Caveat Emptor: Team Abbott Confused Between Election Campaign and Guthy-Renker Infomercial

Source: Opposition Leader Tony Abbott revealed on Thursday evening that he would not be providing final costings and a full budget impact statement until deep into the last week of the campaign. [SMH]



$200 for relationship counselling for heterosexuals looking to legally marry? Thanks Tony! But wait, there’s more! Bailouts to the chocolate industry in Tasmania? Hey, Tasmania likes chocolate, *and* jobs! What a top bloke! But wait, there’s more! How would you like to be paid your actual wage to stay at home and have children, women who are usually on quite a good wage? How do you get this shiny, shiny, life-changing deal, I hear you ask…?

There can be no real sensible reason to refuse to price policy announcements, particularly in light of a promise to return to surplus with deadline. It seems like a sales tactic, an emotional mugging. Do they really think that voters will be so emotionally invested with, say, the prospect that they can start a family sooner without having to tighten the purse strings - that by the time the cost is announced they won’t even care how much it costs, and won’t be rationally linking it with job cuts in the public service, reduced infrastructure in health and education, and another long delay before Australia gets up to a global standard with internet speeds?

Does Australia want a puppy? C’mon, hold the puppy. Love the puppy. Give the puppy a name. Oh, look, the puppy loves you! How much for the puppy? Let’s not talk about that just yet, we haven’t told you yet that you’ll get a free lead! In *any colour* you choose. But wait, there’s more! Book now and get 50% more cute for *free*! How do you get this fabulous, life-changing deal that may also cure cancer and make you attractive to the opposite sex? Do you even care at this stage? Look at the cute puppy. You want the cute puppy? You *need* the cute puppy. Okay, for the low low price of 26 easy installments of $899.99, (what a steal!) the puppy is yours! If you call in the next fifteen minutes, we’ll throw in some plastic stuff that also looks pretty good at the moment. And another free puppy! And because no exciting infomercial package is complete without them, handy-dandy steak knives! They cut things! How can you live with yourself if you don’t take up this offer RIGHT NOW?

Worse, though - at least at 3am when you cave to the hypnotic tones of the Lifestyle channel and concede that you need a puppy, your 26 easy instalments are a capped and predictable final fee. Policy costings like vouchers for marriage counselling cannot really be subject to an accurate and finite figure. Costs sometimes blow out, and if the costings are not done independently and with sufficient time that they can be subject to critique - they are more likely to do so.

If nothing else, a group hoping to run the country should be expected to demonstrate that they are able to be upfront with the electorate about the realities of their policies, including the costs, in a timely manner that doesn’t look like a sales technique - so that rational decisions can play some part in the ridiculous circus that is the election campaign.

After all, unlike exercise equipment and beauty treatment pseudoscience, an election result can’t be mailed back within 14 days for a full refund.

The Surly Valentine

When did this become a thing, this wide-eyed tacky embrace of all things coupledom for St. Valentines' day in Australia? Like Easter and Christmas, it seems to come on earlier and stronger every year. Even my beloved Aldi, the cheap eurotrashy supermarket that keeps me in mushrooms, broccoli and gluhwein while letting me keep my labour in the lower paid community sector, is, two weeks out from the supposed big day, offering chocolate roses. It begins to look as though a total boycott of the festival of mush is entirely impossible. Is there nowhere outside the curmudgeonly cave that is safe from kitsch heartshapes, pinks and reds and cliched sentiment?

It is beyond unlikely that I will be spending February 14th entwined with some other soul, making mushy faces in some overcrowded restaurant, gushing over something Hallmark finds a romantic sentiment, and pretending that every cliched motif of romanticism is somehow a sweet and unique expression of something genuine, as opposed to a crassly commercial, over-packaged and manufactured emotion. Of course, your Curmudgeon would say that. My history around these situations is somewhat fraught.

Growing up in Australia in the 1990s, Valentines Day was a concept as foreign as Krispy Kreme doughnuts and Halloween. There were always going to be a couple of people who embraced the concept, but we never exchanged cards at school or really focussed on the day as a calendar event. When I was fourteen, I contemplated organising a Valentines' day gift in a fit of tacky adolescence, but decided instead to dispense chocolate frogs to other girls at my single sex school who did not have single stems of roses to carry from class to class all day (P.S girls who did have roses, please note they *will* fit into a locker, stop with the conspicuous smuggery). That became a fun tradition as, adolescents being adolescents, there was always someone in need of chocolate and cheering up on this day designed to remind us all that, OMG, the perfect state of being is to be permanently attached to someone else.

