Those hundreds of thousands of Australians, including members of the Coalition, who are signing petitions imploring Tony Abbott to take action to penalise Alan Jones in some way for the disrepute that he has heaped on the Liberal Party are, in my opinion, being a bit unreasonable. Tony Abbott no longer has any power to prevent or moderate the ravings of the likes of Alan Jones, Ray Hadley or Chris Smith. Any that he did have disappeared the day he gained the leadership of the Liberal Party by one vote.
Since then he has been leading a rabble of bickering shadow ministers and backbenchers who can’t come to agreement on anything and therefore haven’t come up with any alternative policies that their leader can take to the voters of Australia. Their latest failing is the ongoing dispute over the direction that wheat marketing should take.
Tony Abbott has therefore had to “sell his soul to the devil” and allow the “stormtroopers” of the extreme right, the so-called “shock jocks”, to take over the role of criticising the Government’s policy by spreading the propaganda and misinformation that their position on the political spectrum requires.
Does this system work for the opposition? You bet it does. Take Ray Hadley’s ongoing criticism of the “Carbon Tax”. Every day he culls calls to his show so there are at least a couple of whinges about the increases in electricity prices. He doesn’t tell his audience that the “Carbon Tax” is meant to increase electricity prices so that consumers are forced to modify their power use to use less electricity and thereby to reduce carbon emissions (and thousands are doing this). Ray Hadley’s failure to “tell the full story” is resulting in voters on the mid-north coast being dramatically misinformed compared to the rest of Australia. While Australia-wide surveys show that opposition to Carbon Pricing has fallen below 60 per cent, a newsletter from National Party Senator John Williams informs us that the figures for the New England and Lyne electorates are respectively 89 per cent and 87 per cent.
Tony Abbott is a decent bloke. It must be killing him that he is being so widely criticised for a situation that he can do nothing about and that Malcolm Turnbull has further increased his potential to be opposition leader by being the very first to jump in with a major criticism of Alan Jones’ deplorable action at a Young Liberals booze-up.
Mike Dibbs
Port Macquarie
