Reading Graeme Richardson’s column in the Oz, Things Grim for Most in the West in tandem with both the excellent Maurice Newman and Henry Ergas columns on the same op-ed page, it strikes me that what lifetime professional political players and lobbiests like Richo with his attempted, selective takedown of Donald Trump don’t seem to understand, is that with the creation of the internet and social media, news with instant news alerts and drop downs on all manner of devices are everywhere, 24/7, in real time or just a few keystrokes away.
The people know and understand what’s going on and whose at fault. They live with the consequences of it every day.
The problem with the generously superannuated and over indulged political class elites like Richo is that they don’t like disrupters to their cosy cartel arrangement or anyone who is not one of them. They dont like outsiders whether it be Pauline Hanson, Donald Trump or Nigel Farage.
Richo also fails to understand that the average person is well and truly over the smooth talking, cookie cutter, central casting political class and knows that it is they, that have created the multiplicity of problems we confront and if they haven’t created them, they’ve made them decidedly worse when trying to fix them.
Exhibit A your honour: The ham fisted, dithering and bungling ructions over Brexit.
The hi viz vests for the lo viz working class in France, the Trump voters in middle America, the ructions over Brexit and the discontent with people on the treadmill in Australia who can’t even afford the deposit on a house didn’t just drop out of thin air. They and their circumstances have been created.
The best (or worst) optics and example of the problem came just last weekend when, with the United States in government shut down and 800,000 workers going unpaid, the Democrats took themselves off to Puerto Rico in the Bahamas flying in a private jet (consider the co2 emissions) for a weekend junket of poolside partying at the expense of lobbyists for Amazon and Google et al.