As we got older, it became the Anti-Valentines outdoor cinema night, or the Lonely Hearts (fuck you, Valentines Day) bar crawl. It was a paean and ode to our youth, our freedom, and the city we found ourselves in. Healthy sense of irony engaged - no one was particularly bitter about being single, but nor were we in a hurry to hide at home from the smug couple hordes. We believed this night should belong to us as well.

I haven't always been as single on Valentines day as I will be this year. I too have had the gushy Valentines Day experience of the cringeworthily cutesy young love variety. I forget what we did, but I recall he wrote me a poem and we had what could somewhat unoriginally be described as a magical evening. Melbourne in February puts on decent weather, and it felt like we had all the time in the world. It was coffee, sunshine, our own little world - but then, when you're a little bit in love with someone every day is like that. The crowds and the conspicuous coupledom of the holiday of lurve neither adds nor detracts, because that would involve peeking outside the adolescent-hormone bubble of each other and noticing that the rest of the world continues to turn.

The relationship was pretty seriously on the rocks when we shared a Valentines Day which involved a teddy bear holding a heart, a single rose, and some chocolate, the scatterbomb approach to human engagement if I've ever seen it. I was never sure if he covered all of the traditional bases because we had just gotten back together after a break-up, if everything was half-price (since we'd missed the actual day out of a combination of busyness and apathy), or if he genuinely didn't realise that the poem he'd written me a year before, the notes he used to leave scattered around my room, actually meant something, whereas a bear saying "I wuv you" means someone's suffered a frontal lobotomy. We had stopped putting anything of ourselves into what we were doing, and we were ready to settle for tokenistic and expected.

The curmudgeon comes out here - these things were somewhat meaningless because they had nothing to do with who either of us were as people. They involved a transaction in which no thought was required, to purchase a message that was made trite and somewhat meaningless by mass-production. This is not an aesthetic or consumeristic point - I would not have liked the idea of these gifts any more if they were expensive, quite the contrary - the only reason I had any time for them at all was because, despite everything, I cared for the person proffering them. It was the fact that thoughtfulness ceased to become a part of the situation. A plush heart to say "I love you" is about as meaningful as a fill-in-the-blanks eulogy from a cereal packet.

Since then I've largely avoided VD in all its forms. If I like someone, I don't need the excuse to show my affection. I do hereby pledge, however, that I will never buy someone a plush animal wielding a heart in cold blood. Maybe this year I'll distribute chocolate frogs to my friends or leave a thoughtful note somewhere to be found, or I'll go back to my favourite haunts and let my city be my Valentine for one more year. Being a complete and solitary human being on Valentines Day, despite the social pressures of monogamy etcetera, is something of a relief. This year I'm curling up with a volume of Charlie Brooker's articles, listening to Van Halen and not giving a fuck what anyone thinks. I recommend it.

Shh! Libraries and the Decay of Civilisation.

Well hello, the Internet. Nice to see you again for another curmudgeonly blog post, dipping once more into the unfathomable depths of cranky rage lurking beneath this mild-mannered exterior.

The local library has turned into a combination hyperdome wrestling centre with flashing lights, vacuous noise and obscene quantities of the kind of literature that is wholly unrepresentative of the notion that we are a moderately advanced culture. That's right, kids, the path to ruin is one where the literate people in our society will only read chick lit about vampires or the sorts of books that form the basis for films with which spend their entire plot budget on explosions. This is the path to a dystopian future where the monkeys keep people in cages and Charlton Heston confuses shouting with dramatic emotional depth ("It's a maaaaadhooooooooouse!").

I dream of the libraries I remember from my childhood, where you had to be quiet on pain of a stern shushing from a serious-looking librarian. The modern community library is the product of a fallen, decadently ignorant civilisation. There are toys, free internet access (ergo lots of bogans shouting out their Farmville achievements), and no one to stop the kids from the local high school hooking up on the beanbags in the reading area. Frankly, it makes me fantasise about when global hegemony is mine and I get to institute literacy and intelligence tests in order to ensure that the deeply stupid are quarantined in their own homes. This may sound somewhat illiberal, but I can assure you that it is essentially for their own safety. I'm not cruel, they'll still have access to all the Judge Judy, Jerry Springer, and Farmville they could want. Give the modern semi-literate bogan a McDonalds which delivers and house arrest will probably even be a kindness.

