Well that's it ladies and gentlemen. The day we spent three years turning the Australian political landscape into a circus for. The day when the promise that catapulted Tony Abbott and his band of merry thugs, loons and psychopaths into government was fulfilled. The repeal of the carbon tax.
The saddest thing about this fiasco isn't that Australia has become the first country to repeal carbon pricing or that we are now the only nation actively fighting against reducing carbon emissions or even the fact that this, and little else, is the reason we're lumbered with an Abbott government, along with their short armed and deep pocketed camp followers and registered charity, the IPA. The saddest thing is that Australia is still a country where the majority of people can be conned into putting the interests of a greedy and self-serving few ahead of the interests of the nation.
We're a country that has achieved much, but has never had the courage to fulfil our potential beyond the safe confines of the sporting field. We've been scared into trashing a world class NBN, the Gonski reforms and our human rights record with irrational fears of a few boatloads of desperate people, anything someone decides to call a tax and fairytales about the economy. This is the biggest con of all. For the last two decades Australia's robust, diverse and broadly deregulated economy has largely run itself. The job of Federal Treasurer is basically the political equivalent of a department store lift operator. It's a superfluous role that could be performed by a half-wit, or even Joe Hockey.
Yet Australians remain convinced that a government that can't even control Clive Palmer is somehow in control of a $1.5 trillion economy. The result is they get to take the credit for economic performance they had little or nothing to do with. They justify ignoring or destroying the things governments can, and actually do, have control over, education, health, industrial relations, welfare, human rights etc. They distract us from their cruel, petty-minded behaviour by convincing us it's somehow in our interests.
The carbon tax is dead, Abbott has kept one of the few promises he ever intended keeping and it's two more years till the next popularity contest. Anyone feeling less scared?