Liberal apoplexy

By February 14, 2019Australian Politics, Society

Grahame Morris is a former chief of staff to former Prime Minister John Howard, and former adviser to Alexander Downer and Andrew Peacock. He is currently the Chairman and Federal Director of Barton Deakin Government Relations. Barton Deakin is an Australian and New Zealand lobbying firm. This firm only works with the Coalition in Australia and the National Party in New Zealand1.

After the passing of the Medevac Bill, the government has gone apoplectic with Prime Minister Scott Morrison and others going berserk, to the extent of quoting Trump that rapists, murderers and paedophiles will flood into the country. This is simply bizarre behaviour and is simply juvenile dummy-spitting because the government lost the vote in the House of Representatives2.

Now, in a new low, Grahame Morris has tweeted

“So, do Australian family members waiting in queues for medical treatment have to go further back in the line while illegal migrants queue jump again?”3

There are several points in this drivel which should be addressed: Firstly, Australians have to wait in queues for medical treatment because of inadequate funding from both federal and state governments, and this is constantly lied about by politicians4. Secondly, asylum seekers are not illegal migrants; that is just a lie spread by the racist half of the Liberal Party; anybody who feels their safety is at risk in their own country is entitled to seek asylum in another. Thirdly, the assertion that there is a queue is also a lie. Fourthly, there are 1080 people in total on Manus and Nauru, and even if all of these people arrived in Australia, we would not notice because there are 25 million of us. Lastly, a record number (64,362) of asylum seekers are already in Australia, having arrived by plane5, so another thousand will have very little effect.

Grahame Morris has form with regard to this sort of unpleasant drivel. It was he who said that Australians should be kicking Julia Gillard to death. He later apologised, not in person, but via host David Speers on the Liberal Party’s Murdoch mouthpiece Sky News6.

Grahame Morris is just another apparatchik from the far right of the Liberal Party and, like most of them, will do anything to try to denigrate or disparage anyone he perceives to be causing the Liberal Party embarrassment, except when it is the Liberal Party itself causing the embarrassment, which is currently the case. It is symptomatic of the born-to-rule attitude of these people, who are completely devoid of empathy. This tweet of Morris’ simply indicates what a squalid, sociopathic, little man he is.




  • Arthur Baker says:

    Not only do Australians have to wait in queues for medical treatment. Australians who are wealthy enough to afford private medical insurance can jump the queue. Apparently that kind of queue-jumping is perfectly OK, but when asylum seekers turn up, as is their legal right, the same people who jump the medical queue invent a queue and accuse them of jumping it.

  • Arthur Baker says:

    It’s often struck me how bad most Australians are at queueing. They’re so bad, some delicatessen counters in supermarkets have had to install little ticket machines to establish who’s next to be served. Where I come from (England) people would just form an orderly queue. I think that’s a hangover from the second world war, when you had to queue for every damn thing, and people have been known to form a queue when there wasn’t actually anything to queue for. But in Australia, people just mill about, glancing shiftily to left and right, and sometimes arguing with others about who was first. Why is it so? Ironic, really, given Australia’s national collective tantrum about asylum seekers jumping a non-existent queue.

    • admin says:

      There is often a ‘tacit’ queue from my experience. People may mill about but everyone knows where they sit (or stand!) in the order. This is something I have observed at our baker. Our delicatessen has introduced the little ticket machines, but at our newsagent, people do form an orderly queue. It seems to have more to do with the physical arrangement of the counter, the number of staff, and the number of customers at any one time. It would be an interesting psychological study to try to work out why these various solutions occur.

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