The Fading Down Of The Red Alert
Posted by Bob Ellis
on November 9, 2014
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I could be wrong about this, but it seems to me the
ISIL-death-cult-red-alert-oh-my-God big scare of Abbott, Brandis, Bishop
and Morrison isn’t working any more, and the homemade bombs found this
morning in Queensland won’t be thought a danger to the G20 by anyone.
There are reasons for this. One was the Whitlam funeral, to which
more likely ‘targets’ came than to any Australian event in in history.
But there were no helicopter-gunships thumping overhead, no army snipers
on adjacent roofs, no swarms of coppers in the Hall and a minimal
search of luggage at the entrances. I got in with three objects — an
ipad, a radio, a mobile — that could have been bombs, and seven Prime
Ministers sat in the front rows without any bodyguards.
There was also the youth of the only two ‘terrorists’ we have been
shown thus far: the ‘ginger jihadist’ and the boy we shot in the head in
Victoria, both seventeen. And the plastic samurai sword captured by a
seven-hundred-man helicopter raid predawn on an Arab suburb where
nothing else was found, and no-one went to gaol.
On top of this, there’s been the ‘shirtfront’ matter, and Mark Rutte
evincing doubt that the ‘act of evil’ was anything more than an
accidental wartime shooting down by, perhaps, the Ukrainians.
And there is the demeanour of Abbott himself. Yesterday, near tears,
his voice cracking, he said he would ‘do what any Australian would do’,
which is, um, to ask, um, Putin to ‘co-operate in the investigation into
the airline crash’, and ‘help us bring the culprits to justice’. Many
Anzacs would have called it a pretty piss-weak call to arms. Not exactly
our finest hour. Not exactly a charge on Lone Pine.
And it’s been a pretty piss-weak ‘red alert’ all up. The Muslim
leaders on Q&A seemed very reasonable people, and more dignified and
civilised and courteous than, say, Scott Morrison. And Abbott railing
about apocalyptic death cults seems, sometimes, just mad. And Morrison
seems mad all the time.
I don’t say all this is happening on a conscious level. But,
underneath, underneath it all, the public is beginning, just beginning,
to see the whole thing as a beat-up.
And Abbott as a shifty, lip-licking con-man.
Our Chicken Little-in-Chief.
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