Friday 1 June 2012

Michael Duffy, Journalist, Author - Seer


It may have taken more than a year before Tony Abbott was sent into Opposition by the Australian electorate, but all those years ago, Michael Duffy eeriely called it like it is.


Pessimism may be the ruin of us all: [2 Metro Edition] Duffy, Michael The Daily Telegraph, 24 Mar 2001, p17:

The poem is of course a gentle satire on rural pessimism, but Abbott's point is that in the past the rest of the country took this with a grain of salt (except when things were genuinely bad), whereas now Roonism is taken by the media at face value and is spreading to the cities. This is occurring in defiance of the reality that things are much better today for most Australians than they were 10 years ago.
The process is being driven, he argues by "a strange alliance between the economically vulnerable and the commentariat, which would like nothing better than the destruction of the Howard Government". The political motivation behind this theory is clear enough, and we can be sure that Abbott will become a leading Roonist himself should be find himself in opposition later this year.  [my red bolding]

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