IT’S ALL THEATRE

Not all days are bright and sunny on cruise ship holidays. All indoor activities on the program today.

Last night after dinner we went to the theatre to listen to an impressionist with a great voice who not only sang some great songs in the style of the artist but threw his voice into two or three puppets without moving his lips. Brilliant stuff! Even Louis Armstrong followed Elvis.

Then he searched the audience for a ‘Grandpa’ and encouraged Peter (real name) to join him on the stage. The impressionist told Peter all he had to do was open and close his mouth in time to the gentle squeezes he made to the back of his neck. Peter complied brilliantly and ‘sang’ many songs. He even moved his body and waved his arms to demonstrate he was really singing and understood the words. Hilarious!

And then it hit me like a bolt out of the blue. The impressionist was Peter Dutton who had thrown his voice into thousands of other ‘Peters’. The ultimate craft of politicians is to have their constituent Peters mouth their words without any effort to investigate their truth (particularly if the words they sing match underlying values and confirm unexamined biases).

Latest Polls have the ‘Voice’ failing and Peter’s popularity growing for the first time since the election! The Conservatives are finding their Voice once again! 

“They’ll reclaim my back yard! They wouldn’t work in an iron lung! You are creating a special class of Aussies!  They are already in the Constitution! It’s going to cost Australians billions! They violently abuse their partners and their children! They already have a Voice through their Representatives like I have! They’ll gum up the courts for years with legal appeals. It’s ultimate racism! Just another unnecessary bureaucracy! This is dividing the country! They should be grateful for rescuing them from their savage past! Some of them are whiter than I. You haven’t given us any details of how it will work! Next there will be a Treaty and we will lose our properties! I never killed any blacks in the 19th Century! Health problems are due to their alcoholism and drug taking! They wouldn’t die in prison if they didn’t go to prison in the first place! They don’t bother to send their kids to school! We have already spent billions; now there’ll be billions more wasted! I’ve got enough problems with cost of living pressures. What about us ordinary Aussies! If you don’t know, vote no!”

All these faulty beliefs have been answered and shown either not to be true or irrelevant. But the picture above matches the mood for a positive outcome. The Voice has been silenced by lies, exaggeration and innuendo. There will be a price to pay.

Nice work, Peter - master puppeteer!

John Kudelka from the Saturday Paper says it best with the diminished figure of Peter Dutton!