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October 16, 2013
Abbott and Hunt have no intention at all of going for a double dissolution over the current Senate's rejection their legislation to repeal carbon pricing. Double dissolutions are mechanisms for governments to overcome obstructionist senates and the Abbott government doesn't face one after July 1 2014.
So they posturing for their base and feeding the chooks in the Canberra Press Gallery. It's political showbiz.
David Pope
Sadly, the chooks do what they do best-----recycle and spin the conservatives politician's messages whilst pretending that they are analysing political events as savvy insiders; ones who really understand what the Abbott Government means when its various Ministers says that it has gotten on with "working rather than talking".
Those on the centre-right would probably say that this is another example of what Chris Berg has succinctly analysed as the left habitually complaining about Tony Abbott's favourable run in the mainstream press. Berg says:
Left intellectuals have spent the past six years obsessing over the wickedness of Australia's press corps. First we were told the press didn't care about policy, then that the press was speculating about leadership tensions that didn't exist, then how it was trying to secure government for Tony Abbott. At its most lucid, the obsession with the media was displaced frustration with Labor's hapless performance turned into anger about Rupert Murdoch.
Not quite. It's about the intellectual impoverishment of the Canberra Press Gallery that finds clear expression in their churnalism". Little of what they write has much to do with the democratic theory and citizenship rhetoric favoured by journalism scholars and commentators and by many journalists themselves.
They have become partisan hacks and party political publicists.
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If the Labor party in opposition sticks to its support of carbon pricing, then the option will remain prominently in the policy mix.