Pleiades rang me yesterday morning to let me know that just about everybody was writing off Malcolm Turnbull. Columnists as far and wide across the AFR, The ABC, The Australian and The Guardian as well as Fairfax were essentially rolling up their sleeves and sharpening their pens to writ Malcolm Turnbull's political obituary.
Pleiades was particularly interested in discussing Barrie Cassidy's prognosis that the Coalition won't get the seats to form government, and Ian Verrender's piece where he couched the problem in a historic context where the political elite have worn out their welcome with the wider electorate. The most damning might be Mark Kenny:
The scale of the failure is colossal. Turnbull's key promise in the final weeks was the assurance of that most valuable thing: stability. Indeed, this emerged as his key edge, his point of market differentiation over the unstable Labor-Greens-independents nexus.
Two points on this. First, stability is not a policy per se and can no more be promised than happiness. It is rather, the by-product of sound policy, effectively designed and successfully delivered. "Stability" in a democracy, is ultimately the people's to give and in this case, the people have expressly withdrawn it.
Second, Turnbull in his anger, ignored the electoral message on Saturday night and thus missed the opportunity it gave him to communicate internally. Voters opted for the centre. They voted in more-or-less equal numbers for his style of economic management, but Labor's higher taxes, and more spending on health and education. Ditto for the NBN and climate change.
Bill Shorten became the first mainstream leader in a generation to actually propose higher taxes and higher spending. Some voters perhaps many, said yes.It seemed a bit strange that a lot of that noise was also going from the far right of the Liberal Party who are still under the misapprehension that Tony Abbott might have fared better had he been the PM contesting it. Oh, and Peter Reith had stuff to say that made about as much sense as a dog turd omelette. Of course when even Amanda Vanstone points out how out of touch such a view might be, then maybe they have to consider that they might be bad at this politics thing. I guess the corollary there is that if you make Amanda Vanstone look like the voice of reason, you're probably lacking in much reason.
By late in the day even Bill Shorten was calling for Malcolm Turnbull to resign - although it's hard to decipher on what basis he thinks that Malcolm would take on board his expert advice. I guess Bill Shorten knows very well what a terminal leadership looks like given his track record. If Malcolm were his leader, Bill would've removed him by now. Maybe Mr. Turnbull should accept it as free expert advice.
Of course, there's this non-endorsement from Steve Kilbey of The Church.
Batman Vs Superman
I finally caught with this turd nugget on Fetch TV. I know Warner Brothers are in a hurry to ramp up the DC cinematic universe but this was a dog's breakfast with a side order cat food and birdseed. No, really, I can't poke fun at this film enough. It is as misguided as it is incomprehensible; it is lame as it is dumb and teetered towards the unwatchable and outright laughable in many spots.
The benchmark for the genre is the first 'The Avengers' where the marvel heroes gather and do battle with the aliens threat. This one is a three way tango between Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman, where you can't fully comprehend the motivations for any of the characters. They don't come together - they fail to even gel convincingly. The patina of the film is so dark and grimy, you lose sight of the fact that you're supposed be watching Superman.
Actually, having watched Season 1 of 'Supergirl' (and what a triumph that was) it was distressing to see a film that utterly failed to make Superman 'super'. Or Wonder Woman wonderful for that matter. Gal Gadot is a great bit of casting. It's a shame they gave her so little to do. Ben Affleck as Batman was okay. He wasn't the worst thing in the film as once feared. But Jeremy Irons totally phoned in his Alfred performance. It was just boring. Again, 'Gotham' is doing great things with Alfred, and this film utterly failed to match that intrigue and interest between these characters.
It's hard to believe this is the film that follows up 'Man of Steel'. It's hard to believe Christopher Nolan was even involved. It's hard to believe they're going to launch Ezra Miller as The Flash on the back of his cameo in this film. It's pretty clear that at this point Grant Gustin has him beat. It's no contest, it's not even close; and that tells you the Miller/Flash movie is going to flop - it may as well be stillborn now. There's no point in doing that film. Even the standalone Wonder Woman movie is going to be deeply problematic judging form this movie.
They're doing this all wrong. Unbelievable.
Just A Side Note On Brexit
I want to share a couple of videos worth watching. The first is the inimitable 'Jonathan Pie'.
He's wonderful, this comedian. This is a great character. I guess if he was working in America they'd offer him a show. heck maybe there's a show in that - Jonathan Pie is sent to cover DC.
Anyway, he makes a fair point about branding the people who voted to leave as all racists and xenophobes.
A more apt description might have been "lied-to". Try this video for size:
Basically, the people who voted for Brexit believing they had very good reasons might have been fed false information to come to their conclusions. Of course it doesn't stop Boris Johnson from continuing to spout forth these lies. Such is life in the world of sane men led into terrible waters by madmen and megalomaniacs.
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