Once I have dropped the children off for the first day at school I know that my return to the Parliament House part of my employment is imminent. I am trawling through hundreds of emails, some generic, some quite bonkers mad, many emphatic but sincere. I can not possibly read them all as there are on many occasions over a thousand new ones a day and if you spent three minutes on each, well, that is 50 hours in a 40 hour day. I bet Mr Wilkie is getting quite a few emails at the moment.
Andrew Wilkie is another product of Tamworth, where I was born. As an intelligence analyst though I thought he should have read the tea leaves a little better when he put his trust in a person who was front and centre in the clandestine removal of the Prime Minister of Australia and then openly went back on her word, given with a straight and sober face to the Australian people, that she would not introduce a carbon tax.
I can't stand pokies because much of their profits prey on the vulnerable, but the Labor party was never going to do anything serious while it owns its own poker machines, and its clubs in the ACT contribute up to 70 per cent of its revenue there.
In breaking their promise to Mr Wilkie, they have given $36 million to ACT clubs to trial mandatory pre-commitment. As Clubs ACT chief, Jeff House, said "There is a theoretical chance clubs will make money, it might happen."
Bad deal for Wilkie, good deal for the Labor party.
The question that I hope Andrew is pondering is not what form the undoubted retribution that he wishes to bring about should take, because, to be honest they have probably already planned for those outcomes, but whether the office of Prime Minister can be held by someone who, by their repeated actions, has proven pathologically untrustworthy. It is not whether you believe in a carbon tax or poker machine reform but whether you can believe in the word of the Prime Minister of Australia on a subject that is not private and personal but a warrant of the foreshadowed public policy of our nation.
It is quite obvious that we can not rely on our Prime Minister's word and this is not tenable in the highest elected office in the land. The current Prime Minister has a very bad habit of saying whatever she needs to say so as to get to wherever she wants to go and then dispensing with all but the illusion of sincerity in keeping that word. If business were to operate like that it would be pandemonium, if families were to live like that they would fall apart, if countries were to negotiate on that basis then we would live in a world of continual dispute and war.
In the search for the endorsement of this latest action of deceit, who did the Labor Party roll out; none other than the personification of the political imbroglio, the Member for Dobell, the man under multiple investigations, Craig Thomson. I must admit that he would be rather low on the shopping list if I were looking for a character reference but somehow Labor must think that Craig will do the trick, so to speak.
This is your country and it has never been run by saints, and it would probably be very uncomfortable for all of us if it were. However, these questions that were asked, answered and then reneged on are not private and personal issues but issues for which you make decisions on how you vote determined by the policy and key office holders as presented to you in the political prospectus. It has become apparent now, even to Andrew Wilkie, that Labor policies are generally ephemeral and are not worth much; independents are anything but independent, except when it comes to being independent to the wishes of their electorate, and any deal is a day at the casino when Ms Gillard is the person you are talking to.
That fact that Mr Wilkie has been done over on a deal about poker machines is tragic poetry. Maybe Andrew has now yet more empathy for those attracted to the lure of treasure and the hypnotic bright lights only to find later that it is very illusory. The trouble though is that Australia is still stuck in the Vegas Room with Julia.