Ahhh ‘politics’. It’s often a word with a lot of negative connotations.
When I asked one of my friends for his thoughts on current politics, he described it as “Lame, like I care, but look as long as it’s going okay.” Most of my friends treat my love for politics as a bizarre obsession and have to put up with my rants. So much has been happening in politics since the last edition and I don’t want to subject you all to a rant so I’ve decided to use the medium of Mean Girls to attempt to describe it all.
Our political parties are like high school cliques, each with a certain reputation. There are the Liberals, who are essentially the Plastics. The Plastics of Canberra include Joe Hockey, who follows the lead and always wears blue ties, Julie Bishop, who like Gretin follows the lead of Regina (Tony Abbott) but probably has her own leadership ambitions. A couple of weeks ago, some backbenchers rebelled against the status quo and announced that Regina should stand down as leader. The school voted and the spill was defeated 61 to 39. Though victorious, much of the media and many political commentators speculate that the writing is on the wall for Mr. Abbott now.
The spill was the culmination of many weeks or months of poor decision-making by Mr. Abbott. The poor performing budget, the constant changing of key policies such as pushing the Medicare co-payment and then the next day dropping it. Also, the fall of Liberal state governments to Labor, including the crushing defeat of Campbell Newman, took their toll. A week before the Victorian election, Mr. Abbott refused to fund one of the Liberal state government’s key infrastructure plans, and gave an Australian knighthood to Prince Phillip just weeks before the Queensland election. This was a move that was viewed very negatively by the majority of Australians, with many Liberal cabinet members having to embarrassingly sidestep questions about their feelings on the matter. Recently, Abbott has called on the Indonesian government to “Remember the aid we gave in 2005” in response to their refusal to grant amnesty to the Bali Nine ringleaders.
Gaffe after gaffe. Will the Plastics change? Will Tony Abbott lead next time we meet? Only time will tell.
Words by Leah Roberts