I don't understand this notion that we need to 'modernise' libraries, as though free access to books is somehow an anticlimax that can only be sold to the populace by stealth. "Oh look, here near all the free internet access and DVD collections of Jersey Shore, there are these bound things with lines of text in them! Maybe you could pick up some literacy by sheer proximity!" It is as though local governments are trying to force the stupid to read the way a parent goads a recalcitrant toddler to eat, hiding the wholesome stuff under mountains of sugary crap "Here comes the aeroplane!" Surely we have enough books that are the literary equivalent of cheezburgers (insert yet another dig at Stephanie Meyer here) that this misguided democratisation of our libraries is at best counter-productive, and at worst, simply making libraries no fun for people who actually like reading. Give them some bread with their cake, preferably something dense and grainy with nutritional value and intellectual depth.

I'm painfully aware this entire rant seems a bit elitist and classist, particularly given that it is highly probable that the semi-literate goons disturbing the library peace and disrespecting the books are from the disadvantaged socio-economic classes. We are talking the sorts of people who consider the baby bonus value for money, and who plan a fourth child as a finance scheme for a flatscreen television. Flatscreens appear to be important bogan lifestyle necessities, perhaps because Border Security just isn't as edifying on the smaller screen.

It is elitist, but only a little. I love the idea of democratisation of knowledge. I love the concept of universal literacy, the idea that everyone can have access to the combined knowledge of Western (and for that matter, Eastern) civilisation. Every child should be given the opportunity to know and love Orwell. I just think that turning libraries into entertainment complexes is the worst possible way to go about this grand plan. We should be concerned with helping people reach a reasonable standard, rather than continually lowering the bar. By lowering our expectations of these groups within society we do them a far greater disservice in the long term.

Also, my idealism falters somewhat when confronted with the sorts of people who think making a flamethrower from a Lynx deodorant is the height of intellectual endeavour. I am transported to memories of a high school experience in which learning how to put out spot fires in your hair was a necessary survival skill. I can't help wishing these kids had paid more attention when the primary school was trying to help them understand the complexities of The Very Hungry Caterpillar. There is no doubt that the system failed them and that many were probably raised by the kind of only barely sentient bogan parents who see the education system as convenient childcare, a necessary evil until the kids hit sixteen and can go start a family of their own on the dole. Nobody inspired them with the written word, read to them as children, listened to them read. Nobody showed them the value in knowledge, and this is a tragedy. I don't have an easy fix for this, but I think it's probably not a terrible start to bring back corporal punishment and empower librarians to brutally beat people incapable of using inside voices within what should be peaceful places of learning.

At the very least, we should be capable of ensuring a minimal standard of behaviour for within libraries such that they are not periodically turned into centres attracting confused-looking neanderthals whose minimal attention-spans are positively indulged with shiny colours and the sort of literature which would be of more social use pulped and lining litter trays.

Oh, such utopian and nostalgic dreams. The peaceful stacks, the quiet studying areas, the libraries of my youth are gone forever. Libraries now apparently feel the need to compete with the local shopping centre for tack and vacuous shiny things, encouraging 'expression' and 'approachability' so that the bogan is essentially transported to the book section of Big W, except the books are free and no one will shout at them for being particularly obnoxious or letting their children climb all over the shelves.

It is archaic, and far too much to hope, this expectation that people might come to the library to be quiet and read something. It is surely only a matter of time before they begin to hold Zumba classes and offering little cocktail sausages on sticks. And then, why not allow for corporate sponsorship, so that the children's section could, for example, be sponsored by Dora the Explorer and be all about teaching pidgin Spanish and the joy of merchandising to inquiring young minds? Hola Kids! Come Explore(TM) the Dora The Explore(TM) Combine Harvester! It's pink and makes pretty sounds while it's grinding the other neighbourhood kids into a scarlet jammy pulp!

I may have gotten a little carried away there, although since there is apparently already a Dora themed toaster, probably not as carried away as it is possible to get. Let me make this simple point relatively clear. The library should contain books. It should contain useful periodicals. There's probably nothing wrong with some documentary style DVDs in moderation. It should probably contain some sort of internet access, but preferably in a space removed from other areas of the library so that no one needs to hear excitable bogans ramble on about how good they are at Farmville. And maybe some sort of nasty-looking contraption with lots of spikes bearing a sign which explains in quite small and graphic words what happens to those who can't manage to keep their voices down and control their infinitesimally tiny attention spans for the duration of their stay in the region of the books.

We are unfair on the bogan. By never requiring it to adhere to a bare standard of civility we never give it the opportunity to peel itself from the glittery tack of its cultural aesthetic to embrace something more substantial. The modern library is in the business of making the bread and circuses shinier and more distracting while civilisation itself is buried under a mound of consumeristic refuse.

Don't get me started on museums without explanatory placard things, either. Glorified fucking pomo art displays...