No secret that Twitter is dominated by the Left, particularly here in Oz. So, if a pollie's name is trending, it's often that of some Labor or Greens MP who's been mouthing the usual PC claptrap, provoking an orgy of affirmation from the platform's countless local SJWs.
Prolly a bit more often than that, though, the situation is reversed. For example, a Government minister says or does something that can be easily construed as elitist, sexist, racist, or homophobic and every blue-haired bolshie Down Under is furiously vying for the Most Sneeringly Vitriolic Tweet award.
With regards to journos and broadcasters, a similar dynamic applies. Names of lefty luvvies and lefty hate objects will briefly surge on social media tsunamis of love or loathing. But what you almost never see, at least here in Australia, are names trending due to the support or snark of those to the right of the political centre. That's pretty ironic given that most Aussie voters do actually fall into that category.
I saw a perfect illustration of this today. In Twitter's local trending list Guardian Australia's Greg Jericho's name appeared. Upon seeing it I thought: Lemme guess … He's just published a Tory-bashing column of some sort.
Lo and behold I was bang on the money! As Guardian gargles go it's pretty pithy, and way more coherent than anything his stablemate Vanessa “Van” Badham might write. But it still drearily invokes the usual simplistic stereotypes of LNP ministers being not just greedy but flint-hearted, even cruel. Check this out:
The government’s horrific start to the year is not only fully deserved, it is completely appropriate. The Centrelink shemozzle and entitlements abuses are a wonderful amalgam of the absence of respect for those on welfare and the tin-eared political nous which characterises this government.
And again:
If raising revenue is the only concern, the key is to make the system as cheap as possible, and thus you remove the “costly” humans and make it automated. But you would only do this if your desire for revenue outweighed your respect of the people who you know will receive erroneous (and dare one suggest, fraudulent) debt notices.
And we know the government has no respect for those on welfare.
Jericho (like many of his fellow travellers, I'm sure) has a particularly dim view of Christian Porter, who might presently be a tad higher on their shit list than Cory Bernardi, or even Tony Abbott himself!
Social services minister Christian Porter was so determined to have people believe that those on welfare are over-paid and lazy he spent last year putting out absurd figures that attempted to convince voters the welfare system was either being rorted or was too generous – such as when he suggested a single mum with four kids was better off on welfare than if she had a job.
So when you hear Porter argue that the automated system is “about as reasonable a process as you could possibly derive”, you need to understand that “reasonable” in his mind includes spouting nonsense designed to vilify some of the poorest in our society.
FFS. Makes him seem like a bloody Dickensian villain!
The article then goes on to bash Sussan Ley and other Government ministers for their shameless rorting of the entitlements system.
Yeah right, like it's an exclusively LNP thing. All pollies -- right across the political spectrum, and all over the democratic world for that matter -- pull this kind of shit all the time. And every now and then one of them is put to the sword to quell the public's anger over it. This time it was Ley. She was just unlucky, that's all.
Still, you can certainly see why the article was so popular. By dutifully invoking such hackneyed stereotypes in such a partisan piece he gave the Twitter trollective exactly what they wanted. I'd call it ideological red meat ... if they weren't mostly vegans.
No comments:
Post a Comment