News location:

Canberra Today 18°/23° | Friday, March 29, 2024 | Digital Edition | Crossword & Sudoku

Macklin / Madness, madness everywhere…

AWU 300dpi“THE world has gone mad,” cried Barnaby Joyce, and who better to break the news. Barnaby has been strolling down that borderline ever since he entered Parliament as a Queensland senator.

He’s “the best retail politician in Australia” according to PM Tony Abbott. This is the same Tony Abbott who banned him from appearing on the ABC’s “Q&A”, which actually reaches a big retail audience.

Madness? Ask Barnaby.

HIS colleague Greg Hunt approved a massive $1.2 billion Shenhua Watermark coal mine on some of the finest agricultural land in Australia.

And this at a time when the coal price has tanked and it’s damned for its role in climate change.

Madness? Ask Barnaby.

THEN another minister (guess who?) actually warned that if we gave the tick to gay marriage “it would hurt our beef exports”.

Madness? Well, Barnaby should know.

HAPPILY, the perfectly sane Tony Windsor took Barnaby’s cry to heart. He’s thinking about running against him in the next election. That’s enough to send anyone over the borderline. Even Barnaby.

OPPOSITION Leader Bill Shorten was mad as a hornet at the warning he received from Royal Commissioner Dyson Heydon that “your credibility as a witness is at risk” in the inquiry into the Trade Unions ordered by the PM.

Counsel assisting, Jeremy Stoljar SC, didn’t help when he repeatedly questioned the former AWU boss on special deals with companies to pay union dues in return for… well, we’re not quite sure. Either way, Shorten is in trouble. His approval rating is almost as bad as Tony’s and this past week’s events will only make it worse.

But what if the PM’s clever trick works and Shorten departs in favour of Anthony Albanese? Might Tony have just stepped over that borderline of political cunning and into a deep hole of his own making?

Ask Barnaby.

SPEAKING of alternative leaders, Malcolm Turnbull kept everyone guessing all week about whether he’d accept Tony’s demand that he join the boycott of “Q&A”.

Sadly, he crumbled, even though he’s a special case as the minister in charge of the ABC. But his silence spoke volumes, and when he did open up, it was to contradict Tony’s scary warnings that ISIS “is coming to get us”.

Truth is, ISIS is a frightening symptom of Barnaby’s “world gone mad”. But for Australians it’s much less lethal than domestic violence, to say nothing of youth suicide which is still running at more than 2000 a year.

SO Nick Kyrgios bowed out of Wimbledon on a mournful note – sad, but surely not the end of the world. We expect sportspeople to be single-dimensional characters who perform for us like marionettes, then go back into their boxes until next time.

We forget Nick’s a 20-year-old kid going through a tumultuous time. And, of course, we talk a lot of silly nonsense about the Wimbledon “tradition” as though it’s a contest of life and death.

UNLIKE the State of Origin series final, which provided your former Queenslander columnist with glorious whoops of joy! But one couldn’t help thinking: what would happen if you were a Queensland politician who had left the Senate and now held a seat in NSW?

Madness? Just ask Barnaby.

robert@robertmacklin.com

Who can be trusted?

In a world of spin and confusion, there’s never been a more important time to support independent journalism in Canberra.

If you trust our work online and want to enforce the power of independent voices, I invite you to make a small contribution.

Every dollar of support is invested back into our journalism to help keep citynews.com.au strong and free.

Become a supporter

Thank you,

Ian Meikle, editor

Robert Macklin

Robert Macklin

Share this

Leave a Reply

Follow us on Instagram @canberracitynews