Shithead apraxia

Apraxia is what happens when the brain takes damage. The injury can be a function of kinetic trauma, a stroke, tumour or a disease like Alzheimer's or the Vid. If the damage is bad enough it can totally fuck with your ability to process incoming signals and respond appropriately. Some exciting forms of apraxia include “the inability to say some words or make particular gestures” and, it turns out, to design a Federal Budget during a hundred year health crisis that doesn’t come off looking like the perverse splatter pattern of a compulsive neoliberal wanking disability.

It’s not surprising, of course, that anything Scott Morrison touches turns into a handout for Liberal Party superfans. For a bloke with a philosophical aversion to government handouts he’s pretty fucking handy with a giant novelty check when it comes time to look after his own. Whether it’s backhand donations of tax payers’ hard-earned to the Cuntington Polo Club on Sydney’s north shore, a lazy thirty-five million dollarydoos for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Sports, or a couple of bizillion bucks from the clean energy kitty for sooty-faced coal barons to pretend carbon capture is a real thing, Smoko’s aversion to tax-n-spend is less philosophical than factional. If it’s your taxes going to his mates, he’s actually tickety-fucking-boo with it.

A little more surprising is the look of peevish truculence when he gets caught dealing from the bottom of the deck. Smoko and Joshy were doubtless ready for the conventional budget push-back this week, because there was so much to push back on I have to dot point my faves.

• With millions of newly unemployed punters suddenly finding themselves at the shit end of the income distribution curve, Frydenberg’s tax cuts weren’t going into as many pockets, and those of us lucky enough to still be earning a quid were much more likely to save any extra as we would be to spend it, completely negating the government’s entire theory of how to restart an economy.

• Those poor bastards who have been fed into the sucking maelstrom of a punitive welfare system are already feeling the pull down into darkness as the government reduces the Jobseeker payment ahead of the banks getting ready to start calling in loans and sending out repomen early next year.

• All of those businesses which have been gifted such spendylicious tax breaks to invest in new equipment, still need to have the cash flow to invest; an heroic assumption when many are still dealing with revenue collapse and whole industry sectors such as arts and education are in an accelerating death spiral.

• Most heroic of all - the budget’s entire fucking goat circus of fantasical math and wish-casting is based upon the presumption that everything gets better and Ms Rona never comes back. Ask Melbourne how that’s going?

But still, none of that unsettled the PM or his treasurer. They’ve had a lot of practice at ignoring the downstream effects of their bullshit and mendacity. The thing they didn’t see coming was the gender studies militia which ruined their special day by pointing out, as Georgie Dent does here, that…

Georgie Dent @georgiedent

Women, who comprise slightly more than half the population, who have carried Australia through this pandemic and borne the brunt of the adverse financial & social implications of COVID19 get 0.0385% of the $600B+ spend. There's no way that's not shocking. But wait! There's more!

Dent rolled from that king hit into a devastating volley of blows targeting the government’s utter blindness to the nakedly gendered bias of their Big Spend.

They were so fucked off in Canberra that the PM’s office took precious time out from the important business of trousering donations from tax evaders and mining bosses to start firing off press releases, dispatching ministerial fixers and breathlessly demanding retractions.

To. A. Fucking. Tweet.

It was almost like, I dunno, they were getting a little bit emotional or something.

But shithead apraxia does that. When you suffer from object blindness to the effects of your congenital cruelty and incompetence, it can come as quite a shock when somebody points it out to you.