CANBERRA (Rooters agency) – Australia has a new prime minister. Yesterday Lubberal Party frontbencher Mangle Turnbuckle challenged and defeated the party’s sitting Prime Minister, Tory Blabbit.
Turnbuckle is considered to have a more liberal outlook than his predecessor, but only on issues that don’t directly or indirectly affect anyone’s profits.
In announcing his challenge, Turnbuckle said he wanted to take the party and government back to the heady days of Prime Minister Johnny Humbug, who ruled Australia for 70 years. (Historians say it wasn’t really that long, but most Australians say that’s the way it felt.)
PM Humbug is revered in the Lubberal Party for having won four national elections, mostly by finding ways to make voters forget the broken promises he had made in the previous election campaign.
Humbug was enrolled in the Guinness Book of Records for having won one reelection by inventing the story that refugees approaching Australia in leaking boats were throwing their children into the water in order to force the Australian navy to rescue the children and/or their parents. This use of a completely invented issue to distract attention from government failures has entered international political science as the strategy of “Promises overboard.”
Humbug is also honored for having created the country’s “goods and services tax” or GST after having promised not to do so, through such stratagems as using the term GST instead of VAT, which is what it was called in the rest of the world, where it was already well known for robbing the poor to reduce taxes on the rich.
Analysts see the reference to Humbug as indications that the Turnbuckle government will continue drowning or otherwise persecuting refugees, and that it will seek to raise the GST and broaden it by finding a way to apply it to people who don’t buy anything.
Turnbuckle also said that he intended to replace Blabbit’s “slogans” justifying Lubberal policy with explanations that he hoped would be more effective in fooling gullible voters.
This is clearly seen as a serious threat by the opposition Australian Laborious Party. Its leader, Bub Shortchange, a former union leader, is noted for his “reconciliation and progress” strategy, which gave employers an equal vote with members in any union ballot, provided they covered the cost of the ballot. If the Lubberals now start trying to appear reasonable, Laborious may have difficulty convincing voters that there is any reason to choose its policies over the identical policies of the Lubberals.
News From Somewhere 