- The Guardian
- Issue #2186
Impact
Don’t call the Reserve Bank of Australia cold-hearted. If interest rises are hurting you, the RBA’s assistant governor feels your pain. Well, let’s not get carried away, the assistant governor has admitted that rising costs will “impact some borrowers.” This is true as far as it goes. For a lot of working Australians, the rising costs will ‘impact’ them the way Vesuvius impacted the people of Pompei.
Gutter politics
Gutter politics is low and dirty and a very bad thing. For Pauline Hanson this term means other politicians criticising her for employing a convicted rapist, telling lies about Aboriginal people, or basing a political party on racism. If you’re Pauline Hanson, those things are above the gutter somewhere, presumably just on the edge of the footpath.
Genuine
The Australian Financial Review is fretting that with all this economic uncertainty the Albanese government is about to bottle it on “genuine” economic reform. If you think they mean taxing gas corporations that don’t pay any royalties or tax, you must be new here. For the bosses’ paper, ‘genuine’ means introducing means-testing to the NDIS.
Ballooning
No, we’re not talking about the hobby of those people who like to bob about in hot-air balloons. This ballooning refers to what spending on the NDIS does if the speaker is someone who wants to cut the NDIS. It’s a transitive adjective: if you’re neutral about spending, it’s ‘increasing’, if you’re in favour of it, it’s ‘improving’ or maybe ‘ramping up.’ People lobbying for military spending call it an ‘investment’ which is ‘thriving’. Meanwhile the NDIS, a program which helps people with disabilities to work and otherwise contribute to the community just gets to balloon.
Persecution
That’s what former PM Tony Abbott calls the prosecution of Ben Roberts-Smith. Most people know what persecution means, but for Abbott it means charging someone with murder when there’s good reason to think they’ve committed murder. Abbott also said it was wrong “to judge the actions of men in mortal combat by the standards of ordinary civilian life,” which is a really long-winded way of saying that murder doesn’t count if you do it when you’re in the army.
Staying the course
This is normally a good thing to do. It’s implied that the person staying the course is sticking with a worthwhile course of action in the face of difficulty. In the hands of Arthur Sinodonis, former Liberal MP and ambassador to the US, ‘staying the course’ means sticking with the AUKUS deal even though it’s ruinously expensive and will make Australia less safe. We should stay the course on AUKUS because doing so will somehow commit the US to defending Australia from an ‘assertive’ China. This despite Trump’s recent demonstrations that alliances mean nothing to him.
Before he moved onto his ambassador job, Sinodonis was famous for answering every question asked by a Royal Commission with “I don’t remember” (his nickname was ‘see-no-donors” because of all the dodgy donors he couldn’t remember). We wonder if he’s forgotten more accurate expressions for AUKUS, like “throwing good money after bad”.
Look at
British shadow defence secretary James Cartlidge has said the quiet part out loud by asking for cuts in social welfare to make room for more military spending. Cartlidge said that the UK needs to “look at the welfare budget in order to prioritise the defence of our country.” He means “savage the welfare budget,” but “look at” sounds as though they’re going to think about it first.
