Wayne Swan is sick of Abbott’s negative waves…

New Year’s resolution: accentuate the positive

Mr Swan, who was acting Prime Minister until the weekend, denied suggestions the government was culpable in helping to set the low tone of what has been labelled the nastiest political year in memory. ”You’ve got to be kidding me,” Mr Swan said.

”The negativity in policy and personal attacks have all been from Abbott. I mean, for god’s sake. These are the people who are now hung out to dry for their activities in terms of Mr [James] Ashby and company,” he said, referring to the Federal Court finding that Mal Brough, an endorsed candidate of the Liberal National Party, conspired with Mr Ashby to end the political career of the former speaker Peter Slipper. Despite the finding, Mr Abbott has expressed full confidence in Mr Brough.

”I’m a little surprised at the notion that there is some sort of equivalence in terms of the negativity going on … The Prime Minister in particular, in the face of enormous negative attack and enormous denigration, performed superbly. Too often that gets brushed aside in some sort of notion that it was some sort of two-way process.”

The Treasurer said hauling the political debate into positive territory next year was his ”New Year’s resolution” to ignore ”glass half empty” naysayers.

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/national/new-years-resolution-accentuate-the-positive-20121230-2c1i8.html#ixzz2GXnNdHrZ

Jacqueline Maley tries her best to tar Labor with the “negativity” tag, but it’s just not on to blame Labor as equally guilty of negativism for responding to the Coalition’s and the media’s vicious attacks.

This contention presupposes that Labor must always turn the other cheek while “color writer”s and Press gallery jabberers like Maley giggle behind their cupped hands at how clever Tony Abbott is for being a complete wrecker. If they’re in a particularly vicious mood they’ll flay Labor alive for not standing up for themselves, declaring they have no “narrative” and no guts.

Maley mentions … um… that … um … Gillard … um … called Abbott an … um … “misogynist”, without noting that he had called Gillard the same thing first, indeed he brought on the whole subject.

She also forgets to mention that Gillard flayed him alive with her response that was watched by millions, enthralled at seeing a true bully reduced to a simpering shell of a man, whose best response was to call her “a piece of work” the next day, when he thought no-one was listening.

Oh, and did I forget to mention that, at the time, Maley assured us that Gillards speech needed to be taken in um… “context” and was a pathetic attempt by the PM to change the subject?

Am I being too negative about the glamourous SMH “color writer”? Nah…

So, fair enough in my books for Swan, Combet and Gillard to respond in kind to Abbott’s negative attacks. It is inconceivable that any government, particularly this one, would seek to trash-talk the economy the way Abott and his gang have denigrated our own.

Negativity has gotten us precisely nowhere. It has destroyed confidence and it has ruined businesses. It has soured the nation and poisoned the national discourse. It has turned us into a nation of bitter whingers.

Billions around the world would love to show us how to take what we have and make something of it besides tears.

We should be celebrating Australia, not moaning that it is finished and a failure.

If this government really was “Stalinist” and we really were living in the equivalent of a Soviet State (as is so often said by the loonier elements on the right), Abbott, Hockey et al would be declared Public Vandals and Seditious Recalcitrants, put up against a wall… and shot. They have done that much damage. Thankfully (for them) we do not employ the death penalty for Economic Treason.

So, let us celebrate Australia, not denigrate it. Let’s get the message out that the promised “Election Now!” is never going to happen, and never was. We should make a New Year’s resolution to spead the good news about this fantastic country and not let the Coalition and its lazy, benighted business mates destroy it becaue they simply don’t have the imaginations to do anything else.

And let us redouble our promises to ourselves to NEVER purchase anything published by Fairfax. The sooner they go under the better, especially if they made the … um … giant mistake of … um … keeping the atrocious Jackie Maley on as an … um … paid member of staff.

************

UPDATE: (Cross-posted from another thread)…

So glad to see I didn’t read Jackie wrong. She obviously thought she hadn’t explained the “context” well enough in her first go at it yesterday, that her attempts at disguising her dislike for the government had been too adequately submerged in phoney balance

So today she lets us know what she REALLY … um … thinks.

“… it’s a bit cute of Wayne Swan to exculpate the government from any responsibility whatsoever for the low tone of this year’s political debate.

It was arguably Swan who kicked it all off in the lead-up to the Gillard/Rudd leadership spill in February, when he released a press statement criticising Rudd for his ”dysfunctional decision-making” and ”deeply demeaning attitude towards other people”.
Advertisement

That started a round of blood-letting against the former prime minister so fierce it made the Coalition look like pussies.
…
… it’s one thing for voters to shrug and concede the carbon tax wasn’t quite so bad as they thought it would be, quite another to embrace it as a positive reform that will set Australia up for its post-mining future, which is what the Treasurer argues it is.

Read more: http://www.theage.com.au/opinion/politics/insults-flew-from-all-directions-20121230-2c1iq.html#ixzz2GfnqdePe “

Onya Jackie!

It was all Swan’s fault, apparently.

He reacted to Rudd’s constant white-anting and carping from abroad, finally nailing for the readers and viewers just what the party thought of him.You could even say he delivered bucketloads of context and then tipped them on St. Kevin. Swan’s words flushed Rudd out, getting the supposed “political master” to challenge for the leadership…. from a mere 10,000 miles and two days’ travelling away!

The vote went Gillard’s way in a canter. We saw that all the stories that Jackie and her colleagues had been writing, telling us how dangerous Rudd was to Gillard’s Prime Ministership, how he nearly had the numbers – might have them, actually, if the crowds in the streets were any guide – were, frankly, full of shit.

The baloney substituting for “context” that Jackie and pals were writing about Rudd’s imminent comeback – a sure thing, bar the shouting – was as ersatz as a Coorey phonecall. Swan not only blew Rudd’s cover, but he blew the Press Gallery’s, who were on a nice little earner there, what with their endless yarns about “senior Labor insiders”, dates, timelines for takeovers, even entire New Rudd legislative agendas (usually involving a cave in to Abbott’s own schemes). This was going to be repealed, that was going to be amended. There’s your “context”!

And poor, inept, Wayne Swan, the ugly duckling of the Labor caucus went and killed the story stone dead by opening his trap and pointing out the Emperor (and his media urgers) had no clothes.

THAT is why Maley’s pissed off with Wayne Swan. He told us what the REAL context was, unfiltered, unabridged and unpleasant (for Rudd).

Jackie you’re a year behind the times. Give it up, sweetheart.