‘If Gina Rinehart bought thirty percent of Qantas would we let her fly a jumbo jet?
‘No, we’d ask her to train and pass exams before she did.
‘It’s no longer acceptable that people who can’t read, like the Packers, run media empires.
‘And it’s time we outlawed people who can’t think, or write poetry, like Gina, from doing so.’
Name:
Surely not! What next, prevent a mad Mexican from running a telco?
Prevent an Irish leprechaun from running an airline?
Stop a slightly deranged ex boxer from becoming PM?
Never! We need all the totally unsuitable people we can get at the very top – the more the merrier.
Well put. Well argued.
My mentor used to repeat to me the dictum that there was a million dollars on every page of the Fin Review every day, if only you could read it… I don’t get GR’s intention here – like other papers the Fin’s been ruined already, nobody reads it regularly, why does she want any of this stuff?
Well clearly if she were well intended then she’d be criticising it because it is largely unreadable and diminished as a result.
But if I were guessing it might be because it fails to celebrate the runway successes of the world most beneficent mining industry leaders.
I don’t know that I’d let her in a Jumbo jet just quietly. Some things just aren’t meant to fly!
Doug’s in favour of promoting people to the level of their incompetence and indeed it seems there’s a lot of it about. Maybe if we could later sack them all for incompetence sans golden handshake it wouldn’t be so bad.
I’ve been misrepresented!
BTW did you see the start of the hatchet job on Abbott recently : “That misrepresents Mr Barry’s views” intercut with the man’s own words, giving the lie to Abbott (again).
How much will it take to destroy any credibility Abbott has left and if he already has none, when will the voting public catch up with reality?
Edit : Barrie
Very good questions Bob.
One could also ask, should we allow incompetent unionists and green tree hungers to run the country? Are they up to the task given the fact that none have ever run a chook raffle successfully before?
Should aspiring political leaders be trained first?
Who should train them?
Well Frank you can have the kind of response Bob might make which is to ask that you identify these incompetent unionists and tree huggers as he’s done with Gina and the Packers.
Or
You can have my own incredulity as to whether Tony Abbott’s training in a Seminary is the kind of thing that we really need?
Tony Abbott is a trained journalist – maybe he can run Fairfax?
Good questions Frank – The last two that is; the first two reflect a certain bias
.
Our political leaders seem to grow like topsy; in a stable democracy few of those capable of running huge enterprises (and earning huge salaries) are inclined to take a pay cut and take the long hard road to public office.
The careers of most of our Prime Ministers reads like this : backbencher at 30, junior minister at 35, senior minister at 40, opposition leader at 45 and PM at 50 or so. Give and take a few, like Hawke who was already a national leader for a decade or so out of parliament.
They get their training on the job; no PM emerges fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus. Howard was very shaky until the events of 9/11 made him seem prime ministerial.
As you probably know by now, I favour Gillard as a good PM; she is just now hitting her straps after two years in the job. It takes time, it takes experience and where do you get either?
A Party must select its leader carefully and stick with him or her through the peaks and the troughs, unless the leader proves manifestly incompetent or otherwise deficient; we all know plenty of examples, Rudd being the latest.
Onward and upward; I still think Gillard is the one.
John Ward, there is much symbolism in Rinehart’s move, people are still entranced by the aura of press power. Rinehart taking over Fairfax is a Tparty putsch right out of the John Birch handbook and there are two reasons.
Firstly, it completes the task of dumbing down of press and media commenced and implemented over the last fifteen years. Its actually no more than a mopping up operation to wipe out the last of broadsheet in the press, now that Mark Scott, Shaun Brown, et al have almost completed the parallel lobotomisation of public broadcasting in the form of SBS and the ABC.
Any one watching the ABC last night would have cringed at Auntie’s geriatric imbecility, for example.
Secondly, to takeover media and press is to land a savage blow aimed at the morale of those who feel a useful press and media are essential for democracy, quite apart from extending the blackout on real world news, that helps in the consolidation of corporatism’s iron grip in the West.
Gina just sold $85 million worth of fairfax shares, dropping her holding to 15%.
Andrew Bolt may not be the next Age editor after all, (if there is another one).
Is she sulking, do you think?
Is she profiting? That’s probably more to the point.