Today, an odd political union causes a disturbance in the force, the one-man board who has to defend his lonely existence, and Travolta’s chilling legal advice.
A marriage made in Hades
The trendy political activists at GetUp! have made some unlikely new friends in recent days – the Liberal Party of South Australia and the Murdoch press.
GetUp!, once described by Bronwyn Bishop as “totally non-independent”, usually spends its time getting stuck into the federal Liberals for their climate policies, treatment of asylum seekers, the budget, Aboriginal issues, and the list just goes on and on.
During the federal election, GetUp! produced an aggressively anti-Murdoch ad which the TV stations refused to run (“Mr Murdoch may have given up his right to vote in Australia’s election, but he hasn’t given up using his power to influence yours.”)
Which made it all the more delicious to see GetUp! national director Sam McLean contribute an op-ed to Murdoch’s The Advertiser today to argue that South Australia’s electoral system is broken because the Liberals didn’t win the state election, despite the party receiving more than 50% of the two-party preferred vote.
Some of the state Liberals are loving GetUp! for this campaign – it is pushing a petition calling for an inquiry, and Liberal leader Steven Marshall was happy to sign it.
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GetUp! aren’t really saying what they want from a review – they just want progressive reform, man, so the people have more power. To our mind, this can only mean moving to a system of proportional representation – in which case, the Liberals would likely never again achieve a majority in the House of Assembly.
So how did this call by GetUp! for a Liberal State Government go down with its lefty supporters? Like the proverbial fart at a funeral.
Just take a look at the furious response on their Facebook page. It really has created a disturbance in the Force.
Out here on my own
It was a classic Jay Weatherill move.
He announced this week the abolition of all government boards and committees to reduce duplication and red tape. But the fine print shows that the process of de-boarding will be a bureaucratic nightmare replete with consultation and hand-wringing.
The Premier will require all of the boards and committees – more than 400 of them – to defend their own existence; in one stroke creating a massive flurry of inward-looking bureaucratic wheel-spinning.
So we wonder how Andrew McEvoy is feeling this week.
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McEvoy, the former Tourism Australia chief, is the chair of the Riverbank Authority, formed in February as one of Labor’s pre-election announcements.
It’s been a lonely role so far – no board members have been appointed, and the authority doesn’t appear to have done anything.
So will McEvoy be required to pen a defence of his one-man-band’s existence to the government that appointed him to great media fanfare only a few months ago?
If we were him, we’d save time and write a three-word response to the question: why should your board continue to exist?
“You tell me.”
Travolta tells it
Getting to the bottom of the contamination issues bedevilling Adelaide’s suburbs is a tricky business.
While the EPA is tied in knots by chronic communication problems and the State Government just seems confused, the industries actually responsible for carcinogens in the groundwater, soil and air are standing to one side, whistling and trying to look innocent.
The key chemical used in many former industrial sites across Adelaide was trichloroethylene – or TCE – a known carcinogen implicated in all kinds of other nasty diseases and problems, including damage to fetal heart development.
We were reminded this week of the 1998 John Travolta thriller, A Civil Action, which in turn was based on a true story of a lawyer fighting for compensation for people whose families were devastated by TCE poisoning.
The opening scene is worth re-watching (see below).
You gotta love lawyers – and wonder if they’re far away from getting involved in Adelaide’s contamination scare, at least in relation to real estate, if not health.
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