Thursday, February 21, 2013

EDM Extract - Nepotism, Nonsense & Prisoner X

Well, it's been another big week in the big house of politics on all sorts of levels. State / Federal / International. Oversight / Breach / Punishment. Rumour / Speculation / Truth. Pretty much the whole gamut of the political discourse in this country.

State-side then, in Queensland anyway, the current Government has been busy in managing to appear in the news for all sorts of wrong reasons. It began last Friday when Minister Bates finally put us all out of our misery and resigned. The Minister who'd been on leave for nearly a third of her tenure had had enough and quit for personal reasons.

Of course the very next day we learnt more about the Minister's activities with revelations she'd appointed a personal friend, Kaye Martin, to a departmental position as well as a member of a government board. Much hilarity then ensued when Martin claimed to not be a friend of Bates and that she'd only met her a few times. Then came the news that Bates had thanked Martin for her friendship as part of her maiden speech to Parliament and that Martin had given a speech at Bates 50th birthday celebrations. Not bad for someone who'd only met Bates a few times. She obviously made quite the impression.

And no Bates story is complete without a mention of Michael Caltabiano, former Director-General of the Department of Transport and Main Roads, who'd been on 'garden leave' pending the outcome of a CMC inquiry into the hiring of Bates' son to a high-level departmental position. Well, last Friday the Premier terminated Caltabiano's contract and the press release contained just two sentences, the second being 'No further comment will be made'. No explanation has been given since and just yesterday Caltabiano launched legal action claiming unfair dismissal.

All of which allowed various Government Ministers earlier today to say they can't explain the termination or comment further because the matter is now the subject of legal proceedings. How convenient. The gods must be smiling for such a scenairo to occur. It's almost like it was contrived. But that would be ridiculous. Surely...

Moving along to Federal politics and...ummm....well....oh shit. It's all too bloody hard. I just can't find any motivation at the moment when it comes to the national scene. The whole sorry saga is getting beyond me and even I'm starting to switch off a bit to save my sanity. I'm just too damn young to be a grumpy old man shaking my fist at the world just yet.

The gist of it though is that Labor is once again shooting itself in the foot with more leadership rumblings. The lunatics are running the asylum it seems with 'disgruntled backbenchers' plotting against the Prime Minister and the media giving Rudd plenty of spotlight to spruik his wares. Political reporters are loving it of course because they can lazily report the 'he-said-she-said' and not have to put any effort into analysis of the big picture issues.

One particularly bad poll for the Government then resulted in the media going into overdrive sounding like Jim Morrison with calls of 'This is the End!' and telling us the Prime Minister should be replaced. And how many people took part in this poll? 1400. Yep, the views of 1400 out of nearly 23 million people is apparently the determinant of how this nation should be governed. How very democratic.

But that's letting the Government off lightly. These few weeks since the election announcement have been very poor from them indeed. The Government has struggled to sell itself and its achievements at the best of times let alone when things like the mining tax are exposed as being toothless and all manner of leadership speculation takes hold. The inability to convince the electorate of anything is also making things difficult as some flimsy yet entrenched views just aren't being shifted.

Minority governance hey. I do remember telling the wife in the days after the last Federal election that whoever took power and formed Government that they would lose the next election. But I'm no oracle on that I'm sure.

Finally, I just wish to bring to your attention the excellent Foreign Correspondent story from last week regarding the imprisonment of Ben Zygier, so-called Prisoner X, by the Israeli Government and his subsequent 'suicide'.

A few weeks ago no-one had even heard of Zygier and his story but since the program went to air it's prompted governments in both Australia and Israel to launch inquiries into how it all went down. Both nations' intelligence agencies have some questions to answer, but I'm guessing those answers won't be too forthcoming. National security and all that apparently. Anyway, check it out for yourself here.

That's the latest EDM Extract then of the days and weeks of late. Til next time,

EDM.

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