression of any conservative who has survived a Northcote barbecue or Newtown soiree, but the fact of the matter is that it isn’t always true. Sometimes our Left-inclined fellow citizens can be the very essence of conciliation, good manners and empathy, extending much love and respect to those on the other side of politics.
This happens whenever they lose an election, as TV personality Lisa Wilkinson has just demonstrated. No sooner had it become apparent Labor couldn’t win on May 18 than she was pouring her broken, gentle heart into an open letter to once and future PM Scott Morrison.
“It might be good to start with some healing,” she begins, observing that “we” are all feeling “just a little broken right now”. We? According to the Australian Electoral Commission, some 52 per cent of the voting population has been pretty chipper for the past two days or so. Ms Wilkinson continues:
… broken-hearted in fact, at how toxic the Australian body politic has become — and a return to basic civility in public discourse would be a great start to that healing.
What follows is a laundry list of issues and obsessions parties on the port side of politics put to the electorate as in dire need of fixing: climate doom, gender pay gaps, oppressed indigenes, homeless street-sleepers, suicidal teens, domestic violence, childcare. Islamophobia fails to crack a mention, but Ms Wilkinson’s good manners no doubt decreed that topic be left to Channel 10 stablemate Waleed Aly.
In order to achieve that “healing” for which Ms Wilkinson has been yearning since Saturday night, all the Morrison government need do is implement the very same slate of Left policies which the electorate rejected. Funny how that works.
Less amusing is the Left’s rather more insistent attitude when their side wins, as might be recalled by those who heard ALPBC radio compere Jon Faine’s on-air quizzing of the Herald Sun‘s editor after Labor’s 2007 victory. No yearning for “healing” back then; rather, the need was for “cleansing” News Corp’s cadre of columnists of those who don’t see the world as it appears from Ultimo and Southbank (emphasis added).
“I’m going to talk in particular about columnists … and … you have some notorious ones of your own.
“It kind of represents the thinking that’s out of step with the result of the election … You’re not going through a cleansing process?“
The lesson: if conservatives wish to encourage civility in progressives, they need to thrash them and then thrash them again. After this latest Coalition victory, history suggests at least some will eschew abusing and maligning their ideological foes until, well, Thursday or so.
— roger franklin
