- The Guardian
- Issue #2182
Work through
Foreign Minister Penny Wong likes to be non-committal. Is Australia sending any military support to the war our ‘security ally’ has started in the Middle East? Rather than just admitting that they haven’t decided yet, Wong has said “We will work through [the request for assistance].” Much classier than ‘dunno’ or ‘not telling.’
Pro-growth
This word gives away its weasellishness by being uncontradictable. Who’d want to be anti-growth? Well, it depends what’s involved in growth. In this case, it’s the Australian Financial Review’s usual bosses wish-list of reduced rights for workers and lower pay. Employers and their stenographers at the AFR call for lower wages and worse conditions on any day with a ‘y’ in it. In this case, it’s the economic disaster flowing on from Trump and Israel’s attack on Iran.
If only, we’d been more pro-growth, they explain. Specifically, that means dumping ‘Same Job, Same Pay’ and abandoning any push to re-unionise the Pilbara. The AFR never wastes a crisis.
Community sentiment
It’s exhausting to find out what large numbers of people think, and it’s a bit too much like hard work to think about why people might have particular opinions. Much easier to just read other journalists, notice that One Nation has done alright in the polls and conclude that there’s a “community sentiment” that immigration rates are too high. If you’re columnist Jennifer Hewett, you can also cite Coalition Leader Angus Taylor’s tired anti-immigration rhetoric as though that’s a fact about the national mind.
Pragmatism
We’re not saying ABC commentator Patricial Karvelas has just come out of a decades-long coma, but given her comments on Albanese and the war, we’re not ruling it out either.
PK, as she likes to be called, has described Albanese’s decision to support an obviously illegal war as ‘pragmatism’ despite him once being “of the left” (this means having said some pro-peace things back in the day). Pragmatism is almost always a good thing – it means you’re practical and realistic. It certainly sounds nicer than ‘servility.’ In the short term, it’s easier for Albanese to make noises about joining in on Trump’s rampage. Whether it’s realistic or desirable we’ll leave the survivors of the war we’re about to help out with to decide.
‘The action’
From PK again; “the call to back the action is also more than sucking up to Trump for the sake of the US-Australia alliance.”
‘Action’ sounds so much more limited and decisive than ‘illegal and almost certainly disastrous attack.’ It’s easier to say too.
Narrow
We all know what ‘narrow’ means, but we can’t quantify it. We certainly know when something is not narrow. Former head of the UK’s army, a guy called Richard Dannatt has told a far-right tv show that UK PM Keir Starmer was “standing on a narrow legal point” when he refused to let the US use British airbases to attack Iran. The legal point in question was that the war is illegal by international law because the US has attacked a nation that was no threat to it at all. If the legal point was that “narrow,” Starmer could have stood on it comfortably and even bought some friends.
Erasure
Like most weasel words, ‘erasure’ is a real thing. The role of women in the advancement of science over the years was often erased, first by collaborators taking all the credit, then by text books following the ‘great man’ approach to history. The role of unions in Australia’s history has been erased or ignored, and this paper does its best to un-erase it.
For US Vice-President JD Vance and his ideological buddies, ‘civilisational erasure’ doesn’t describe a real thing that happened. Rather it’s a clumsy code word for “more non-white people than we’re comfortable with.”
